Mary Maloney's behaviour
December 2010 Lamb to the Slaughter – Roald Dahl
WALT – identify and discuss techniques used by Roald Dahl in the short story ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’.
Techniques we are going to study for the exam essay paper are:
Characterisation
Setting
Turning Point
Building tension
Key Incidents
Characterisation:Mary Maloney
Before Turning Point
Caring – “I’ll get it!” “Darling, shall I get your slippers?”
Slightly obsessed – “She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man”
“each minute gone by made it nearer to the time when he would come”
Pregnant – “for this was her sixth month with child”
Lonely – “after the long hours alone in the house”
Nice – “On the sideboard behind her two tall glasses, soda water, whisky”
After the Turning Point
Calm and collected – “all right, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.”
Clever/sly/cunning – “She rehearsed it several times more”
Manipulative – “Patrick would never forgive me, God bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you decent hospitality”
Priority switches to her baby – “What were the laws about murderers with unborn children?”
Scary/crazy – “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 the head”
Characterisation – turning point
The turning point in the story is when Mary murders Patrick – hitting him on the head with a frozen leg of lamb. This is so particularly shocking because the reader does not expect this from Mary. Clever characterisation by Roald Dahl conveys Mary before this point as kind, caring, vulnerable, lonely and deeply in love with her husband (see ‘Before Turning Point’ quotations above).
After this Mary changes drastically and is shown to be callous, clever, sly and manipulative (see ‘After Turning Point’ quotations above).
Characterisation - sympathy
Throughout all this the reader remains on Mary’s side. She is the main protagonist (main character) in the
WALT – identify and discuss techniques used by Roald Dahl in the short story ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’.
Techniques we are going to study for the exam essay paper are:
Characterisation
Setting
Turning Point
Building tension
Key Incidents
Characterisation:Mary Maloney
Before Turning Point
Caring – “I’ll get it!” “Darling, shall I get your slippers?”
Slightly obsessed – “She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man”
“each minute gone by made it nearer to the time when he would come”
Pregnant – “for this was her sixth month with child”
Lonely – “after the long hours alone in the house”
Nice – “On the sideboard behind her two tall glasses, soda water, whisky”
After the Turning Point
Calm and collected – “all right, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.”
Clever/sly/cunning – “She rehearsed it several times more”
Manipulative – “Patrick would never forgive me, God bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you decent hospitality”
Priority switches to her baby – “What were the laws about murderers with unborn children?”
Scary/crazy – “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 the head”
Characterisation – turning point
The turning point in the story is when Mary murders Patrick – hitting him on the head with a frozen leg of lamb. This is so particularly shocking because the reader does not expect this from Mary. Clever characterisation by Roald Dahl conveys Mary before this point as kind, caring, vulnerable, lonely and deeply in love with her husband (see ‘Before Turning Point’ quotations above).
After this Mary changes drastically and is shown to be callous, clever, sly and manipulative (see ‘After Turning Point’ quotations above).
Characterisation - sympathy
Throughout all this the reader remains on Mary’s side. She is the main protagonist (main character) in the