“Lamb to the Slaughter”(1953)

Hema A. Hamza
Roald Dahl
● A British novelist, short story writer,
playwright, poet and children's fiction
writer; a WWII fighter pilot;
● one of the best-selling authors of the
20th century;
● his short stories are known for
unexpected endings;
● he was an intelligence officer
supplying information for Winston
Churchill
“Lamb to the Slaughter”(1953)

Initially rejected, along with four other stories, by The New Yorker, '
'Lamb to the Slaughter'' eventually appeared in Collier's in 1953,
after Knopf published its first collection of Dahl's short stories and
established his American reputation.
“'Lamb to the Slaughter," reflect aspects of human perversity, cruelty,
and violence. ' 'Lamb to the Slaughter'' opens with Mary Maloney,
the pregnant, doting wife of a policeman waiting for her husband to
come home from work.
Characters
● Mary Maloney: the story's protagonist, is six months pregnant and satisfied with
her (from an external perspective) rather banal life with her policeman-husband
Patrick, whom she adores.
● Patrick Maloney: is a police detective who cares more about his work than his
marriage. Despite Mary’s best attempts to make him comfortable and care for him,
he does not reciprocate her efforts or feeling. He callously tells Mary that he has
decided to abandon his marriage, and is then killed by Mary herself with a frozen leg
of lamb.
● Jack Noonan: is a sergeant and friend of the Maloneys. Jack is one of the first
officers to arrive at the scene of the murder. Like the other officers on the case, he is
sympathetic and condescending towards Mary and does not suspect her of Patrick’s
murder at all. Instead, he tries to comfort her and, along with his colleagues, is
persuaded by Mary to eat the leg of lamb, unaware that it is actually the murder
weapon.
O'Malley: is Sergeant Noonan's partner. Dahl is having fun with stereotypes, for
O'Malley, like Maloney and Noonan, is an Irish name, and ' 'the Irish cop" was a
sociological phenomenon in American big cities in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. O'Malley's words and actions are not specified in the story:
he is just one of the policemen on the scene, discussing the case and, eventually,
unwittingly consuming a portion of the tasty murder weapon.
Sam: the grocer, appears in the middle of the story. After Mary has killed
Patrick, she constructs an alibi by making a hasty visit to the grocery store to buy
vegetables to go with the meal she tells Sam she is cooking because Patrick does
not want to eat out, as they usually do on Thursday nights. Mary later overhears a
policeman reporting that Sam found her behavior at the store ' 'quite normal."
Themes
Betrayal: "Lamb to the Slaughter" tells of at least one betrayal: Patrick Maloney's
unexplained decision to leave his pregnant wife. This violation of the
marriage-vow is obviously not the only betrayal in the story, however. Mary's
killing of her husband is perhaps the ultimate betrayal. Her elaborately planned
alibi and convincing lies to the detectives also constitute betrayal.
Identity: Dahl plays with the notion of identity both at the level of popular
psychology and at a somewhat more philosophical, or perhaps anthropological,
level. At the level of popular psychology, Dahl makes it clear through his
description of the Maloney household that Mary has internalized the bourgeois, or
middle class, ideal of a young mid-twentiethcentury housewife, maintaining a tidy
home and catering to her husband; pouring drinks when the man finishes his day
is a gesture that comes from movies and magazines of the day. Mary's sudden
murderous action shatters the image that we have of her and that she seems to
have of herself.
In the anthropological sense, Dahl appears to suggest that, in essence, human beings are
fundamentally nasty and brutish creatures capable of precipitate and bloody acts. Then
there are the police detectives, who pride themselves on their ability to solve a crime, but
whom Mary sweetly tricks into consuming the main exhibit. Their identity, or at least
their competency, is thrown into doubt.
Love and Passion At the beginning of "Lamb to the Slaughter," Mary Maloney feels
love and physical passion for her husband Patrick. She luxuriates in his presence, in the '
'warm male glow that came out of him to her," and adores the way he sits, walks, and
behaves. Even far along into her pregnancy, she hurries to greet him, and waits on him
hand and foot—much more attentively, it appears from his reactions, than he would like.
Patrick is presumably motivated to leave his wife by an overriding passion for something
or someone else. Mary's mention of his failure to advance at work, and his own wish that
she not make a "fuss" about their separation because "It wouldn't be very good for my
job" indicate that it may be professional success that he desires. His treatment of his wife
does not suggest that he loves her
Passivity: The concept of passivity figures in the story. The first pages of the story
portray Mary' s existence as almost mindlessly passive: she sits and watches the
clock, thinking that each minute brings her husband closer to her. She is content to
watch him closely and try to anticipate his moods and needs. Patrick's predictability
up to this point is part of this passivity. The two are living a clockwork life against
which, in some way, each ultimately rebels. Passivity appears as the repression of
passion, and passion finds a way to reassert itself.
Justice and Injustice: The question of justice and injustice is directly related to the
question of revenge. ' 'Lamb to the Slaughter'' narrates a train of injustices, beginning
with Patrick's betrayal of Mary and their marriage, peaking with Mary's killing of
Patrick, and finding its denouement in Mary's deception of the investigating officers.
Patrick acts unjustly (or so it must be assumed on the basis of the evidence) in
announcing his abandonment of Mary, for this breaks the wedding oath; Mary acts
unustly, in a way far exceeding her husband's injustice, in killing Patrick, and she
compounds the injustice by concealing it from the authorities.
Style
Black Humor
Black humor is the use of the grotesque, morbid, or absurd for darkly comic
purposes.The image of the cheerful housewife suddently smashing her husband's
skull with the frozen joint of meat intended for his dinner is itself blackly humorous
for its unexpectedness and the grotesque incongruity of the murder weapon. There is
a morbid but funny double meaning, too, in Mary's response to her grocer's question
about meat: "I've got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer." She did
indeed get a leg of lamb from the freezer, and after she used it as a club, she found
herself with a rather large portion of dead meat on her living-room floor.
Also darkly funny is the grocer's question about what she plans to give her husband '
'afterwards," that is, for dessert. From Mary' s point of view, Patrick has already
gotten his "just desserts," and there will be no more "afterwards" for him!
The ultimate example of black humor
in "Lamb to the Slaughter" is, of
course, the spectacle of the
policemen and detectives sitting
around the Maloney kitchen table,
speculating about the murder weapon
while they unwittingly devour it.
Point of View
Dahl grants the point of view to Mary, the protagonist. Right away,
readers see the scene through Mary's eyes. The warmth and cleanliness,
the punctilious orderliness, of the living room where Mary awaits Patrick
reflect Mary's conviction, soon to be shattered, that she has built a
comfortable and even beautiful life. In Patrick's case, Dahl communicates
indirectly by gesture. Mary greets Patrick with a "Hullo, Darling," while
Patrick responds with a "hullo" only, omitting the endearment
Symbols

The setting is symbolic: Its domestic primness implies Mary's having bought into
a rather banal version of middle class happiness. The frozen leg of lamb is also
symbolic and indeed constitutes the central symbol of the story. The piece of meat
is already a token of violence: an animal traditionally viewed as meek and gentle
slaughtered for carnivorous consumption. The notion of a lamb, moreover,
resonates with biblical symbols, such as the scapegoat mentioned in Leviticus, the
ram that substitutes for Isaac in the tale of Abraham and Isaac, or Jesus himself,
"the Lamb of God." But Dahl's story reverses the connotation of these biblical
images.
Other Literary Elements and Devices
Themes
● love and betrayal
● love and murder gender issues
● Criminology
Allusion
● to the Bible - the title
● Mary and her unborn child-mother figure, innocence, her godly mission
● a lamb - the crime weapon
Other Literary Elements and Devices

situational irony - the