Mary Maloney In Roald Dahl's Lamb To The Slaughter

In Roald Dahl’s short story, “Lamb to the Slaughter,”, the character of Mary Maloney is a pregnant housewife, is expecting her husband Patrick to return home from his local job as a policeman. Unfortunately, upon his arrival she is greeted with bad news and she does not doesn’t take it well. Her husband says he is leaving her and without questioning why, she takes a frozen lamb and swings it to the back of his head. When the story opens up, Mary seems like a loving and devoted wife and then she becomes insane and at the very end clever. So Tthe author indicates that Mary is a woman of different personality traits and we are left to unravel her true identity. We have to ask ourselves if Mary Maloney is doing this as a desperate act or if she is actually a calculated sociopath. Talking about this for a brief moment, I would have to say she is a calculated sociopath for the following reasons.

In the beginning, Mary shows how loving and devoted she is to her husband. The story states “The room was warm and clean, the curtains

After Proceeding being told that by her husband, Mary Maloney goes out to get the supper and without any hesitation, she swings a the big frozen leg lamb at the back of Mr. Maloney’s head. The funny thing is that she had no sympathy for what she had done, instead she spent the time practicing the plan on how to cover up her crime. Her cover story indicates “When Patrick had come in, and she was sewing, and he was tired, so tired he hadn’t wanted to go out for supper. She told how she’d put the meat in the oven - it’s there now cooking - and how she’d stepped out to the grocer for vegetables, and come back to find him lying on the floor.” This shows cleverness by showing how she has thought out her plan on how to fool the her cops into thinking she has not was not been there at the time of the