Preview

The Landlady And Lamb To The Slaughter

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
629 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Landlady And Lamb To The Slaughter
In the short texts The Landlady and Lamb to the Slaughter written by Roald Dahl, important characters are the Landlady and Mary Maloney. Both these characters are important as they are not the pleasant personas they appear to be and are in fact ruthless murderers.
The Landlady is about an elderly woman who kills her house guest by poisoning them with arsenic and then stuffs their bodies. Lamb to the Slaughter is about a housewife Mary Maloney who kills her husband Patrick Maloney, with a leg of lamb, after he ends their relationship.

The Landlady is an elderly woman 'about forty-five or fifty years old...' She seems 'terribly nice' and 'looked exactly like the mother of one's best school-friend welcoming one into the house' with a round

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Suspense In The Landlady

    • 615 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Readers enjoy noticing suspense in stories because it hooks them on to read the rest of the story. In “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, a man named Billy Weaver stays at a bed & breakfast and meets the Landlady. The Landlady is an odd woman. She appears as a kind and generous soul, but on the inside she is an evil and despicable lady with bone-chilling plans for Billy. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the old man had no problems with the narrator. The narrator actually liked the old man, but the level of insanity in the narrator’s head leads him to committing a horrific, gruesome act. Therefore, suspense is depicted in both Roald Dahl’s “The Landlady” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” through the use of symbolism and descriptive…

    • 615 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    On the other hand, Lamb to the Slaughter is a murder case instinctively executed by Mary Maloney, who is the wife to the deceased Patrick Maloney. Although Mary commits the crime after her husband broke the news about the plan to divorce her, she immediately comes to her senses after hitting him “as hard as she could” with a frozen leg of a lamb. She successfully lays down a plan to deceive the police that she was…

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word." (PG. 2) After his long day at work, Mr. Maloney tells her six month pregnant wife, Mary, he wants to leave her. The conflict of Lamb to the Slaughter is Mary Maloney's husband is going to leave her.…

    • 381 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Human beings ,we have darkside's; we have dark issues in our lives . To progress anywhere in life you have to face your demons “ was once said by famous actor John Noble about Human beings.This is true in life and Literature. For example, Mary Maloney from “Lamb to the Slaughter” a house wife who loves her husband but he thinks differently, or Vera from And then there Were None who was invited and hired to be a secretary but would figure out later what she was really in for, or Hannah from “The Perfects“ who was just babysitting some odd children but then got in lots of trouble. Vera ,Hannah and Mary struggled to face their demons.…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ronald Dahl’s “ Lamb to the Slaughter “ is a story about the murder of Patrick Maloney by his wife Mary , that murdered her husband after Patrick exclaims he’s leaving Mary & her unborn child . This story captures the change on how Mary turns from a loving , nurturing wife to a fiendish murderer.…

    • 519 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Mary Maloney, a devoted woman to her husband was looking forward to seeing him again. As usual, she had prepared everything he could need at home when he would come back from work. But, when he came back that day, he looked preoccupied. She kept on taking so much care of him as she was used to, but it seemed like he had something to tell her, something she would never forget.…

    • 256 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mary Maloney is very devious. In the stories, “The Landlady” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”, the antagonists are both devious, but one is more devious than the other. Mary Maloney is more devious because she made the police eat the lamb and she pretended to not know that Patrick was dead.…

    • 376 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Mr. Maloney had asked Mrs. Maloney to sit so he could discuss his wishes to get a divorce. She never expected this night to take a turn like this, so when he told her this she was in disbelief. She did not want to face reality so she got up out of her chair and grabbed the lamb leg from the freezer to make dinner. Mr. Maloney said he was leaving and to not make dinner. Then, she picked up the lamb from the table and bashed it into his skull. The back of Mr. Maloney’s head was completely shattered. She realized what she had done, but showed not even a glimpse of remorse across her face. She murdered him in cold…

    • 601 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    I believe that Roald Dahl wants us to think Mrs. Maloney is a victim. I think this because in the story Mrs. Maloney looks to be a nice, kindhearted woman who is devoted to her husband, even though he would ignore her presence when she was speaking to him. "I think it's a shame," she said, "that when someone's been a policeman as long as you have, he still has to walk around all day long." He didn't answer. Although Mr. Maloney ignored his wife and was not interested in what Mrs. Maloney had to say she still continued to speak to him a respectful manner. When Mr. Maloney decided to tell Mary that he was leaving her for another woman she tried to deny his words in her mind. “And he told her. It didn't take long, four or five minutes at most, and she sat still through it all, watching…

    • 435 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Like fat melting in a pan, Lamb to the Slaughter has a smooth and natural feel to it. The way that the story depicts Mrs. Maloney actually makes the reader feel sympathetic towards her, regardless of her actions. To the reader it seems obvious that Mrs. Maloney has been mistreated. The husband knows that his news will hurt his wife, but he assumes that she will act in the same submissive manner that she always has; it never occurs to him that she might lash out.…

    • 1186 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Roald Dahi presents the idea that loss of innocence lead to a transformation of a character. In the story, After Mary Maloney killed her husband with a lamb leg, she said to herself:”So I’ve killed him.”, which demonstrates that the changed of her attitude from a tradition housewife to a clam murderer by she killed her husband because of the imbalance relationship,which led to her anger and seeking for a vengeance.The second one is when Mary found a way to help her escape from the punishment by acting,this demonstrates that the change of her personality by the showing turned into a smart and clear minded criminal who spent time on faking a smile. The last example is when the detectives stayed and ate…

    • 176 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Roald Dahl dystopian story “Lamb To The Slaughter” takes places in a small town that's peaceful and quiet. Until a wife of a police office killed her husband with a leg of lamb and not having any guilt about it. Enraged that he man was leaving her another woman while she’s pregnant with her first child with him. One lesson in the story suggest is you may not know what's under your noses until you're eating it.…

    • 1065 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slaughter House

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Slaughter-House-Five written by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel about a character named Billy Pilgrim, who was a Prisoner of War in WWII who fought during the bombing of Dresden in Germany. Since the war Billy has never been the same returning home. He constantly travels back in time to the memories of being in Dresden and how horrible the war was. Billy has insane time travel stories throughout the book making readers believe he is crazy. Kurt Vonnegut himself was a Prisoner of War during the bombing of Dresden and he too suffered greatly during his time. Throughout the novel the readers can make a relation to whether or not this book was based on Vonnegut’s experience in Dresden and using Billy as a character to portray his experiences. Vonnegut is the narrator of the story and tells the story as first person and third person perspectives. Vonnegut using his own experiences and stories in first person perspective in a few chapters makes us believe this book is about him. Many critics argue about this topic using evidence in the book and comparing it to his life, but we do not have a straight forward answer. His role as a narrator plays a major role because he tells the story of the memories he remembers from the bombing. It can paint a picture in the reader’s minds how insane and dreadful the bombing was. This adds mystery and questions while reading the novel and continue to flood questions whether or not Vonnegut was using Billy to explain his story. In my opinion having Vonnegut as the narrator to this novel makes me believe this book was about his life story in Dresden, but using Billy as a character portraying him. Also, it’s hard to use yourself explaining in a book all the hardships and troubles about being in war. Vonnegut has to remember all the dreadful memories that took place being in war which is why he uses Billy to explain his story. There is nothing beautiful or glorious about a massacre as Vonnegut…

    • 585 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 489 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In both "Lamb to the Slaughter" and "Tell Tale Heart" the author uses the technique of the reader knowing more than the character. While the reader may know that Mary Maloney murdered her husband with a lamb leg, the detectives suspect that she…

    • 624 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays