Compare And Contrast Lamb To The Slaughter And A Jury Of Her Peers

In the stories we read, Lamb to the Slaughter and A Jury of Her Peers, women felt victimized, and killed their husbands. While they both took action for a different reason, those actions yielded the same result: a dead man, a guilty woman, and a criminal investigation. It seems that, based on the ending of A Jury of Her Peers, neither one of them will be caught or punished for their actions, because both women refused to admit to their crime. Mary Maloney (Lamb to the Slaughter) left her dead husband and went to the grocery store in an attempt to act normal, making it look like Patrick Maloney was killed by a third party while she was gone. She then fed the murder weapon, a leg of lamb, to the detectives. Similarly, Minnie Wright (A Jury of Her Peers) pleaded innocence, claiming she was asleep when someone snuck into her bedroom, strangled her husband, who was sleeping beside her, and then vanished without a trace. They were both too afraid to take responsibility for their actions.
While both plot lines are
Mary and Patrick seemed happy together, but one small act on his part drove her to a wild crime of passion. Minnie Wright, on the other hand, was oppressed by her husband, and it was a combination of many things that caused her to kill him. Dahl describes Mary’s anticipation as she waited for Patrick to return home from work; she wanted to see him, and she “please(d) herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come.” The relationship between the Wrights, though, was the opposite. “She used to sing. He killed that, too.” Mrs. Hale told of how Mr. Wright “killed” the light inside of Minnie during their years together. When they discovered the bird, they realized that he had wrung its neck to stop it from singing, and pushed Minnie over the breaking point. She had been steadily driven to murder, while Mary made a spontaneous and violent