Lamb to the Slaughter

Lamb to the Slaughter Have you ever had what you love taken away from you? What did you want to do about it? In “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Roald Dahl gave an example of what love will do to someone if it is taken away. Love is a powerful feeling and key element to irony, conflict, and foreshadowing in “Lamb to the Slaughter”. Mary Maloney is a stay at home wife who is brought home the shocking news of her husband divorcing her. The divorced was foreshadowed when her husband came home but wasn’t acting normal. He told her to sit down and by her uneasy feeling; it was possible to tell that a divorce was going to occur or another type of difficult situation. She still tries to cook dinner for him and stalls to look at a frozen leg of lamb inside of the freezer. She was going to kill her husband. She killed him, losing control in the shock of her beloved divorcing her; she kills him with the frozen leg of lamb. This is an external conflict with her husband. She went through an internal conflict when she had the news of a divorce. It was an ironic but cruel death, to kill the person you love the most in the world for the fear of not being with them, and now you never can be with them, they are dead. It panned out as a situational irony that she did what we wouldn’t expect her too. We also knew the dramatic irony of her feeding the lamb she used to kill her husband to the cops, to hide any trace of her being the murder. Don’t go out thinking that Mary Maloney was just a crazy person. She was crazy in love, she wanted a life with her husband but she couldn’t control love and love controlled