Lamb to the Slaughter (Criticism)

Criticism

Thomas Bertonneau

Bertonneau holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from UCLA and has published over thirty scholarly articles on aspects of modern literature. He is particularly interested in the anthropological implications of narrative, an interest which he explores in the following essay on “Lamb to the Slaughter”.

In his short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” Roald Dahl offers his readers a tale so grotesque, so darkly comic, so hilarious in some of its incidental details (the fourth line from the end features a belch), that one can easily fail to take it seriously. “Lamb to the Slaughter” seems a kind of literary joke, a morbid toss-off, which the author luckily convinced some editor to buy. Yet part of Dahl’s cleverness in this slick tale of domestic comfort disrupted, of marriage betrayed, and of a life taken, is that he tricks his readers into complicity with a murder, just as the murderer tricks the investigators into complicity by getting them to consume the evidence.

If readers feel sympathetic to Mary Maloney (as well they might) because her husband Patrick has abrogated their marriage and rejected her love without prelude, they must nevertheless not forget that Mary’s act, her escalated turnabout against

Patrick, violates a much deeper tabu than that against the unilateral dissolution of marriage; it violates the tabu against murder. Rather like an authorial devil, Dahl tempts readers to join with Mary’s “giggle” at the end of the tale, when her self-exculpating plan has prevailed. Attentive students of Dahl’s text will understand, however, that the comedy conceals an eruption of ugly vengefulness and that such vengefulness potentially entangles all people, actual and fictional. The law, represented in the story by the unfaithful Patrick and the bumbling detectives, serves in real life, under coercive threat, to defer just this type of personal score-settling. “Lamb to the Slaughter,” perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be a story about the fundamental — and fragile — devices of civilization, and about the ease with which the seemingly law-abiding citizen lapses back into the murderous brute.

Consider the murder itself and its immediate effects. Approaching Patrick from behind, with the frozen leg of lamb hefted as a club, Mary swings high and directs the full weight of it on Patrick’s head “as hard as she could.” As Dahl affirms, a frozen joint smashes as well as cold steel. (The detectives will suspect something like “a heavy metal vase.”) Grotesquely, Patrick “remained standing there for at least four or five seconds, gently swaying.” The adverbial qualification constitutes a neat, and telling, bit of narrative irony on Dahl’s part, for the act is anything but gentle. Patrick crashes to the carpet. When Sergeant Jack Noonan arrives, he finds “a small patch of congealed blood on the dead man’s head.” Over the sinister repast, one investigating detective remarks that the police doctor had found Patrick’s head to be “smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.” In the story, these details lie dispersed at different stages of the telling. Putting them together serves as a reminder that Patrick’s death is quite brutal, and that Mary, seemingly out of character, has summoned the grim strength of a Neanderthal. To Patrick, it seems, falls the role of sacrificial lamb to which the story’s title refers, the one who goes unwittingly to his own pathetic slaughter. Yet whatever his offense, no matter how much he corresponds to stereotype of the male betrayer of women, Patrick does not deserve to die.

One might imagine a feminist reading of “Lamb to the Slaughter” in which the interpreter focuses on Patrick’s betrayal of Mary, his casual sacrifice of the marriage to his career, to his ambition, to his very own withdrawn intentness. Perhaps one does not even have to be a feminist to succumb to the urge to defend Mary on just such suppositional grounds. Patrick’s piggishness — if that is what it is — after all seems to confirm the worst things that contemporary (especially academic) convention ascribes to the naturally reprobate male character. The plight of abandoned, and at least emotionally abused, women circulates widely and is well known to many. Why should readers therefore not side with Mary and even delight in her revenge against patriarchal oppression? All the more so because the events take place in a story, not in real life. Are not stories, after all, precisely the locus in which our impractical wishes may be carried imaginatively to fruition, thereby sublimating dangerous thoughts and urges? A close reading of the details ought to dampen this urge. The scene in which Patrick announces his intention to leave Mary looms as particularly interesting.

Patrick begins his tense speech to Mary with the assertion that “this is going to be a bit of a shock to you.” Mary, whom Dahl has previously characterized as being “without anxiety,” exhibiting “a slow smiling air,” and being “curiously tranquil,” has already “begun to get frightened,” now infuses her eye with a “bewildered look.” Patrick says that he has thought about what he is planning to say “a good deal” and that he hopes that Mary will not lay too much “blame” on him. So far, Dahl has employed direct discourse. Now, however, he switches to indirect discourse and to a purposefully vague vocabulary: “And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at the most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.” Switching back to direct discourse, Dahl makes Patrick conclude his speech with remarks about how “there needn’t be any fuss” and how a fuss “wouldn’t be very good for my job.” It sounds selfish. What else can it be? But the important thing to note is what Dahl premeditatedly declines to divulge, what he quite deliberately conceals through elision. Readers never learn from Dahl’s carefully elided narrative precisely what Patrick’s line of reasoning, his case, is. (Or even what his line of unreasonable self-justification, his non-case, is, for it could be one as easily as the other.) While a strong tendency to put the worst light on such matters no doubt afflicts every reader, the fact remains that Patrick’s motive hovers outside any reader’s ken. To fill in the blank, no matter how certain one is about an assignable motive, would be to collaborate unbidden in the storytelling, a violation of critical principles.

What happens to the instinctive reading of the story (namely that Mary is primitively justified) immediately the reader’s lack of knowledge about Patrick’s motive makes itself known? In the first place, what Dahl casually calls Mary’s “instinct,” her “instinct. . . not to believe any of it, to reject it all,” becomes suspicious, the more so since, having dispatched Patrick with the convenient and fatal mutton-joint, she herself experiences clarity: “It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden.” In the light of this clarity, Mary carefully rehearses her alibi. She sits in front of her vanity mirror and practices saying normal things to Sam the grocer. Her talent for lying rises, here, to the superb. It shows itself superb again when, returning from Sam’s, she convinces herself to act naturally, as though she did not know the fact of her own criminal deed. It expands into the superlative when she skillfully lies to Sergeant Noonan and O’Malley, on their arrival, feigning the distressed survivor, mocking herself up as the discoverer of a grisly crime perpetrated by an unknown assailant. Now if, in the unrecorded blank of his speech, Patrick said to Mary, I’ve taken up with someone else more helpful to me in my career, younger and more beautiful, so I’m abandoning you, one might say that Mary was, indeed, primitively justified. But of course Patrick might just as well have said, I’ve discovered that the child is not mine and that you are not what you seem, in which case the reader’s sympathy with Mary would be considerably undermined. A purely speculative interpretation which insisted on this could point to Mary’s adeptness at manipulation and deception, her acquaintance with “nearly all the men at the precinct,” as clues that she might be capable of such duplicity. The point is that Dahl leaves us entirely without knowledge. And it is therefore without knowledge of Patrick’s motive that readers must assess Mary’s act.

Of course, “Lamb to the Slaughter” belongs to the genre of comedy, as well as to the genre of crime fiction. Dahl exaggerates everything, selects morbid details, transforms mere domestic facts, like the existence of a meat-freezer in the basement, into the occasion for criminal enormity. Mary hefting the lamb-joint is a moment of dark comedy as well as a nasty little scene. Even the title, with its multiple if rather simple ironies, contributes to the comedy. For who exactly is the lamb on the way to the slaughter? At first it is Mary, about to be rejected by her husband, then her husband, fatally stunned with a leg of lamb, and then the police investigators, tricked fiendishly by Mary into consuming the very murder weapon which would enable them to solve the case. In this last detail, one might even sense a hint of ritual cannibalism, since in eating the lamb the men are participating, unwittingly of course, in the immolation of Patrick. At one point, one of the men belches. Seen this way, the placid little postmortem meal takes on a higher degree of morbidity. But it also points to the “moral,” so to speak, of Dahl’s amoral tale.

Civilization calls on its members to renounce primitive justification in favor of rational justice; it requires them to renounce personal vengeance, that is, in favor of established institutions which depersonalize the assignment of guilt and the administration of punishment. Even though it feels slightly absurd to invoke ideas like due process and the assumption of innocence in the case of a story which probably does not take itself altogether seriously, emphasizing these philosophical points is nevertheless imperative.

Modern middle class domesticity, represented by the living room where Dahl first reveals Mary in the story’s opening paragraphs, is an instance of civilization. Taken for granted and even reviled, such homely banality nevertheless amounts to the culmination of an age-old battle by human beings against their base nature, their tendency to act out of selfish motives without regard for others. For one thing, domesticity has a wider context beyond itself, the public order of which the policeman are the putative caretakers. Dahl shows us that the caretakers of order are always less than perfect, but that is merely to underline the fragility of the achievement. Not a material, but a spiritual achievement, the triumph of trust and cooperation over selfishness, as in marriage, requires continuous maintenance. The parties must cherish one another and hold vigil each over himself. When one party breaks the trust, or breaks the law, or otherwise disrupts the peace, the almost inevitable natural reaction of others is to reply in kind, or to escalate their response above kind. The whole fabric of trust now verges on unraveling. Dahl shows us, in sardonic fashion, just this unraveling, and in transforming the sweetly pregnant wife into the calculating killer, he reminds his audience that angelhood is a rare achievement and that revenge, especially, is an appetite which only faith and morality enable us to suppress.

In Mary’s concluding “giggle,” then, the comedy ends and the serious discussion must begin. Readers caught up in the fantasy of vengeance, made palatable by the comedic elements in Dahl’s story, will be sorely tempted to chuckle quietly along with the clever killer, but this temptation reveals something about the primitive being in every reader. To be sure, that primitive lurks in every individual, and seeks any justification, any chink in the moral framework, to manifest itself. The lamb of our best nature must always keep a wary eye on the slaughtering beast.

Source: Thomas Bertonneau, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

Elisabeth Piedmont-Morton

Piedmont-Marton is the coordinator of the undergraduate writing center at the University of Texas at Austin. In the following essay, she analyzes the irony behind the title of Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

“Lamb to the Slaughter” is representative of Dahl’s economical style and dry, dark sense of humor. Like all of his short fiction, the narrative in this story is driven by plot, not by character or mood. Readers find themselves dropped into the middle of the action with no knowledge of the background or history of the characters to establish tone or motive. Starting with the double meaning of its title, however, “Lamb to the Slaughter” offers readers a number of opportunities to explore the complexities and possibilities beneath the taut and matter-of-fact surface of the story. Alert and curious readers will find themselves opening narrative trap doors and rummaging through Mary’s psyche in search of reasons why an ordinary evening ended in murder.

The expression “lamb to the slaughter” is used to describe an innocent or naive person being led into danger or failure. Unprepared political candidates, or woefully outmatched sports teams are often described as lambs being led to the slaughter. Dahl’s use of the expression is surprising and effective for two reasons. First, it reminds us that the slaughter that the lamb is led to is a real, not a metaphorical, killing. Second, in this story, readers discover later, the lamb is not the victim of the slaughter, but the instrument. When we first encounter meek Mary Maloney, bent over her sewing and awaiting her husband’s arrival, we think she will be the lamb. As it turns out, her husband Patrick is literally the lamb led to slaughter, Mary brings her little leg of lamb to the slaughter as weapon, and in the metaphorical sense of the expression, the investigating officers are lambs, that is, naive followers, led to the slaughter, first to the scene of the crime, and second to the dinner table to consume the evidence. When readers last see Mary Maloney she is giggling to herself at the unwitting joke one of the officers makes when he claims that the weapon is “probably right under our very noses.”

Mary Maloney is hardly the lamb she seems to be. As critic Mark West has noted, seemingly ordinary and respectable characters who “are confronted with peculiar problems or opportunities and respond by committing, or at least contemplating, cruel or self-destructive acts,” are a feature of Dahl’s stories of this period. Unlike the characters in the war stories, however, characters like Mary “do not behave nobly under pressure.” When they find themselves in extreme circumstances they “lose their moral bearings.” In “Lamb to the Slaughter” Mary, in West’s words, “so easily makes the transition from housewife to murderer that one wonders about her mental state prior to the day she killed her husband.” A close reading of the story suggests that she may have possessed the traits of a killer all along, and by extension, so do we all.

Upon re-reading, “Lamb to the Slaughter” offers some provocative insights into Mary’s character and her relationship to her husband. Because on the first reading we are predisposed to think of her as the “lamb,” the innocent who is about to get hurt, we do not notice how her composure that evening seems put on, or at least strained. Dahl describes her as having a “slow smiling air about her.” She is “curiously tranquil” as she waits for the clock to tick off the minutes until her husband comes home. When he finally does come home, he becomes the center of her universe, the “sun” around which her world revolves. Her desire to please him seems edgy and frantic, more an act of control than affection.

Patrick’s news that he is leaving her threatens the control she has over him, and thus over her own impulses. She seems to make a last-ditch effort to remain in his orbit by insisting that he let her make him supper. Patrick does not respond when she whispers “I’ll get the supper,” after hearing his devastating announcement, and she takes that as acceptance of her offer. As it turns out, though, he simply is not listening to her and lashes out when she enters the room with the frozen leg of lamb: “For God’s sake. . . Don’t make supper for me. I’m going out.” When her offer of service is rebuffed, Mary perceives it as a loss of control and literally hits her husband over the head with the meal he rejected. Readers are left with several questions. At what point does Mary decide that she’ll use the meal first figuratively and then literally as a weapon? If she has no intention of attacking him why does she unwrap and inspect the meat in the cellar? If she were really planning to make supper then surely she would have selected something smaller, like the lamb chops she has suggested earlier. A whole frozen leg of lamb will — and does — take hours to cook. And why does she grasp it like a weapon rather than a piece of food, “holding the thin bone-end of it with both hands”? What seems most calculated about her behavior is the fact that after he rebuffs her final offer she comes up behind him “without any pause,” as if to get a running start.

After she brings lamb to the slaughter of her husband, Mary sets about gathering the rest of the lambs into her circle of influence. Mary’s behavior after she kills Patrick asks readers to consider some difficult questions about her true nature. This is unnerving because, as West points out, Dahl asks that readers see something of themselves in the apparently ordinary Mary who finds herself in extraordinary circumstances: pregnant and facing the death penalty for killing her husband. Her deliberate behavior to cover her guilt is explainable as the natural instincts for a woman trying to protect her unborn child. But the explanation is less than convincing, however, since the welfare of the child occurs to her almost as an afterthought, “on the other hand, what about the child,” never to be mentioned again. Furthermore, Mary seems much more calculating than instinctive in the hours that follow her husband’s murder.

Mary’s actions immediately after the murder are a chilling mirror image of her behavior in the first scene of the story. Earlier that evening she had carefully set the ideal domestic scene while she waited for Patrick to come home, arranging their two chairs and the “two tall glasses, soda water, whiskey.” After the murder Mary puts the lamb in the oven and then “sat down before the mirror, tidied her hair, touched up her lips and face.” Then she begins to rehearse the appropriate emotional reactions to the situation. First, she feigns nonchalance for her visit to the store that will establish her alibi. Later on her way back from the store she practices how she will be overcome with shock and grief at discovering her murdered husband’s body. Mary’s performance is so convincing that she quickly diverts attention from herself as a suspect. While she sits quietly playing the distraught widow the officers scour the house and grounds looking for the weapon.

Mary ultimately uses the same means of control over the investigating officers that she had used with Patrick: food, drink, and the illusion of uncomprehending innocence. It is because Patrick finally rejected her offers that he ended up dead. Because the officers can only perceive her as a helpless victim, they cannot see how they are being led astray. First she tempts them with a little whiskey. Then finally, using Patrick’s sense of duty and their loyalty to him as reasons, she convinces them to abandon the trail of the murderer and sit down to eat the weapon that she used to kill her husband and their colleague.

“Lamb to the Slaughter” is unusual for a Dahl story in that the murderer seems to face no consequences for her actions. But by drawing readers into Mary Maloney’s psyche, Dahl demands that readers ask themselves some difficult moral questions. Seen as a crime of passion, an emotionally distraught woman’s single impulsive act that ends in tragedy, Mary’s crime does not seem to require punishment other than her own lifelong remorse and knowledge that she has caused her child to be fatherless. But a woman in the throes of passion and jealous rage could not have behaved with the forethought and self-control that Mary displays in the hours following the murder. Her orchestration of the investigation goes far beyond the knowledge she would have gained as “the detective’s wife.” She appears to be a master manipulator who killed her husband because he was no longer willing to submit to her control. Dahl’s chilling conclusion seems to be that as long as there are lambs, people willing to manipulated, there will be slaughters.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Dahl’s first published story, “Shot Down over Libya,” appeared in Saturday Evening Post in August 1942. As Dahl’s earliest work, it merits the attention of anyone interested in the remainder of his stories. The story stems from Dahl’s experience in the Royal Air Force, heavily fictionalized, and introduces the element of violence which threads through his oeuvre. A pilot, a British flying his Hurricane in support of ground troops, meets up with an aerial ambush by Italian aircraft, which shoot him into the ground. He survives the crash, but is injured. Despite its slightness, “Shot Down” prefigures much of the later writing.
• The short stories of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., collected in Welcome to the Monkey House, have been cited in comparison with those of Dahl for their darkly comic nature and often bleak assessments of human nature.
• In Dahl’s story “The Way Up To Heaven,” a woman is infuriated by her husband’s chronic lateness. She begins to suspect that he is late deliberately to torment her. She siezes a chance opportunity to leave him stranded in a disabled elevator where he will almost certainly die.
• For many years, Dahl was married to the actress Patricia Neal, whose autobiography As I Am (1988) contains a frank depiction of their life together and of the factors that drove them apart.
• In James Thurber’s short story “Mr. Preble Gets Rid of His Wife,” a typically mild-mannered, married Thurber protagonist had an ongoing joke with a female colleague about running away together. One day she varies her standard response by saying that first he will have to “get rid of’ his wife. That night Mr. Preble lures his wife into the cellar of their home, planning to kill her and bury the body under the earthen floor. She is reluctant to enter the cellar, but once she does, she realizes what he plans to do. She belittles his plan, criticizes his choice of a murder weapon, and mocks his general ineptitude as a prospective murderer. The story ends with Mrs. Preble sending him away to find a more suitable weapon and screaming after him to “close the door . . . were you born in a barn?”
• A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift is an early and famous example of literary irony and grotesque humor. Under its full title: A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of the Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents, or the Country, and for Making them Beneficial to the Publick, the essay shocked some members of the public when it appeared in 1729, advocating that problems of famine, poverty, and overpopulation be addressed by eating the children of the poor.