Deception Has Many Forms

an essay over the lamb to the slaughter by Roald Dahl

“Betrayal” is a word with multiple uses. It is used every day for several reasons. Roald Dahl has a way of twisting the definition of the word and making it seem innocent, when it is anything but innocent. The short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” shows treachery in the appearance of innocence through vague dilemmas using different types of irony and humor.

            Roald Dahl was born on September 13^th, 1916 to Harald and Sophie Dahl in Llandaff Glamorgan, England (Beetz). His father was a boatman. His parents were both Norwegian (Wilson 136). Roald went to a Repton School growing up. Even though his parents were not rich, they wanted Roald to go to a private school.  After he graduated from school, he worked for Shell Oil Company (Wilson 136). Later on, he the army, but was badly injured while in the Libyan Desert He could no longer fulfill his duty there and was transferred to be a fighter plane pilot in Syria and Greece. Flying planes and jets eventually started giving Dahl headaches and he could no longer fly so he decided to go to Washington DC to do “ assistant air attack” (Wilson 136). People say that Roald Dahl “was a genuine war hero who had volunteered to serve his country”. He Married Patricial Neal, an actress in 1953. Over the next thirty years they had five children together and their marriage ended in 1983 (Beetz). Roald Dahl began his career by writing in Collier’s Magazine in 1942 (Wilson 124). Dahl’s first writing piece was about the war. He sent it to his friend C.S. Forester who sold it to Saturday Evening Post (136).  Roald was not expecting to be a writer, much less a children’s book author. He learned how to write children’s books with the help of his own children. He said, “I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so” (Beetz).  Dahl’s children stories started as a simple bed time story every night, every story was a new adventure. Roald was not just a children’s book author or a writer for a magazine, he also wrote short stories. He was “the best short story” author in the late 1950’s but his career really grew as a writer when he wrote the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Beetz).

            Of all the stories and books written by Roald Dahl, only one of them won an award to be in the Mystery Hall of Fame. “Lamb to the Slaughter” received this award in 1984 by The Mystery Writers of America (Beetz).  It is one of Roald Dahl’s greatest stories and shows examples of madness, brutality, and incorrect human behavior (Wilson 130). It was published in 1953, because of the story “Someone Like You” (138).  The New Yorker would not publish “Lamb to the Slaughter”, but the success of “Someone Like You” helped Dahl get his other stories published as well (130). The theme of “Lamb to the Slaughter” is that the Maloney’s go from being a perfect couple who live a “perfect” lie together to the “perfect crime” all because of a leg of lamb (May 2251). The story is “deceptive” because Mary is the killer and tricks the police into ruining any clue of Mr. Maloney’s murder. She tricks them into getting rid of the weapon by feeding them it as a thank you for helping her with her husband’s death (2251). Nonetheless though Mary loves her husband and is a wife who lived around her husband. Without him she would be nothing. She loves him but he seemed to be falling out of love with her even though she is carrying his baby (Wilson 127).

            The story starts with a police officer named Patrick Maloney. He does not speak much and loves his evening drink (Wilson 125). He works with a couple of officers who are named in the story: Noonan, whose real name is Sergeant Jack Noonan, and O’Malley who is Noonan’s partner (126). Sam is the grocer at the store the night Patrick dies and unwillingly becomes Mary’s alibi. He is questioned by Noonan and O’Malley to see if Mary was acting different that night. Mary is a house wife who is six months pregnant with Patrick’s baby. She loves her husband dearly (125). She waits for him to come home every day from work:

“Now and again, she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety, merely to please herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time he would come … when the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen … she laid aside her sewing, stood up, and went forward to kiss him as he came in” (Dahl).

At the beginning of the story, Patrick comes home one Thursday and tells her he is leaving her. She listened patiently as he spoke:

“And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at the most and she stayed very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went farther and farther away with each word” (Dahl).

 

Mary goes into shock and ends up hitting him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb, killing him. The story explains that this married couple has a schedule that everyone knows. Mary cooks every night except on Thursdays when they usually go out to eat. She must have realized that everyone knows their schedule because after killing Patrick, she sees that she did a horrible thing, and plays it off as if someone else did it, so she can save her unborn child (May 2251). She decides to make herself an alibi by going to the store and telling Sam that Patrick wanted to eat in that night. As she is cooking the murder weapon, she calls Noonan and O’Malley and explains to them that she came home from the store and saw Patrick dead on the floor. They arrive to the house, but cannot find what killed Patrick. Mary somehow tricks them into eating the leg lamb, and the murder weapon is therefore never found.

            Thus story portrays that everyone goes against one another even if they are unaware of it. In “Lamb to the Slaughter” a husband leaves his wife by breaking his marriage vows with her. The wife, who is innocent and madly in love with her husband, kills him after hearing the news that he is leaving her (Wilson 135). These are both examples of “betrayal”. Betrayal is shown throughout the story and is hidden behind things that look pure, and makes others think in ways never before. Dahl shows that the looks of things and people in life are not always what someone may assume them to be (May 2252). The style of writing can be described as “deceptive” because Dahl makes the wife look innocent and “harmless”. Roald leaves certain things in his writing up to the reader to figure out. For example, he does not completely say that a divorce is being asked to happen or that the police would never guess that Mary murdered Patrick (May 2252). Mary murders Patrick with a leg of o lamb. The leg “reveals the sinister meanings that lie in a seemingly innocent object” (May 2252). The irony of the end of the story is that the police are eating  the murder weapon as they are talking about that the object used to kill their friend could be right under their noses (May 2252). The meat shows that even though lambs are small and sweet creatures when alive, they can be used malevolently when they are dead (Wilson 128).

            Thomas Bertonneau says that Dahl was very “clever” when he chose the writing style of “Lamb to the Slaughter”. It is a shadowed story of a husband and wife going against another (Bertonneau). He discusses that the story is dark and can be taken as a joke because of the way that it was written (Wilson 130). He also talks about the dishonesty woven into the story and how Roald wants whoever reads the story to feel sorry for Mary. She is very dishonest to Patrick by killing him after he is dishonest to her first by wanting a divorce (131). Thomas points out that Mary hit Patrick in the head hard enough to where the police will think the murder weapon is something of a lot of weight and possibly metal (132). He says that depending on when certain things are said in the story, it fibs on one another. The killer leaving a small blood spot on Patrick’s head was “smashed al to pieces” are two different things (Wilson 132). Mr. Maloney fits the title “Lamb to the Slaughter” perfectly because he is like a “sacrificial lamb” (132). The story may zoom in on the act of the murder done to Patrick by Mary, but the rest is up to the reader to fill in on their own (Bertonneau). Dahl switches back and forth between Mary and Patrick. It began with Patrick telling Mary he is leaving her, but not saying much, directly switching over to Mary being calm about it (Wilson 132). Since Dahl never comes out and says why Patrick is leaving, it is up to the reader to decide on their own why he is leaving. Thomas brings attention to Patrick’s speech, allowing the reader to see that his reasons for leaving could be more than just about him. Patrick may have found out that Mary cheated on him and that the child did not belong to him or Patrick may have had an affair and is leaving on his own faults (Wilson 132). Nonetheless, he is portrayed as self centered, seeing how the only thing explained to the reader is that he does not want Mary to make it his fault for the split and that it could hurt his job if she makes a big deal out of it (Wilson 132).

            Elizabeth Piedmont-Marton thinks that “Lamb to the Slaughter” has more than one meaning (Wilson 132). In her analysis, she makes known that the way Dahl talks about Mary, it is as if she serves her husband because of dominance, and not really a passion of their marriage (134). If thought through, Mary has a way that she patiently waits for her husband to come home after work, making her the lamb of the story because she is so sweet and innocent. Piedmont-Marton states that with Patrick coming home and saying he is leaving her means she will no longer dominate him, and insists to still cook for him even though Patrick is ignoring her (134). Compared to other stories written by Roald Dahl, “Lamb to the Slaughter’s” character Mary does not lose control of herself under stress. Many people think that she was probably mental to where she had characteristics of a murderer the whole time before she decided to kill her husband. Once out of shock, she realized that she has to protect her unborn child and does this by telling herself how to look, act, and get rid of the murder weapon (Wilson 135). The lamb may also refer to the detectives who are “naïve followers led to the slaughter” (134). The officers were friends of Patrick, who have to deal with knowing their friend is dead. The last thing they would even consider would be that Mary is a psychotic woman who killed her own husband. They are blinded and did not see that Mary used the same type of control on them that she did on Patrick: “food, drink, and the illusion of uncomprehending innocence” (135).

            Treachery is a widely used word that comes in many shapes and sizes. When it happens, several people never even see it coming. Patrick was too blinded to see that when he decided to break his wedding vows that it would cause the end of his own life. Dahl made treachery look so easily humorous with the way he hid it in the situations in the story and leaving the end open to the reader to concur what actually happened.