The Horse Dealer’s Daughter Analysis

The Horse Dealer’s Daughter is a short story written by D.H. Lawrence. In this story he presents the situation of a girl who is struggling with her inner-self. Mabel Pervin, the main character of this story lives with her three brothers. She lost her mother in the age of fourteen. Later her family was under debt after the death of his father. She seems to be in depression after the death of her parents and this leads to fade away her relationship with his brothers. They treated her with no respect. To ran away from all the sufferings of her life and to feel closer to her mother, she tried to commit suicide by drowning in the pond. But the situation of her inner world changes when she met Dr jack Fergusson who saved her from drowning into the pond. She developed a feeling of being loved by someone.

This story ‘The Horse Dealer’s Daughter’ uses the interesting technique like symbolism and represents the themes like love, family, death and suicide. The author, from the very beginning described that the condition of the main character of this story is due to her family. This family goes through a break down because of the death of the mother at an early age. The way in which three brothers look at their last horses represents a sense of emotional feeling for their family business. Mabel, the main character of the story loves her father a lot as described in the story “She went regularly to church, she attended to her father” (Lawrence 458). After the death of parents, children were supposed to become the strength of each other but nothing like that happens and, in this story, this is considered as a factor to promote a feeling of loneliness and depression in main character Mable. How the death of parents, can destroy a family can be easily observed. Death is an important factor in this story because a happy and wealthy family was destroyed because of it. Children lost their parents. At first Mabel thought that death is an evil thing because it takes away her mother and happiness from her but after some time when she felt loneliness, she realized that it is a method to meet the people who you love the most and that is why she decided to run away from all the sufferings of life and develops this idea of suicide, so that she can meet her parents. Like it is mentioned that “For the life, she followed here in the world was far less real than the world of death she inherited from her mother” (Lawrence 459).

So, death and suicide are closely related to each other in this story. Mable developed a feeling that she can only meet her mother by following death. She went to a pond after cleaning her mother’s grave. Here pond is an interesting symbol used by the author. It makes us understandable that she wants to do suicide by drowning into the pond. “Then she waded slowly into the water” can be regarded as an evidence that her goal was suicide. Dr. Ferguson followed her and thus pond is also considered as a symbol which changes the lives of two person in this story. They two actually met there and Mabel’s life totally changed after that incident. The words like ‘dead cold pond, dark, clay’, are used by author as a symbol to describe the death (qtd. In Lawrence 460). The love between two main characters in this story is fully understandable. Dr. Ferguson feels attracted towards Mabel when he saw her at her mother’s grave. Sometimes love happens unexpectedly between two persons as represented in this story. Mabel was a kind of unromantic person at first, but we can easily observe the transformation in her feelings when she was naked in front of Dr. Ferguson.

As described he was little confused about his feeling towards her like “He never intended to love her”. (Lawrence 463). But he realized his love for her at the end as he said, ‘I want you, I want to marry you, we’re going to be married, quickly, quickly-to-morrow if I can” (Lawrence 465). In conclusion, we can say that the author represents each perspective of the story by the narrator’s voice as a third person. Mabel’s story includes death, economic crises and, breakdown of relationship between brothers and sisters, isolation but also a hope of love or to be loved by someone and that incident changed her life forever. At one time, she was very uninterested in her life because of the death of her parents and she disconnected herself from the s