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Comparing the Way in Which Helen Stoner and Mary Maloney are Treated in The Speckled Band and Lamb to Slaughter
This essay will consist of a study of the short story, ‘The Speckled
Band’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle written in 1292. Short stories are
condensed fictional narratives, which have been popular since the
nineteenth century and still remain so today. They typically concern
a relatively small number of characters involved in a single event or
situation. There is usually only one thermatic focus, aimed at
provoking a single emotional response from the reader. Short stories
may be created or written for magazine articles but have also
developed into a real significant work of prose fiction. The dialogue
is used very carefully in a short story due to a lack of space for
extended development of conversation and narrative. The length of
short stories vary.
The two story I will be looking at is from the murder mystery genre.
This is a category in itself. Murder mysteries hold certain
connotations that we constantly associate with the genre, for example,
a detective, a victim, a culprit and often believers. The narrative
is often concentrated around an investigation, but may offer a variety
of view points i.e. from the detectives point view, from the victims
point of view, or from the murderers point of view.
Due to the different times that the two stories, I have been asked to
analyse, were written in the demands of society would be totally
different, causing actions and responses to be different. The 1800’s
expressed a repressed society for women. Their lives were limited and
activities often had to be supervised by,...
... middle of paper ...
... at the two stories, ‘Lamb to Slaughter’ and ‘The Speckled
Band’, it has come to me a lot clearer, the changes between the ways
in which people lived in different societies and behaved in different
times. Their, behaviour and language, also speech, has dramatically
changed over time. It also shows us how similar people are and the
way they still cling to hope and react in different situations.
I personally like ‘Lamb to Slaughter’. I think this is because it
suits my age better and I can relate to the period more. I feel that
‘Speckled Band’ was written for older people as it contains complex
language and a more detailed narrative to follow. The language in
Roald Dahl’s story was in my opinion , more open and the narrative was
clear. Although both stories had their assets, my preference was
‘Lamb to Slaughter’.
The All-American quarterback; a past life for Neely Crenshaw who returns to his home-town in Messiena and finds himself dealing with the problems he thought he ran away from. In the book Bleachers, John Grisham tells the story of a former star high school football player from a small town where football was more sacred than a Sunday Mass. Being back where it all started, sitting on the bleachers, Neely awaits the death of his former coach. Throughout the story Neely is able to find himself by realizing that greatness has its costs; running away from your problems doesn't make them go away and by deciding to forgive Coach Rake.
Throughout The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town, the murder of Ernst Winter in Konitz is very much a reflection of the overall attitudes of many Europeans during the early 20th century. It was clear that once the anti-Semitic attitudes started to become prominent in society, they spiraled out of control and started to take over entire communities. The Jewish people were blamed for crimes they did not commit, were excluded from society, and suffered from acts of violence and hate speech. Wild stories began to be spread all over town and people started to believe everything they heard, even if there was no substance behind it. This caused lots of problems in Germany, as well as Europe in general, since many people got
In Lamb to the Slaughter, Mary Maloney, doting housewife pregnant with her first child, commits a heinous crime against her husband. After he tells her that he is leaving, she become distraught and strikes him in the head with a leg of lamb. Afterwards, Mary...
do not seem suitable to be human beings. He understands the things he does are
head. She might just have hit him with a steel club.' As you can see,
Throughout the book the strongest scream of the women is their protest against their incarceration. Their despair is thei...
A comparison between Roald Dahl's Lamb to the slaughter and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Speckled Band
Baruch Spinoza once said “Experience teaches us no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free, simply because they are conscious of their actions and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.” He compared free-will with destiny and ended up that what we live and what we think are all results of our destiny; and the concept of the free-will as humanity know is just the awareness of the situation. Similarly, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five explores this struggle between free-will and destiny, and illustrates the idea of time in order to demonstrate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut conveys this through irony, symbolism and satire.
An additional view point of the story could be from a woman. A female reading Lamb to the Slaughter would most likely side with Mary Maloney. Dahl starts the story describing Mary’s behavior before her husbands’ arrival. She sits ...
Mary Bell was a murderer, sadistic torturer of her victims, and a victim, more importantly she was a child. At the age of 10 Bell had killed two boys before the age of eleven. Growing up in the financially depressed town of Newcastle in England, in which Bell lived an impoverished life. Bell was born to her Betty Bell, a prostitute who suffered with mental illness and her father, presumed to be Billy Bell, a lifelong criminal who had a history of violence and was frequently unemployed. At the time of Mary’s birth, her parents were not married, and only married a few years after her birth.
In the story “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl, Mary Maloney is shown to have a very sinister and manipulative character. In the beginning of the story, Mary Maloney was a normal, loving and caring pregnant housewife that loved and cared for her husband, Patrick Maloney, very much. Earlier at the start of the story we see Mary was waiting for her husband to come home from work. She had set up the house with two table lights lit and plates on the dining table so they can have a very romantic dinner when Patrick comes home. When Patrick came home, Mary was very excited to see him. She would try to offer him some drinks and insisted she would get things in the house he needed so he didn’t have to get up himself. The countless times that Patrick said no to her offers and helpful doings, she still tried to serve and tried to make him feel comfortable and relax after work.
Hester Prynne and Emma Bovary were created equal by Hawthorne and Flaubert respectively. They were painted by the same brush. They were coming from two different parts of the globe and lived at times with a gap of two centuries. Hester lived in the 17th Century Puritan Boston and Emma Bovary came from the 19th Century French bourgeois society. Still they were akin in many respects. They were similar in their physical beauty and they both possessed romantic hearts. These adulteresses were perfect beauties. Hester’s tall figure, rich
From the beginning of the novel there are numerous attempts to unite the Schlegel and the Wilcox family, even though their different sets of values tend to clash and often force social negotiations, moral compromise, and emotional turmoil. The tension between the two families is evident from the onset through Helen’s momentary and dramatic affair with Paul Wilcox. Following Helen’s telegram “All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one” (9), and her return to Wickham Place, the Schlegels declare that they will have nothing to do with the Wilcoxes. This encounter illustrates how different the two family’s approaches to life are, and how di...
The narrator depicts the oppressive nature of Marygreen by intruding into the dialogue between the Mrs Fawley and the villagers. The aunt, at her private residence, entertains her village friends by talking about her nephew Jude. She constantly pities and undermines the boy. Her attitude towards Jude is exemplified in her statement; ‘It would ha’ been a blessing if Goddy-mighty...
time to sit down and read a novel. One difficulty of a short story is