Mary Maloney is a very loving and devoted house wife and mother-to-be. Though her dream of having the perfect American family was destroyed by the bewildering news of Patrick choosing another women over Mary and their child. Innocent is all Mary Maloney is, due to her indistinct state of mind caused by her heinous husband’s decision to desert her and her child while she is unable to control her emotions due to her being pregnant. Mary is not guilty of murder instead innocent due to diminished capacity.
Mary brought it up to the living room, he once again rejected her trying to give him food by saying he would be going out. (2) She suddenly swung the frozen leg of lamb at his head knocking him down, thinking of her consequences of killing her own husband. Mary didn’t care what the penalty was for her but she was pregnant and it worried her what would happen with her child.(2) She quickly thought about putting the leg of lamb in the oven and preparing to go out.
Both the men in each story take their wives for granted and nothing else. They see their wives not being good for anything other than cooking and being an ordinary housewife. In both stories, the women prove their husbands completely wrong in their own way. In the short story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Mrs. Maloney was an ordinary wife expecting a baby but when her husband comes home a bears horrible news, she grows furious and kills him. Patrick Maloney came home to bear the bad news not expecting her to beat him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb.
But as she is just about to make dinner with a leg of lamb tha she got from downstairs, Mary is blinded with rage from something her husband said and she then strikes him with the leg of lamb and murders him. The now “widow”, pops out from her psychotic bubble, becomes filled with anxiety about everything she has done and wonders “what were the laws about murders with unborn children”(Dahl, 177). By killing her husband, Mary shifts her path in
In “The Wife’s Story,” most readers are led by ambiguous language to believe they are following the tale of a woman, but discover at the conclusion the “wife” is actually a wolf mourning the transformation of her beautiful, kind-hearted husband into a hateful human beast who attacks their family. The wife’s vague language provides readers no reason to think anything is going on aside from what is presented to them-- or rather what they think is presented to them. As readers see his change from the wife’s POV, the truth is revealed, “The hair begun to come away all over his body. It was like his hair fried away in the sunlight and was gone. He was white all over then, like a worm’s skin.
Even though Lady Macduff and her son do not pose as a threat to Macbeth, Macbeth has them killed. Lady Macbeth, while sleepwalking, announces to her doctor and maid, “Will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5.1.45). Lady Macbeth is finally starting to realize that her husband has took his obsession with power too far. She expresses her guilt and remorse without even realizing it, showing that she truly regrets her actions.
Marion a real estate secretary is on the run after stealing $40,000 from her boss. She steals the money because she wants to get married to her boyfriend Sam but since they can’t afford to, Marion decides to steal money that her boss gave her to deposit in the bank. Her run away to California(where her boyfriend lives) is interrupted by a heavy rainstorm.
Calixta is ambitious and attempts to gain her momentary freedom by her own actions, where as Louise Mallard obtains her short-lived freedom only by accident, when she learns of her husband’s death. The consequences for the characters differ also. Louise Mallard is so disappointed that her husband is alive and that she will not obtain the freedom she has been longing for that she dies from a heart attack. In contrast, the only consequences for Calixta, being as she didn’t get caught is the guilt for her actions that lives in her conscious.
In lamb to is slaughter irony is used to create a surprise ending while supporting is theme of the story. In this story Dahl uses two types of irony throughout the story, situational and dramatic irony. Situational irony is showed when the woman kills her husband with a piece of lamb meat. The effect of this is that it is surprising and has allot of suspense which supports the theme that everything isn 't how it seems. The dramatic irony is that is readers know that the woman is the killer and is police don 't and especially how is police are eating the only evidence that the woman killed her husband.
As the story progresses the audience can relate and sympathize with Georgiana as she is essentially the victim of her husband’s judgement and shock of what he claims to the birthmark to act as an ailment of her beauty. Aylmer goes on to calling her near perfection were it not for the birthmark, however as many would agree that in real life there is no such thing as perfection. Georgiana progressively begins to see her husband change and show his true nature. He becomes angry with her and does not trust her, leading to Georgiana essentially losing
The detectives hesitated, but they were hungry, and in the end, they went into the kitchen and helped themselves to supper” (4). This creates dramatic irony because the murderer, Mary Maloney, is asking the police to eat the murder weapon, which is the evidence of her offense. The police don’t know this, and they decide that they will eat the leg of the lamb. What the police don’t realize is that if they eat the leg of the lamb, they will also destroy the evidence of Patrick’s murder, and they may never find who actually killed Patrick. The reader knows it is the murder weapon, but the police do not, which is why this is an example of dramatic irony.
The next day while her husband was at work she went out to the pig pins and realized the bones were not an animal, they were a humans. Frantically she called the police and they came to investigate the scene. Her husband was taken into custody that evening, and was
Wife Missing After Murdering Husband On Tuesday evening, August 12th, 1954 Mary Maloney, wife of officer Patrick Maloney, had murdered her husband after verbalized he would divorce her. Out of aggravation, Mary Maloney had hit him on the back of his head, utilizing a leg of lamb. This event happened in the Maloney’s house. On April 19th, Mary Maloney had asked her neighbor, Miss Anne Smith, to watch her 2-year-old son due to personal issues.
Although she thinks of herself as a refined, conscientious woman who is a good judge of character, her family sees her as she really is: easily offended, manipulative, dishonest and at loath to admit fault. In the beginning of the story, she tries to scare her family into staying away from Florida by talking about The Misfit. Her idea doesn’t work because her son and daughter-in-law are already very familiar with her manipulative ways of persuasion and just ignore her. She takes offense when her grandchildren don’t act “respectful of their native states” (35) or when June Star insults Red Sammy’s wife. In other words, when the children act like children.
The reader understands the woman’s sense of freedom because it is tough having to coexist with