“Lamb to the Slaughter” and “Jury of her Peers” Compared
The two stories, “Lamb to the Slaughter”, by Dahl, and “Jury of her Peers”, by Susan Glaspell, share multiple similarities between them, like their plots and the murderers’ after thoughts, while at the same time, they are completely different stories with differing moods and perspectives.
To begin, “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “Jury of her Peers” are similar in that they both have a similar conflict. In both stories, there is a wife who murders her husband. In Dahl’s story, Mrs. Maloney hits her husband on the back of the head with a frozen leg of lamb. She did this after getting into an argument with him, in which he told her that he was going to be leaving her. In the second story, by Susan Glaspell, Minnie Wright finally cracked after years of abuse from her husband. She ultimately shattered when he broke the neck of her canary, which brought her the only bit of joy in her gloomy life.
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For example, in “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Mrs. Maloney, the murderer, tells herself, “Do everything right and natural. Keep things absolutely natural and there’ll be no need for any acting at all.” She thought that if she would go to the store and pretend to know of nothing that happened, that the detectives wouldn’t suspect her as the murderer. Furthermore, in the second story, “Jury of her Peers”, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale discuss Mrs. Wright’s request for her apron in jail. “...She said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want,... for there’s not much to get you dirty in jail,... But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you’re used to wearing an apron…” Minnie Wright wanted her apron to comfort her and to make her feel more