How Does Dahl Use Gender In Lamb To The Slaughter

In the short story, Lamb to the Slaughter, written by Roald Dahl, Mary Maloney waits on her husband to get home from work. When he gets there, he tells her the awful news that he is leaving her. Mary, who has been a very good wife who is always tending to her husband's needs, finally snaps after this new development. After retrieving a leg of lamb from the freezer, she kills her husband with the leg. She then quickly thinks of how to approach the situation, setting up the perfect story, along with an alibi, to trick the police, even going as far as having the police eat the leg of lamb, thus disposing of the evidence. Dahl communicates the theme of the reversal of gender roles through literary devices including symbolism, point of view, and

There is more evidence of this when one of the detectives says “Get the weapon, and you’ve got the man,” implying that they all believed they were looking for a large man who could’ve had the strength to kill Mr. Maloney. The establishment of these gender norms shows how drastic the change had to be for Mary to have switched gender roles from a loving housewife to a crafty and deceiving killer.

Lastly, Dahl uses characterization to show the reversal of gender roles. At the beginning of the story, Mary is designed to look and act like a socially acceptable woman from the time period. She is portrayed as a loving housewife who does everything for her husband, including

Prevratil 4 cooking, cleaning, and even fetching his slippers. This is done on purpose, to show how drastic the reversal of roles really is. At the time this was written, gender roles had not been as progressed as they are now. In our current time, we have an “‘egalitarian essentialism’ that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.” (Cotter, 1) This means that today, we have blended “elements of the previous conflicting frames of feminism and

After hearing Patrick's news, she slowly starts to switch gender roles, becoming smarter and even more violent. This theory is confirmed when she kills Patrick, as she is then described as an intelligent and scheming person. She can also be interpreted as stronger, physically and emotionally while the murder is being described, hence “She might just as well have hit him with a steel club.” She can be seen as emotionally stronger when all she reacts with after his murder is “All right, so

I’ve killed him.” After this “unladylike” reaction, she continues planning how she will create the perfect alibi and even practices how she will talk normally and act when she gets home and

“finds” him dead. Consequently, she makes an obvious reversal of gender roles, starting to be the more masculine character, while Patrick switches to the feminine, being left powerless and dead.

Roald Dahl uses a mixture of symbols, points of view, and characterization to reveal the consequences of gender roles, in that women should be allowed to act freely, and containing them will only cause more issues. Unlike typical feminist short stories in which the female