The Horse Dealers Daughter by D. H. Laurence

Symbolism in The Horse Dealer 's Daughter

D . H . Lawrence 's The Horse Dealer 's Daughter is a haunting tale about the complex , almost mysterious , ways of love and human relationships Like his fellow modernist , viz . James Joyce and Virginia Woolf Lawrence was also very fond of a symbolic way of expression and his short stories and novels are usually veritable powerhouses of symbols Lawrence used a huge variety of symbols in his works drawing from a great multiplicity of sources . These symbols serve to evoke a range of additional meanings beyond

and usually more abstract than their literal significance , thereby helping the author to introduce complex ideas and increase the depth of his work . This is intended to analyze a contextual symbol , a cultural symbol and a universal symbol used in Lawrence 's short story , The Horse Dealer 's Daughter . It also aims to shed light upon the complexity of meanings evoked through the use of these symbols in the short story

A contextual symbol in a work is one that maintains its literal significance while evoking other meanings within the context of the story . The meanings evoked by such a symbol in the context of the story are limited within the story itself and need not be universally true or applicable . In this sense , the symbol of water as used by Lawrence in the short story under consideration can be taken to be a contextual symbol . Water in the short story is explicitly associated with coldness lack of warmth , lack of life and even death . The association of death with water is hinted at from the very setting of the suicide . When Mabel goes to visit her mother 's grave , she she took an empty jar from a neighbouring grave , brought water , and carefully , most scrupulously sponged the marble headstone and the coping-stone (46 ) and this work gave her sincere satisfaction to do this (46 ) since she felt in immediate contact with the world of her mother . Then an afternoon moist ' with heavy coldness ' Mabel walked to the pond and waded slowly into the water (48 ) to commit suicide . The pond is again and again described in terms of death in the story . When the young doctor reaches the spot to save Mabel , His eyes seemed to penetrate the dead water (49 ) and as he wades in after Mabel , the water clasped dead cold round his legs (49 . The instances can be multiplied : he could smell the cold , rotten clay that fouled up into the water (49 , his body was all sunk in the hideous cold element (50 , he lost his balance and went under , horribly , suffocating in the foul earthy water (50 . When he came out of the pond , he was thankful , full of relief to be out of the clutches of the pond . He lifted her and staggered on to the bank , out of the horror of wet , grey clay (51 The imagery persists in the climactic scene of the story as the water...