The Lady, or the Tiger? (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Shortly after Stockton published “The Lady, or the Tiger?,” he and his wife left on an extended European vacation. Thus, he missed much of the initial debate that swirled around his story. Martin Griffin in his 1939 biography of Stockton said that “notices of the strange dilemma proposed by the story began to appear in newspapers and critical reviews.” The poet Robert Browning believed the man chose the door with the tiger, and Griffin suggested that Stockton weighted the story towards that conclusion. Many other readers, famous and not-so-famous, debated the ending in various public and literary forums. The controversy was so vibrant that when Stockton returned to the United States he was deluged with letters. In response to the story’s popularity, he wrote a similar story with a trick ending called “The Discourager of Hesitancy.” In another story, “His Wife’s Deceased Sister,” Stockton tells the story of a writer who writes a wildly popular story and is never able to achieve that level of success again.

Critic Henry Vedder wrote in his 1895 book, American Fiction To-Day, about how the story became a social fad and commended Stockton on his commercial shrewdness and his skill as a writer of short fiction. As tastes changed in the twentieth century and modernism exerted its hold over literature, stories like Stockton’s became antiquated and were considered relics of an earlier, less relevant time. Stockton had worried about this all along, yet the story itself has remained popular as an example of literature from an earlier era.

Fred Lewis Pattee in his 1923 book, The Development of the American Short Story: An Historical Survey, discussed Stockton’s mastery of the marvellous, the way he posed his humor in brief, well-written stories that are not overburdened with explanations, and compared him to Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain. In 1925 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch mentioned that although people had read “The Lady, or the Tiger?,” few considered the story appropriate for serious criticism. As one of the first British critics to deal with Stockton, Pattee compared him to Daniel Defoe and wrote about his prominence as a writer of short fiction that is wholly American.

Proving the story’s durability, Henry Golemba wrote about Stockton for the Dictionary of Literary Biography in 1981, and suggested that “The Lady, or the Tiger?” was still worthy of extensive critical analysis. He analyzed Stockton’s use of cosmic metaphors in the story: the hero represented an everyman figure and the arena was a symbol of life itself. This interpretation lends itself to more serious themes, an observation that led to Golemba’s comment that Stockton’s “reputation as a widely popular author in the late nineteenth century has eclipsed the fact that he was also a serious writer, just as his fame as a humorist has made people blind to his serious statements.”

Compare & Contrast

• 1881: Animals are not protected from human exploitation. P. T. Barnum and his partner, James Bailey, form the Barnum & Bailey Circus, whose main attraction is Jumbo, an African elephant they bought in London. Their traveling show delights thousands across the United States.
  1990s: Tigers and other animals are protected as endangered species. Tigers are frequently raised in captivity and live in zoos or are trained as circus animals. Several breeds of tigers became extinct during the twentieth century. By 1996, there are only twenty to thirty remaining South China tigers.
• 1880s: Capital punishment is practiced throughout the world and in the United States, though public executions are not as common as they once were. However, some efforts to abolish the death penalty have succeeded. By the 1880s, the state of Michigan and the countries of Venezuela and Portugal have outlawed capital punishment.
  1990s: Many states have reinstated the death penalty. By 1997, it is allowed in all but thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Accepted methods for carrying out death sentences include hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber, the firing squad, and lethal injection. Capital punishment has been abolished in Europe and many other countries, with the United States, China, and Japan the world’s most prominent death penalty proponents.