For this piece of English Comparison Coursework I am comparing the novels: 'The Jewels' and 'The Lamb to the Slaughter'.

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English – Comparison

For this piece of English Comparison Coursework I am comparing the novels: ‘The Jewels’ and ‘The Lamb to the Slaughter’.

In both novels people die in ‘The Lamb to the Slaughter’ the husband (Detective Patrick Maloney, Murdered by his wife) and in ‘The Jewels’ the wife (Madame Lantin, who dies for an illness: pneumonia).

Summaries

The novel ‘The Lamb to the Slaughter’ is about a woman called Mary Maloney who is six months pregnant, with her husband’s baby. She kills her husband Patrick Maloney who is a detective with a frozen lamb leg by striking him on the back of his head because he had said something earlier to shock and upset her, what he said remains a mystery as it was not stated.  As soon as Mary has hit Patrick with the leg she snaps out of her trance and realised what she had done and comes up with a plan. The wife then pretends nothing has happened and she has just come home from the grocers then calls the police saying she thinks that her husband, Detective Patrick Maloney, is dead. The police (who were Patrick’s close friends) then check out the incident suggesting that Patrick has died as someone has struck him with a large metal weapon, e.g. a sledgehammer, large spanner or a metal vase, Mary then says they have none of those items. She then shows that she is very upset and it gets her off the suspects list, the lamb she has struck Patrick with is eaten by the police because Mary insisted they never continued hungry as Patrick wouldn’t like this, making the police force look like idiotic fools, this is also shown by Mary giggling as they ate the evidence.

The novel ‘The Jewels’ is about a man called Monsieur Lantin, who works for the French civil service, who falls in love with a girl who has recently come to Paris from the country. They soon get married. Everyone who knows the girl thought she would make the perfect wife.  Monsieur Lantin is married happily for 6 years. The girl seems to love him and completes his needs. She gets into going to the opera and develops an obsession for more and more jewels, which her husband thinks look like fake jewellery. One night the girl comes home from the opera and is very ill which kills her. Her husband is heart broken. After his wife’s death he finds hard to connect odd ends together, goes bankrupt and it hits him he can get a small sum of money from selling off his wife’s jewels. When Monsieur Lantin gets to the jewellers and give the man at the desk his wife’s favourite necklace the man says it is work 12-15 thousand francs ends up being sold to the shop keeper for 18,000 francs, as it was brought at his shop, Lantin is shocked and faints. Monsieur Lantin then goes home, after finding out how much it is worth and realises why his wife was so attached to them and goes back to the shop with all his wife’s jewels sells them to the shop keeper. After making all this money from the jewels he quits his job and develops an expensive taste, ending up like his wife, and soon gets married again.

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Comparison

The first main Detail in both stories is death; death plays an important part in both novels and happens to loved one’s.

In ‘The Jewels’ Latains wife comes home from the theatre and is very ill and dies from pneumonia:

“One night in winter when she had been to the Opera, she came home shivering with cold. The next morning she had a cough, and a week later she died of pneumonia”

The quote is basically telling me, as the reader how Latains wife dies, he explains in not much detail but puts the point across on ...

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