25 pages • 50 minutes read
Frank R. StocktonThe Lady, or the Tiger?
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1882A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Tiger
When an accused subject is brought to trial in the arena, he is found guilty if he opens the door behind which stands “a hungry tiger, the fiercest and most cruel that could be procured, which immediately [springs] upon him and [tears] him to pieces as a punishment” (Paragraph 5).
Although the king’s justice system is described as fair and objective, that claim is directly contradicted by his ruthless choice of punishment. Instead, the tiger, which is intended to be suggestive of wild, faraway lands, echoes the king’s “semi-barbaric” appetite for violent spectacle (Paragraph 1). As a result, the king’s seemingly sensible reasoning is revealed to be a pretense to satisfy his cruelty. This irony exposes the king’s underlying motives: he wants power and control over his subjects, who leave the arena “with bowed heads and downcast hearts, [...] mourning greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have merited so dire a fate” (Paragraph 5).
The Lady
If a subject brought to trial in the arena opens the door behind which stands the lady, he is found innocent, and “to this lady he [is] immediately married, as a reward.” The lady, who is “the most suitable to his years and station that his majesty could select among his fair subjects” (Paragraph 6), is therefore the symbolic opposite of the tiger (see “The Tiger” above).
The presence of the lady as a reward for innocence echoes the traditional fairy tale trope in which the protagonist marries a princess in recompense for a heroic deed. However, the “happily ever after” is undercut by the narrator’s comment that “it mattered not that [the accused] might already possess a wife and family. [If] innocent, he was rewarded on the spot, whether he liked it or not. There was no escape from the judgments of the king's arena” (Paragraphs 6-7). This reward is therefore not as merciful as it may seem, and instead exposes the king’s ruthless authority just as much as his use of a tiger as a means of punishment. The princess’s final dilemma is further evidence of this because she sees the lady and the tiger as equally cruel punishments.
Dual Doors
In literature and philosophy, identical doors often symbolize a character’s self-determination. Typically, a character faced with a choice between two doors needs to make a decision that will alter his or her fate, often with moral or ethical consequences.
In this story, the accused subject chooses which door to open of their own free will, thus guaranteeing “perfect fairness,” and the result determines whether they are guilty or innocent in a “positively determinate” judgment (Paragraph 7). On the surface, the doors reflect the king’s desire to appear rational. However, since the alleged criminals can only open a door at random, they are not truly choosing their fate or making a moral decision. The consequences of their choice (i.e., guilt or innocence) are also determined retrospectively, rather than being an integral part of their decision-making. Therefore, the trial may seem like an objective way of rendering justice, but it is built on a logical fallacy that reveals the author’s ironic representation of a perverted justice system.
