Lamb To The Slaughter And Invitation To A Murder

There are many motives that a person may kill another human. The most common motive for murder in the short stories from Mysterious Circumstances is the wife killing the husband out of anger for something that he does. The three stories that show this are”Lamb to the Slaughter”’, “This Way Nobody Gets the Blame”, and “Invitation to a Murder”. In all of these stories, the wife gets angry with her husband because of something that he does. So instead of being responsible and working it out together, she decides to murder him. In the story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Mary Maloney kills her husband out of anger by hitting him on the head with a frozen leg of lamb “...Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause 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” (Dahl 114). Mary Maloney kills her husband out of anger for leaving her alone with her being pregnant. This is just one example of a wife killing her
husband out of anger. In the next story called “This Way Nobody Gets the Blame” the wife, Ella, is angry at her husband because he commits embezzlement and because of that she will have to leave her house that she loves very much. “She loved that old house, its cozy position in a hollow overlooking the sea, and the status that being its owner conferred on her” (Grant-Adamson 121). Although Ella kills her husband without thinking about it, she still kills him out of anger for having to leave her home. This is yet another example of how anger can get to the point where somebody feels as though they must kill the person who angers them.
Another one of the stories that includes the wife killing the husband out of anger is “Invitation to a Murder”.
In this story Eleanor Abbott kills her husband because she is angry that she has to take care of him for the next ten years because he can't walk, talk, or even think. “I have to put an end to the horror the doctors say is still alive, that terrible things I know is Gregory’s corpse” (Pachter 130). Eleanor kills her husband out of anger because she is keeping him alive when he is unable do anything. She is angry that she has to keep him alive for no reason.
The most common motive for murder in these short stories is the wife killing the husband out of anger. The examples from these short stories come from “Lamb to the Slaughter”, “This Way Nobody Gets the Blame”, and “Invitation to a Murder”. In all of these stories, the wife kills her husband for something that he does that affects her now or will affect her in the future and the only solution that she finds is
murder.