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David Herbert Lawrence, novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist, was born in Nottinghamshire, England, in 1885. Though better known as a novelist, Lawrence's first-published works (in 1909) were poems, and his poetry, especially his evocations of the natural world, have since had a significant influence on many poets on both sides of the Atlantic. Susan Glaspell was born in 1882 and raised in Davenport, Iowa. Glaspell began her career as a novelist and author of sentimental short stories for popular magazines. By 1915, she had turned her energies to the theater, becoming one of the founders of the Provincetown Players, a group devoted to experimental drama.
In 1916, Glaspell moved with the company, now called the Playwright's Theatre, to Greenwich Village in New York, where for two seasons as writer, director, and actor, she played an important role in a group that came to have a major influence on the development of American drama. Both of these two writers write in secrecy, forcing the reader to decipher the story to find the theme, developing plot. D. H. Lawrence used multiple forms of secrecy to make this story a classic. He did not only write a story that had a good plot line, but a story that had many in depth topics.
The plot in The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence reveals to the reader conflicts between Paul and his mother using different levels or forms of secrecy. There are secrets hidden throughout the house that leads Paul and his mother to an unpleasant life.
The first level of secrecy is the actual secrets that Paul and Paul's mother keep from each other. The second form of secrecy is that D. H. Lawrence uses a story telling style of writing. This way of writing in itself holds many secrets.
Finally, the third level of secrecy is through the use of symbolism. The theme in this story that was hidden by Lawrence was that luck is not acquired, but it is found. The Rocking-Horse Winner' is intended to make us feel emotional as well as intellectual revulsion from the inorganic death-in-life of [a family in] the middle-class" (Steinbeck, 391). The way the conflicts were shown throughout the story between Paul and his mother using secrecy was magnificent. D. H.
Lawrence is an excellent writer and The Rocking-Horse Winner is a prime example of the talent that he has. The beginning of "The Rocking Horse Winner" gives the reader a sense of fantasy. It starts off with "There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. " Already the reader has a sense of timelessness, of an extraordinary, illusory reality. Lawrence continues on with this feeling when the narrator tells us of this beautiful woman and her feelings towards her children. "Only she herself knew that at the center of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody. " The narrator goes on to tell us the tale of a woman, unable to love her own children, who is obsessed with money.
The house the family lived in was always filled with a whisper, "There must be more money!" This whisper is what leads to Paul becoming obsessed with money and luck like his mother. The dream-like tone that fills the story continues with the idea of the rocking horse helping Paul to find the winners of the races. In the end Paul dies, searching for the winner of the Derby through the night on his rocking horse. The moral of this story is a warning against being obsessed with money and luck, for the pursuit of these two things may kill you in the end.
Dramatist Susan Glaspell wrote at a time when the boundaries between the private and public spheres were beginning to break down. Her style of writing was very similar to Lawrence's, in that they both wrote during the times when women were suppressed. Her secrecy in Trifles shows their suppression. The theme that is hidden in Glaspell's secrecy is A Jury Of Her Peers (web). Women were caught in a position of liminal ity, pinned between the traditional female and male worlds by the expectations of both. In recent years, her talent has gained the recognition it deserves.
Glaspell's play, Trifles, falls among the many shades of gray in this interface of perceptions, not only because of its context and content, but also because of the critical reaction to the play. Although most criticism discerns gender conflict in the indeterminate area between law and justice in Trifles, both the conflict and its consequences change form as each critic sees a different shape in the shadows. Many writers, like Susan Keating Glaspell, deconstruct gender roles by giving female characters knowledge that empowers them within the women's sphere. This can be clearly seen in "Trifles, " when Mrs. Peters and Mrs.
Hale discover critical evidence precisely in the kitchen. They also determine Minnie Wright's state of mind by examining distinctly feminine possessions: an ill stitched quilt, a broken bird cage door, and a dead canary. Now they know much more about Minnie's life, and have a clear motive that would condemn her for murder. Meanwhile the men upstairs still don't have a clue. However, it is what these women do, or rather don't do, with this information that provides the ultimate empowerment. Both Trifles and The Rocking-Horse Winner are literarily sophisticated stories, and they have some of the qualities that illustrate in miniature the various literary elements associated with drama, mainly secrecy / foreshadowing .
They each contain very different lessons, one moral and the other amoral. D. H. Lawrence and Susan Glaspell both are extraordinary writers whom use secrecy in very similar ways, but develop plot in two different worlds.
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Research essay sample on Rocking Horse Winner D H Lawrence
