Lamb to the Slaughter (Style)

Style

Black Humor

Black humor is the use of the grotesque, morbid, or absurd for darkly comic purposes. Black humor became widespread in popular culture, especially in literature and film, beginning in the 1950s; it remains popular toward the end of the twentieth century. Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961) is one of the best-known examples in American fiction. The short stories of James Thurber and the stories and novels of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. also offer examples. 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 ordiliness, 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. He drinks his evening scotch and soda more quickly than usual and resists Mary’s efforts to wait on him; he fails to respond to Mary’s conversation. Readers see these things more or less as Mary sees them, although they likely interpret them more quickly than she does as signs of his dissatisfaction with his marriage. After the killing, Mary changes. No longer the ornament of a contented setting, she becomes the calculator of her own survival, and that of her unborn child. As Dahl writes, Mary’s mind suddenly clears; she begins to dispose of evidence, and she sits in front of her dresser-mirror rehearsing a normal conversation with her grocer. When she returns home, having founded her alibi, she views the body of her husband as if for the first time, and readers, too, get a newish view of it, described much more grotesquely, with greater and more poignant detail, than previously. In these two contrasting scenes of the death, Dahl completes the transformation of his central character.

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.