Lamb To The Slaughter By Roald Dahl

The theme of “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl is that love drives people's actions, shown by the love Mary Maloney has in the story, and consequently how her love impacts what she does next. At the beginning of the story, Mary’s character loves her husband, Patrick, and then she loses that love. Mary first treats her husband with as much respect as possible and tries to do tasks for him so that he is untroubled, even while pregnant. After Patrick confesses something to Mary that causes her to lose love for him, she kills him with a hardened leg of lamb, taken from the freezer. The only love she keeps throughout the story though, is her love for her unborn child. The realization forces Mary to change the narrative and hide what she did

This is when she hides Patrick’s murder, for the sake of her child’s life. Killing her husband leaves Mary’s character unaffected by the thought of her impending consequences, with Mary only thinking to herself that “She knew the penalty…That was fine. It made no difference to her.” This quote portrays Mary as someone entirely unfazed by what is about to happen to her. She could not care less about what happened to herself. However, this changes as soon as she thinks of her pregnancy. “What about the child…Mary didn’t know, and she certainly wasn’t prepared to take that chance.” One could conclude from this that she is unable to part from her child, due to the love that she already has for it. No thought whatsoever goes into the preservation of her life, but once Mary thinks of her child, her view changes. Subsequently, Mary’s actions are directly influenced. Mary thereafter plans to hide the murder of her husband, and she does so skillfully, despite being distraught. “She rehearsed it several times more.” This quote describes when Mary practiced talking and acting normal, so she could create an alibi for herself immediately after the event of the murder. Following this, Mary does several more things to strengthen the claim of innocence she has, and in the end, convinces the police that she is not Patrick’s murderer. Before all of this though, Mary had no plan of convincing the police of anything. She had been content with being found guilty of her crime, content to suffer the consequences alone. The lone factor that drove her to reconsider was her love for her child, validating how love can drive people’s