"The Rocking-Horse Winner" is a modernist short story, but it's also a family drama. Novels and short stories that detail the ins and outs of domestic life during the Modernist era often make statements about social or political issues by exposing the effect such issues have on the private lives of individuals. In this way, they provide social commentary by essentially shining a light on that which is normally private. In the case of "The Rocking-Horse Winner," Lawrence investigates the tension surrounding money in Hester and Paul's family as a way of dramatizing the influence of society's consumerist and greedy mentality.
What's more, "The Rocking-Horse Winner" toys with the kind of experimentation often seen in modernist literature, a genre that frequently left behind the strict trappings of realism to better explore its characters' subjective and psychological experiences. To that end, "The Rocking-Horse Winner" includes some supernatural elements: there's the talking house, Paul and Hester's seemingly supernatural intuition, and Paul's untimely and implausible death. Lawrence makes a brief foray into the magical realism genre with these narrative elements, requiring the reader to suspend disbelief in service of symbolic representation. In turn, the story heightens the tension and emotion at stake for the characters.
