Throughout the short story Lamb to the Slaughter, author Roald Dahl suggests that a person’s gender does not define their actions or abilities through his use of irony and setting.
Firstly, Dahl utilizes irony within the story to illustrate that a person can do anything, no matter their gender. When Mary murders her husband by “[swinging] the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and [bringing] it down as hard as she could on the back of his head,” situational irony is put into place, due to this being the very last thing expected of a housewife in the 1950s (Dahl 2). This situation irony helps to illuminate the theme that gender does not define one’s actions because despite the set role for a woman in the 1950s being a housewife that blindly supports and loves her husband no
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She defies her set role and doesn’t let her gender tell her what she can and cannot do. Another instance in which irony was used to further support theme was with the use of dramatic irony while the police were in the Maloney household to investigate the murder of Patrick Maloney. As the policemen were continuing their search for the murder weapon and the culprit, they constantly refer to the suspect as a man and one states that if you “get the weapon, [then] you’ve got the man”(Dahl 5). This example of dramatic irony, in which the characters in the story don’t know that the murderer is a woman, but the reader does, helps to illuminate the theme because based on the values period, they believed that only a man could be the culprit and didn’t even consider a woman to be an option. Therefore, as Mary was the murderer and not a man, her gender did not determine her ability to