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Sindy Simms
Professor Hussein
English 200: Essay #2
Friday, November 14, 2014

Lamb to Slaughter, The Wife Strikes Back

Historically, female literary characters have been presented as the weaker sex and

rarely, if at all, get to carry the mantle of heroin. Roald Dahl’s short story, Lamb to the

Slaughter, is an exception to this tradition and places the female character in the leading role.

In considering this story from a feminist perspective, and by using new historicism critic, I aim

to determine if the author was an early proponent of feminism. Is it possible to establish a

feminist discourse through the characterization of Mary Maloney?

Written in 1953, Lamb to the Slaughter was originally rejected by The New Yorker, but

was later published in Harper’s Magazine. The opening of the story describes a scene of

domestic bliss. Mary Maloney, who is six months pregnant, is sat sewing and waiting dotingly

for her husband to return from work. In a manner typical of the era, she greets him with a kiss

and a “Hello Darling,” and sets about preparing their pre-dinner drinks. It is only when Mr.

Maloney requires a second drink, which Mary offers to make for him, that it becomes clear the

illusion of domestic bliss hides a deeper and malevolent undercurrent. All is not as it seems in

the Maloney household, and Mr. Maloney quickly dismisses her attending him. Mary considers

his behavior unusual but remains unsettled by his apparent rudeness until the moment when

he informs her that he has something to tell her. The story describes the direct manner with

which he delivers shocking news, the content of which is withheld from the reader. Mary is said

to be, “. . . watching him with puzzled horror” (Dahl). In concluding his address, Patrick Maloney
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tells his wife ‘not to worry’ that she will ‘be provided for’. Mary is now as Francis Bacon suggest

and theorizes, a soulless machine and continues to act as if nothing had been said between

them, dutifully carrying out her indoctrinated role as a wife on instinct, “She went downstairs to

the freezer and took hold of the first object she found. She lifted it out, and looked at it. It was

wrapped in paper, so she took off the paper and looked at again --- a leg of lamb” (Dahl).

Upon returning from downstairs Mary sees Patrick gazing out the window with drink in

hand, "I've already told you," he said. "Don't make supper for me. I'm going out" (Dahl).

Without pause Mary swings the frozen leg of lamb with great force and a few seconds later her

husband hits the carpet. Feminist do not condom murder, nor do they deny marriage; however,

1950’s America still clung to more traditional values that generally centered around the

construct of family and placed significant importance on the role of a woman within this

arrangement as a homemaker. In Lamb to the Slaughter, Mary is both wife and pregnant, and

is therefore totally reliant upon her husband physically, mentally, and emotionally. It is a

situation that compromises her stability.

Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1916. He was the son of Norwegian immigrants

who had settled there in the late nineteenth century. Dahl’s father died from pneumonia when

Roald was a boy of 4, leaving his mother to raise him alone. As a boy, Dahl he attended The

Cathedral School in Cardiff where his adventuring experiences not only got him in trouble but

also helped to shape ideas for his future writing. The character of Miss Trunchbull found in

Dahl’s book Matilda exudes many negative female traits and is primarily based on Dahl’s

account of his early misadventures with his mates and the mean sweet shop owner, Mrs.

Pratchett. In Dahl’s book, Boy: Tales of Childhood, the story of The Great Mouse Plot is told in
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which young Roald and his friends seek their revenge by putting a dead mouse in a jar of

gobstoppers for the mean Mrs. Pratchett to unwittingly discover. As a consequence, the

headmaster caned Dahl and his friends while Mrs. Pratchett looked on. Evidently, Dahl loathed

this woman and developed the Miss Trunchbull character based on both the headmaster and

Mrs. Pratchett personalities (Dahl, Boy: Tales of Childhood).

Dahl attended boarding school in England at St. Peter’s of Weston, where he suffered

homesickness and missed his mother relentlessly. Dahl was raised by his mother and adored

her, which initially suggests the strong influence that his mother, and perhaps woman in

general, played in his life. Later Dahl became an Ace Flyer and flew numerous sorties in the war

and maintained an impressive strike rate for enemy planes destroyed. In 1952 Dahl moved to

New York and met the actress Patricia Neal at the home of playwright Lillian Hellman. The

couple was married and had 5 children, but existed through thirty difficult years of marriage. In

Neal’s biography she maintains that her marriage to Dahl was purely for the purpose of having

children, and that she did not marry for love. In reference to Dahl attending her while sick with

severe illness, the New York Times posted a quote by Neal saying, “I knew at that moment, that

Roald the slave driver, Roald the bastard, with his relentless scourge, Roald the Rotten, as I had

called him more than once, had thrown me back into the deep water. Where I belonged”

(Harmetz). This quote becomes relevant when considering Dahl wrote Lamb to Slaughter in

1953, the year he and Neal were married, and hints towards his disciplinarian manner and more

traditional archetypal ideals.

In Beyond Power, Marilyn French, speaks of “the cult of domesticity,” which seeks to

define the era of the early 1950’s and the setting of Lamb to the Slaughter. French summarizes
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this period of social history by aligning the word domesticity with that of the purposeful and

diligent role of a women; of decorating the home, of making them a beautiful haven for their

husbands to return to after the toil of their day’s labors (French, Beyond Power, On Women,

Men, And Morals). Mary Maloney’s entire world was her husband, he was her sun, the center

of her universe. “Now and again she glanced at the clock, but without anxiety: She merely

wanted to satisfy herself that each minute that went by made it nearer the time when he would

come home” (Dahl).

“Marriage as defined from a feminist view for a woman is civil death” (Tuttle). Early

advocates of the Feminist movement sought marriage reform as a priority in their drive

towards equality and liberation. The feminist movement became fully established in the 1960’s

when, with the advent of the Cold War and the emerging threat of communism, the notion of a

family nucleus was popularized and sought to reaffirm the role of the wife and mother within

the cohesive family unit. The 19th Amendment had only been ratified for 33 years when Dahl

wrote Lamb to the Slaughter, and women still found their place and purpose in the home, and

society still considered it the norm for a wife to be a willing slave to her husband. It is evident

from the story that Mary Maloney appears to be happy with the current domestic arrangement

and very much loves her husband. Dahl writes of her adoration as Mary studies his every move

as one studies a work of art, “She loved the shape of his mouth. . .” (Dahl).

John Bodnar, Professor of History at Indiana University Bloomington, in his essay, Unruly

Adults: Social Change and Mass Culture in the 1950’s, examines the influence that literature

had on society during the era. One of which is Peyton Place, by Grace Metalious, “The author of

possibly the most powerful attack on marriage and male domination in American life in the
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decade of the fifties, Metalious was one of the leading “unruly adults” of her time” (Bodnar).

Peyton Place was publicized as a salacious, lusty novel which made it a best seller with advance

orders before even hitting the bookshelves. The author, Metalious, deeply resented her

husband leaving her pregnant as he went off to war, and detested even more his expectation

that she would pay his way through college when he returned home. “She later stated that she

“screamed silently” and felt “trapped,” especially because she had ambitions of her own to

write” (Bodnar). Grace Metalious expresses her power as a woman in this era, and one can

readily understand and appreciate her frustrations, and indeed see her as a wife holding the

typewriter over the head of her husband in preparation to bludgeon him! But instead of

resorting to violence she became rich, successful and divorced him.

In the mid-twentieth century, when the story takes place, women’s rights were still

fledgling and new, even a century after the suffrage movement. Feminist author Marilyn French

explains that women had to argue that they were part of the human species and that during

their struggle both sexes continued to live together in traditional relationships, “. . . women live

in isolated units with their oppressors . . . have nowhere on Earth to flee (with their children)

where the can be free” (French, From Eve TO Dawn, A History of Women In The World).

Once Mary is awaken from her trancelike state she realizes that she has murdered her

husband. Mary thinks quickly, Patrick Maloney was a detective and Mary knew what happened

to murders. She worries for the life of her unborn child, and she takes action by putting the

lamb on to cook. Mary creates her alibi by going out the back door to the grocer with whom she

has a pleasant conversation telling him she needs some vegetables for dinner, to accompany

the leg of lamb. On Mary’s return home she acts as she normally would and seeing him dead
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honestly recovers her love and becomes hysterical. Next Mary phones her husband’s partners

at the Police Department and tells them hysterically that she has found Patrick dead. When

they come to the home to investigate, they discover the cause was a blunt force to the back of

the head. Mary overhears them saying, “They were looking for the weapon. The murderer

might have taken it with him, but he might have thrown it away or hidden it. --- "It's the old

story," he said. "Get the weapon, and you've got the murderer." She offers them a drink which

they refuse as drinking is not allowed on the job, but they acquiesce. Detective Noonan informs

Mary the oven is on and meat is inside, Mary tells them she knows after all their hard work they

must be hungry, “I know that Patrick would never forgive me if I let you stay in the house

without offering you anything to eat. Why don't you eat up the lamb in the oven?" (Dahl).

Feminism certainly doesn’t condom murder, but Dahl demonstrates with his dark humor Mary’s

strength to persevere and overcome a victim mentality. A reversal of typical roles whereas the

wife is left holding her belly in a puddle of tears and helpless.

Traditional roles of women in marriage has shifted in the twenty-first century, no longer

is a woman delegated to domestic life as their only purpose. To the contrary women are

expected to share in responsibility for the family finances, and the men are also expected to

care for the children. In this exploration of Roald Dahl, and his work Lamb to Slaughter, Dahl

does not appear to be a misogynist, or a feminist. In his own marriage to Neal, Dahl was nurse

mate and caregiver of his children. In his writing of Lamb to Slaughter, he found his typical dark

humor in the irony.

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Works Cited

Bodnar, John. Unruly Adults: Social Change And Mass Culture In The 1950S. Vol. 26.4. OAH:
Education Research Complete., 13 Nov. 2014. Web.
Dahl, Roald. Boy: Tales of Childhood. London: Cape, 1984. Print.
—. "Classic Short Stories/Dahl." n.d. Classic Short Stories. B&L Associates. Web. 5 November
2014. <http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html>.
Dobie, Ann B. Theory into Practice, An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Stamford: Cenage
Learning, 2015. Print.
French, Marilyn. Beyond Power, On Women, Men, And Morals. New York: Summit Books, 1985.
Print.
—. From Eve TO Dawn, A History of Women In The World. New York: The Feminist Press, 2008.
Print.
Harmetz, Aljean. "Patricia Neal, an Oscar Winner Who Endured Tragedy, Dies at 84." New York
Times 9 August 2010. Print.
Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.,
1993. Print.
Martin, Courtney E., Sullivan, Courtney J., ed. Click, When We Knew We Were Feminist. Berkley:
Seal Press, 2010. Print.
Tuttle, Lisa. Encyclopedia of Feminism. New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986. Print.