Lamb To The Slaughter Mary Maloney A Dynamic Character

“Her first instinct was to not believe any of it. She thought that perhaps she’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps, if she acted as though she had not heard him, she would find out that none of it ever happened” (Dahl 2). Mary Maloney said this right before she killed her husband out of a crime of passion. This essay will discuss that Mary Maloney was a dynamic character in Roald Dahl’s Lamb To The Slaughter by the way she acts, what she says, and how her thoughts are described in the text. Firstly, Mary Maloney can be verified as dynamic character by the way she acts. In the beginning of the haunting short story, Mrs. Maloney is seen as a loyal housewife, who waits on her husband’s hand and foot. Classically, this was the case for most households so nothing seemed out of the sorts. After she found out her husband was leaving her and her unborn child, her personality drastically changed, “At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause, she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head...all right, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.” (Dahl 2) …show more content…
For someone who just killed her husband she sure was not acting with a normal response. “Then she washed her hands, ran upstairs, sat down in front of the mirror, fixed her makeup, and tried to smile. The smile was rather peculiar. She tried again. ‘Hello, Sam’ she said brightly, aloud. The voice sounded peculiar, too. ‘I want some potatoes, Sam. Yes, and perhaps a can of beans.’ That was better. Both the smile and the voice sounded better now. She practiced them several times more.” (Dahl 2) demonstrates how moments after she slaughtered her husband she was already finding ways to cover up for her heinous