Lamb to the Slaughter Theme Essay Example

The story I choose to do was the "Lamb to the Slaughter", by Ronald Dahl. The theme is that the weak have more power than one may think. It's the like 'Mouse and the Lion' story. The weak seem weak, but prove very powerful in the end. The husband doesn't appreciate his wife, and he suffers. The wife, until the murder, does not appreciate her ability to take care of herself; she does not appreciate herself, and she is suffering for it. When she finally does appreciate it, she is so happy she giggles. Giggles! Not chuckle or laugh. Giggle. As for your symbol, that is the leg of lamb, representing Mary Maloney's weakness. Maloney doesn’t want to be weak no more, so she kills her husband to feel reborn into a free woman. If you want, you could say the husband is also a lamb, follower of laws and his job; caring only about work and image, and he is slaughtered for it.

The biggest symbol in the story is the lamb. It's the most spoken about object in the story. There's GOT to be a reason for it, the lamb in the story is the wife. She does everything for the husband like gets his slippers, makes dinner, slaves over him, and his thanks is to get a divorce. Everything is taken away by this guy and at the end of the day he’ll still be getting his pay check, but for her (loving housewife) it will not be.
Basically she is a lamb being slaughtered and left for dead, but she fights back. She kills her husband and it shows her overcoming her divorce. Here, the 'lamb' of a wife overcomes her killer husband (his job is in the police force) by killing him. And with it, she turned the tables now she isn’t a lamb she is the butcher. The lamb has been slaughtered, and a free woman is left. The police arrive and eat the lamb. Once that lamb is gone, so is all evidence that she was ever under her husband's