The Horse Dealer Daughter Analysis

733 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The horse dealer's daughter analysis

The “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” by D H Lawrence haves a very ancient death-rebirth symbolism. The story takes place in the early 1920 's in and around a farm at the edge of a small English town. The horse dealer’s daughter is a young woman named Mabel. Her father has died and Mabel along with her brothers are in debt and with nowhere to go. Dr. Jack Fergusson, a physician and friend of the brothers, who likes Mabel. Both Jack and Mabel are depressed. By the end both Jack and Mabel are reborn, and in love. Mabel is at the end of her emotional and material resources. She is depressed and suicidal at the same time. Her mother died when she was 14, and it was traumatic for her. She gives up in life and feels that she has nothing to live for …show more content…

He is sick, and exhausted from work. There is no woman in his life, and his only friend is leaving town. However, Jack has a subtle, semi-conscious attraction to Mabel but he is in a state of denial, and repression. As Jack goes to visit Mabel’s brother’s he becomes intrigued by their gloomy, proud, and strangely detached sister. He very carefully avoids talking to her, the narrator says: “Mabel looked at him with her steady, dangerous eyes, that always made him uncomfortable, unsettling his superficial ease.” (5.) Later on Jack passes Mabel and they exchange a look; the narrator says: “There was a heavy power in her eyes which laid hold of his whole being, as if he had drunk some powerful drug. He had been feeling weak and done before. Now the life came back into him, he felt delivered from his own fretted, daily …show more content…

He undresses her dry’s her, put’s her in front of the fire to warm her up. When she wakes up she asks him “do you love me then?.” At first Jack hesitates, resists her, and he wanted to maintain an impersonal, doctor/patient relationship. Jacks concept of love is a matter of intention rather than spontaneous feelings. However Jack finally yields to her love. The narrator says: “She lifted her face to him, and he bent forward and kissed her on the mouth, gently, with the one kiss that is an eternal pledge…He never intended to love her. But now it was over. He had crossed over the gulf to her, and all that he had left behind had shriveled and become

Show More
Related

  • Dealing With Grief In The Lovely Bones

    1807 Words  | 4 Pages

    Jack Salmon, Susie’s father, is most vocal about his sorrow for losing his daughter. However, his initial reaction was much different. Upon hearing that Susie’s ski hat had been found, he immediately retreats upstairs because “he [is] too devastated to reach out to [Abigail] sitting on the carpet…he could not let [her] see him” (Sebold 32). Jack retreats initially because he did not know what to do or say to console his family and he did not want them to see him upset. This first reaction, although it is small, is the first indicator of the marital problems to come. After recovering from the initial shock, Jack decides that he must bring justice for his daughter’s sake and allows this goal to completely engulf his life. He is both an intuitive and instrumental griever, experiencing outbursts of uncontrolled emotions then channeling that emotion into capturing the killer. He focuses his efforts in such an e...

    Read More

  • Isolation In 'The Haunting Of Hill House'

    1389 Words  | 3 Pages

    The main character, Eleanor Vance, can be seen as the victim of the novel. She ultimately commits suicide, like Maria, because of her susceptibility to the supernatural elements and experiences that happen in the haunted Hill House that Eleanor gets invited to stay at with others to investigate this paranormal phenomenon. Eleanor has been isolated from society because she has taken care of her mother for eleven years. This job has led to Eleanor missing out on many experiences and social interactions that has cause her social awkwardness and withdrawal from society. As in the novel, it states Eleanor “ had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually” (Jackson 3). This isolation causes her to make what can be considered a reckless decision to take up Dr. Montague’s offer to stay at Hill House. This then leads to Eleanor’s tragic suicide, which closely resembles the circumstances that lead to Maria’s suicide in The Shadow in the Corner as well. The social isolation that Eleanor experiences causes her to come in contact with supernatural forces and become impacted by them on a deeper level than the other characters in the

    Read More

  • Frankenstein vs. the Terminator: Themes of Science, Feminism, and Romanticism

    1874 Words  | 4 Pages

    , how it drowns to his attention how much he had longed for his sister/future wife to be. Yet he never felt so lonely whilst within her company. Whether it was the fact that the burning desire driven him away. Or just his sheer highly intelligent curiosity got in the way of settling for second best.

    Read More

  • The Cabdriver's Daughter Analysis

    732 Words  | 2 Pages

    Perspective allows people to see another person’s point of view. In the essay “The Cabdriver’s Daughter” by Waheeda Samady, she addresses her perception versus society’s opinion of her father. In her eyes, her father is a person capable of displaying kindness and expressing his profound knowledge while for some Americans, he is their preconceived notion of what a terrorist might look like. She challenges people to look past his scars and the color of skin, and “look at what the bombs did not destroy” (19). To her, he is the man that has lived through the Soviet-Afghan War, persevered through poverty, and denied these experiences the power of changing him into a cantankerous person. Samady feels prideful of her father’s grit through his past experiences yet feels sorrowful thinking about the life he could have lived if the war had never happened.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Postpartum Depression In The Yellow Wallpaper

    1149 Words  | 3 Pages

    However, the reader must always keep in mind the time at which this piece was written and how these relationships exemplify the realities of personal relationships during this time era. Her relationship with John is dominated by him and is almost like she is the child. Without anyone to speak to about her true feelings and stresses, she writes, another thing she must hide from John and Jennie. The reader feels a sense of fear from the narrator, “there comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 78). Yet another sign of how he does not want his wife thinking for herself and doing what she pleases. When learning about the author and her background, her feminist side shows in this piece through examples like these. The true dark sides of marriage, the loneliness, and the female role of always being superior are portrayed perfectly in this short

    Read More

  • The Yellow Wallpaper Madness Analysis

    877 Words  | 2 Pages

    As she spends more and more time isolated in her bedroom, with nothing else to occupy her mind, she gradually become fixated on the dreadful patterns of the paper and instantly foresee something else: the narrator eventually see a “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous design”(77). The narrator’s bedroom being a prison becomes more literal as from figurative when the loneliness and social negation intensifies her need for an escape from the pre-set nature of conduct created specifically for her (a mentally depressed and unwell women) by the people in her life especially by John. Throughout the story, the narrator’s psychological breakdown goes from a typical depressed mind and lacked awareness of identity, to a complete madness and reversed sense of self-esteem. She gradually changes the place she has in the physical world and fights back the social rejection she is facing by turning away from reality in exchange for a world where she has total control and can act according to her own will. The author uses the yellow wallpaper as a symbol for representing the phases of the narrator’s gradual deteriorating

    Read More

  • Room, by Emma Donoghue

    1358 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this passage, Jack is doing his nightly routine of saying goodnight to different objects in Room that are important to him. He is taught, through the choice of his Ma,...

    Read More

  • The Boat, by Alistair Macleod

    843 Words  | 2 Pages

    The mother is a selfish and stubborn woman. Raised a certain way and never falters from it. She neglects help, oppresses education and persuades people to be what she wants or she will cut them out of her life completely. Her own morals out-weight every other family member’s wants and choices. Her influence and discipline brought every member of the family’s future to serious-danger to care to her wants. She is everything a good mother isn’t and is blind with her own morals. Her stubbornness towards change and education caused the families state of desperation. The realization shown through the story is the family would be better off without a mother to anchor them down.

    Read More

  • Free Yellow Wallpaper Essays: Oppression of Women

    1089 Words  | 3 Pages

    By closing her off from the rest of the world, he is taking her away from things that important to her mental state; such as her ability to read and write, her need for human interaction, her need to make her own decisions. All of these are important to all people. This idea of forced rest and relaxation to cure temporary nervous problems was very common at the time. Many doctors prescribed it for their female patients. The narrators husband, brother, and their colleagues all feel that this is the correct way to fix her problem, which is practically nonexistent in their eyes. Throughout the beginning of the story, the narrator tends to buy into the idea that the man is always right and makes excuses for her feelings and his actions and words: "It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise and because he loves me so," (23).

    Read More

  • Jack Merridew: Choir Boy or Savage Boy?

    930 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...would be in the pursuit of righteousness due to the fact that he was the leader of the choir at a private boys’ school. As it turns out, the results of being absent from society and the heightening desperation to survive causes the wickedness sealed away deep within him to break its chains and overtake his personality. Throughout the novel, the reader experiences the change of Jack’s character from one of righteousness and a fair leader to a schismatic, belligerent savage with no reverence for objects with sacred values. The reader can observe these obvious alterations as everybody who isn’t on his side becomes victimized by a malicious beast known by the name of Jack Merridew. The beast lurking in the darkness of Jack’s inner being maliciously exposes itself and ultimately turns a once innocent child into a bloodied savage with almost no morality left in his body.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Sickness In The Yellow Wallpaper

    1070 Words  | 3 Pages

    While she is analyzing John and Jennie’s change in behavior, she concludes that “he [asks her] all sorts of questions, too, and [pretends to be] loving and kind. As if [she] couldn’t see through him” (Gilman 402). She takes John’s act of kindness and care as a disguise to find out more about her sickness. She thinks John and Jennie “are secretly affected by it” (402). John has control over her life so she does not understand why he feels the need to treat her right. She thinks his kindness and love is temporary, so she protects herself by pushing him away. Her sickness is making her feel paranoid about having the wallpaper to herself. The yellow wallpaper is the first thing she feels that John does not have control over. A part of her recognizes that John is changing and the other part of her tries to understand his

    Read More

  • New Year Baby by Socheata Poeuv

    1217 Words  | 3 Pages

    tragedies that befell her. She is an example of a melancholic character that is not able to let go of her loss and therefore lets it t...

    Read More

  • Irony in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

    383 Words  | 1 Pages

    Jack, thinking he might have been that very baby, retrieves the bag he was found in as an infant in which Ms. Prism identifies by some distinguishing marks to have been her own. Jack realized the woman that had been teaching his niece was his mother. But then Lady Bracknell explained that she was not, but Lady Bracknell’s poor sister Mrs. Moncrieff was. The irony continues to explain how Jack and Algernon were biological brothers. They were pretending to be earlier to play out their game of Bunburyism.

    Read More

  • Analysis of Importance of Being Earnest

    544 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jack has been lonely without the knowledge of his parents and when he gets a hint of what might be a reality, he lights up like a Christmas tree without acknowledging that it might turn out to be false.

    Read More

  • D. H. Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”: the Suspected Suicide Attempt

    641 Words  | 2 Pages

    After analyzing the story, a clear path can be followed that alerts and prepares you for Mabel’s attempted suicide. Lawrence cleverly uses setting to help the reader come into the dark, grey, and sad world Mabel sees herself in. Not only does the setting indicate Mabel’s suicidal path but her lack of relationship with her family shows she is not attached to the things of this living world but longs for the dead world of her mothers. Mabel attempted suicide because she saw it as her only way out of this depression state she had fallen into.

    Read More

More about The Horse Dealer Daughter Analysis

Open Document