Lamb to the Slaughter and Human nature

 My 3 year old cousin baby is a 3 year old. Whenever she’s in a bad mood, you just have to tape the window and wait until the hurricane pasts. I love her but she can be horrifying. If she wants something, she’ll always get it, or else she’ll just beat people with her fat fists yelling something like - “I want icecream!!!!!!!!” My uncle says that she’ll kill people for meat in the ‘Snowpiercer’; that’s her. It’s not only my baby cousin but every 3 year old, if you just look around, are such a ball of anger when they want something. No humility, no decency, no nothing. They’ll use their little violence or petty persistence to achieve what they want without any moral conscience. I believe this anger 3 year olds express conveys the very human nature Roald Dahl wanted to portrait; the anger human feel when they can’t get their own way can results into extremely horrifying acts

 It’s amusing why Roald Dahl particularly used ‘lamb’ meat for the setting. Lambs are symbol of innocence and purity. However, this symbol of innocence and ‘sheepishness’; the lamb is used for killing Mary’s husband. The lamb is the representation of Mary’s previously gentle personality that she showed outward. At the start of the story, Mary seems so helpless and even stupid because even though her husband is being such a trash, she keeps on being a gentle wife by trying to make him dinner as if nothing has happened. It was as if she was being led to the table for sacrificial victim of the marriage like a lamb. By killing her husband with a lamb and cooking it to dispose it, she has disposed of her own helpless sheepish personality and achieved what she want by killing her husband. The violent dark side of human nature when they can’t get what they want is drawn very clearly in the story when Mary kills her husband crying “But you can’t go! You can’t! I won’t let you!”

 Also, Dahl seems to write the dark side of human nature especially in the form of impulsive revenge. In ‘Nunc Dimitris’, ‘Neck’, ‘My lady, love, my dove’ and several other Dahl’s short stories, the main character all try to have their revenge by hatred or anger. In some aspect, revenge is a very childish way of expressing unpleasant feeling. In decent conscience, when people have unpleasant moment, many of the mature people would at least try to overcome the problem by some degree of manners not by a form of violence. This shows that by making the characters more childish, Dahl was more apt to portrait the childish manner of human nature, which includes impulsive boiling anger. In the story “Lamb to the Slaughter”, the character inside are all very childish like other many Dahl’s characters. They are impulsive, stubborn, and revengeful. When Mary kills her husband with a blow, the impulsive act was not only because of mere use of violence to meet her goal but the anger that results into bloody revenge.