Comparing Relationships In The Riding Horse Winner And Tears, Idle

As sons of wealthy mothers, Paul and Frederick are never short of materialistic desires. Their mothers dress them elegantly and they live luxuriously. However, relationships often establish roots in emotional connections rather than materialism, as materials are often powerful distractions. Yet, the emotional needs experienced by Paul in D.H. Lawrence’s “The Riding Horse Winner” and Frederick in Elizabeth Bowen’s “Tears, Idle Tears” seem unable to be satisfied by their mothers. In fact, in these two pieces of literature, both children suffer volatile and detached relationships with their mothers as the they both fail to connect, focus, and express their feelings. In both works, the hollow feelings and lack of connections demonstrated by the mothers and children result in turbulent relationships. In “The Rocking Horse

In “The Rocking Horse Winner”, the mother teaches Paul that luck and money are the two most important things in life. The mother demonstrate this by having “just as expensive” (307) tastes and focusing her effort on satisfying Paul’s material desires by hiring personal servants and buying him toys. This drives Paul to follow her footsteps and become absorbed in “seeking for the clue to ‘luck’” (309) which distracts and creates a gap between the mother and Paul as both parties seek endlessly for materialistic desires to meet their social status. Likewise, in “Tears, Idle Tears”, the mother wears “a silver fox, white gloves and a dark-blue toque put on exactly right” (110). She portrays herself as an upperclass woman. However, this pursuit of social status causes her to feel ashamed of her son who cries in a park making the “whole scene…disgraceful” (110). The mother leaves Paul to calm down while she walks ahead in order to distant herself from the disreputable child. Therefore, the mother’s focus on social status eventually creates distant relationships with their