Lamb to the Slaughter Study Guide

Roald Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian immigrants in 1916. At an early age, Dahl’s father and older sister died of illness, leaving his mother to raise him and his two other sisters. During his formative years in Wales and later England, he experienced the violent cruelty of other students and adults at school, a theme that emerges in works such as Matilda and Witches. While at school in Derbyshire, England, he and his fellow students were occasionally enlisted as taste testers for Cadbury chocolates, inspiring Dahl’s best-known work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Once finished with his schooling, Dahl travelled to Newfoundland and later through east Africa as an employee of the Shell Company. Though now renowned as a children’s writer, Dahl was also a fighter pilot for Britain in World War II and served the Royal Air Force from 1939 until he was invalided in 1941. The next year, Dahl became an assistant air attaché in Washington, D. C., where he met C. S. Forrester and began to publish short stories. Dahl’s experience in the RAF and Forrester’s encouragement eventually led to the publication of Dahl’s first novel, The Gremlins, in 1943. After the war, Dahl married a well-known American actress, Patricia Neal, with whom he had five children. Tragically, his oldest child, Olivia, died of measles in 1962, and his wife Patricia suffered from multiple ruptured brain aneurysms in 1965. Neal and Dahl divorced nearly two decades later, and in 1983 Dahl remarried Felicity Crosland. After writing 19 novels, 13 short story collections, and several autobiographies and scripts, Roald Dahl died on November 23, 1990, at the age of 74.

The story likely takes place in the 1950s, based on its reference to a “deep freeze,” a once-popular term for a refrigeration unit. Mary’s chat with Sam about whether freezing meat makes a difference suggests that the technology was relatively new then. As in the present day, life in the 1950s was deeply influenced by patriarchy, a system in which men hold more political, social, and economic power than women. Though (white) women in both the U. S. and Britain gained the right to vote in the early 20th century, women in the 1950s did not have as many opportunities as their male counterparts and were expected to remain in the private sphere of domestic life, taking care of their houses, children, and breadwinning husbands.

Like “Lamb to the Slaughter,” many of Dahl’s other short stories for adults contain elements of black humor or comedy. Nathaneal West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (published in 1933), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) are examples of other novels that utilize black humor. The plot of “Lamb to the Slaughter” is also similar in several ways to Susan Glaspell’s works Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers, both of which involve a repressed housewife murdering her insensitive husband and her motive never being understood because of male detectives’ arrogance.