Abstract

D.H.Lawrence is one of the greatest British writers in the 20th century, he wrote loads of excellent works throughout his lifetime, The Rocking-Horse Winner is one of the prominent short story. In this short story, irony, contrast and symbolism were used to describe the themes, which indirectly reflect the distorted interpersonal relationship caused by money in Western industrial society, and reveals the evil and hypocrisy of capitalism.Many images in this story have different symbolic meanings, and Lawrence’s modern symbolism is a little different from traditional symbolism. In this thesis, I will mainly focus on Lawrence’s symbolism in this short story to better understand the themes of the story.

This thesis is mainly consist of three parts: the first part is introduce, which includes the introduction to Lawrence and the novel, as wellas the introduction to Literature Review and Symbolism; the second part is to analyze the causes of Lawrence’s Symbolism from internal cause and external cause; the third but the most important part is to find out the symbolic images in this novel and analyze their symbolic meanings, to better understand the themes of this novel.

Key words: Lawrence; Rocking-Horse Winner; Symbolism; Money

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction1

1.1 Introduction to Lawrence and The Rocking Horse winner1

1.2 Literature Review .2

1.3 Symbolism.3

2. The causes of Lawrence’s symbolism.5

2.1 Internal cause5

2.2 External cause..5

3. The interpretation of symbolic images in The Rocking-horse Winner.7

3.1 Symbolic meanings of rocking horse..7

3.2 Symbolic meanings of racing horse.9

3.3 Symbolic meanings in characters ..11

3.4 Symbolic meaning in the description of mother-son relationship..12

3.5 Symbolic meaning in other image - money13

4. Conclusion.15

Bibliography.16

Acknowledgments..17