Roald Dahl wrote the lamb to the slaughter in 1953 and
the way up to heaven in 1954.
Dahl starts to write stories in 1942. Lamb to the
slaughter would be one of the stories he wrote on his first full decade as a
writer. That period of time is called the ‘’The Post War Period’’. Among the
features of the Post War period the most important would be the growth of
cities, and the attendant rise in urban tension, the incipient liberation of
women, young people, and minorities, the sense that the normative,
agriculturally based America that had existed up until the nation’s involvement
in World War II was in radical dissolution. . It is significant with respect to
Dahl’s story that divorce, formerly rare in the statistics of American life,
began to rise in the aftermath of the war.
2. Would
you say Dahl was a feminist? Why (not)?
I wouldn’t say he was a feminist, I would say that
Roald Dahl shows the cruel side of people. He shows the cruel side of the
husbands, who have neither pity nor respect for their wives, but in the other
side, the author shows the wives more evil and calculating than their husbands.
In my opinion, at some point in both stories –principally in the first one- it
is shown that there is always another truth under the impressions that people
might have of a person, and that sometimes when we think everything is perfect,
underneath it isn’t.
