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How Does Dahl Use Violence In The Lamb To The Slaughter

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In “The Lamb to the Slaughter,” Roald Dahl presents violence in two ways, physical and emotional. The story shows that the wife feels emotional violence when her husband says he’s leaving her and she shows physical violence when she hits him in the head, ultimately murdering him. Emotionally, the wife was unstable the whole story. At the beginning, she wanted her husband to come home from work for “she was curiously peaceful” awaiting him to come home (Dahl, 1). She is a stay at home wife that is a mom to be and she is always looking forward to him coming home. Furthermore, she knows what time he arrives everyday and she waits at the door, “ she stood up and went forward to kiss him” when he entered the house (Dahl, 1). It was a routine for her to make alcoholic drinks for her husband. When he went and got another drink she knew that …show more content…

Even though he was leaving her, he said he was going to give her money to help her and support her. However she didn’t want money, she just wanted his love. The physical violence starts when she continuously wants to make dinner for him. For example, she tries not to believe it but then “ she thought that perhaps she’d imagined the whole thing” so she just went on ahead to the freezer to get the meat to cook dinner (Dahl, 2). Additionally, she grabbed the lamb leg, went back up to him and “she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head” which knocked him stone cold dead (Dahl,2). Mary wasn’t in her right mind when she hit him. For an illustration, when her husband fell to the ground she came out of shock by “the violence of the crash, [and] the noise” which made her think about what she had done (Dahl,2). She knew the punishment for killing a detective because her husband was a

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