25 pages • 50 minutes read
Frank R. StocktonThe Lady, or the Tiger?
Frank R. StocktonFiction | 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.
Themes
The Fallacy of Justice
The king’s fanciful way of rendering judgment calls into question the notion of justice as it is defined in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” The narrator, who might be a version of Stockton himself, uses irony to present the king’s idea of justice in an emphatically positive light while implicitly demonstrating the flaws in this fundamentally illogical system. In this subverted fairy tale, Stockton examines the concept of justice in a humorous, satirical way that engages the reader’s own judgment.
Throughout the text, the narrator’s emphatic claims draw on seemingly universal concepts like fairness, impartiality, and rationality to give credibility to an irrational system. Whether he praises the “perfect fairness” of the trials and their “positively determinate [decisions]” (Paragraph 7), or the king’s ability to not “hesitate nor waver in regard to his duty” (Paragraph 9), the narrator imbues the public arena with positive qualities and relies on the reader’s assent. He also argues that “this vast amphitheater [...] was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance” (Paragraph 3). In short, the narrator offers indisputable truths about the need for fair and objective justice to preemptively counter any criticism of the trials.
Even though those statements are true on the surface, they are meant to distract the reader from the lack of rationality in the justice system. There are fundamental flaws in the king’s logic, namely that the two doors, rather than rendering justice, simply decide their fate at random, regardless of their guilt or innocence. The outcome of the trials is certainly “impartial and incorruptible” (Paragraph 3), as the narrator claims, but the means used to make those decisions are not based on reason or truth. Instead, a game of chance is turned into a violent public spectacle and presented under the guise of fairness, reflecting the king’s cruel whims disguised as civilized discourse.
The open ending further illustrates the fallacy of justice at play in the story. After presenting the story, the narrator asks the reader to decide the princess’s lover’s fate in the arena. If the reader does not question the truthfulness of the narrator’s claims, they may subscribe to the story’s logic and attempt to answer his question. However, because it is based on insufficient evidence, the problem remains unsolvable by nature. Stockton’s ironic tale therefore encourages readers to question the seemingly unquestionable concept of justice, which he humorously turns on its head.
Power as Absolute Authority
Stockton offers an ironic portrayal of a king whose power relies on fear and absolute authority, but who gives himself the appearance of a rational, impartial ruler. The king’s “semi-barbaric” nature highlights his conflicting impulses, allowing the author to critique the idea of unchecked power.
The king is said to possess “an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he [turns] his varied fancies into facts. He [is] greatly given to self-communing, and, when he and himself [agree] upon anything, the thing [is] done” (Paragraph 1). The narrator praises the king’s tendency to reflect on his decisions, but the fact that he does not take counsel from anyone belies his sensible appearance. The story emphasizes the king’s ability to make his most fanciful notions come true, which suggests that no one dares to resist his orders. Additionally, the fact that the king takes “such great delight and satisfaction” from watching the public trials makes it clear that he enjoys cruelty and violence as “aesthetic pleasure” (Paragraph 10).
This definition of power is also illustrated by the princess, whose “power, influence, and force of character” (Paragraph 13) allow her to discover the secret of the two doors. Although she has inherited her personality through her “semi-barbaric” blood, she seems to be driven by passion rather than a desire for control: she loves the young man “with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to make it exceedingly warm and strong” (Paragraph 9). The narrator does cast doubt on the princess’s motives, however, by revealing her jealousy of the lady her lover might be married to. When he uses free indirect speech to ask, “She had lost him, but who should have him?” (Paragraph 20), the narrator makes it clear that the princess views both potential outcomes as equally tragic. The question of her desire for control is implied in the final problem: will the princess give up control over her lover and let him marry another, or will she assert her power over his life and let him die?
Both the king and the princess exhibit similar kinds of power rooted in absolute authority over, respectively, his subjects and her lover. However, their motives differ in that the king is evidently driven by cruelty, while the princess’s character is purposely made ambiguous. In the end, even the reader is given the power to decide the lover’s fate, in a strategic rhetorical move that cannot be resolved. In short, Stockton uses the characters in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” to explore the definition of power, then offers that same authority (or an equivalent literary illusion) to the reader to better demonstrate the problem of unchecked authority.
Luck and Justice
When the king discovers that his daughter is involved in a love affair with one of his courtiers, he immediately imprisons the young man and puts him on trial. The narrator says the king “did not hesitate or waver in regard to his duty” (Paragraph 9). Yet there is no consequence for his daughter even though she was equally (if not more) responsible for the transgression. The king’s unusual sense of justice does not consider that she is also culpable.
This oversight may be simply a matter of the king’s bias toward the daughter who was “loved by him above all humanity” (Paragraph 15). Or it may connect more deeply to the logic of the king’s arena. Early in the story, the narrator suggests that the purpose of the area is to (illogically) determine if a person committed a crime. But such is not the case with the lover. The narrator says, “Everybody knew that the deed with which the accused was charged had been done […] neither he, she, nor anyone else, thought of the denying the fact” (Paragraph 16). The purpose of the trial in this case is not to determine what the lover did. It is rather to determine if what he did was a crime: “whether or not the young man had done wrong in allowing himself to love the princess” (Paragraph 16). In other words, the trial reveals guilt or innocence not by discovering whether someone broke the law but by determining what the law is.
The king’s belief that the trial is impartial is thus not as farfetched as it appears at first. He has given up his legislative power to chance. If his people are oppressed or victims of injustice, it is not so much because of the king’s tyranny as bad luck. Referring to the princess’s love affair, the narrator remarks that such situations became “commonplace enough,” suggesting that the trial revealed that what the young man did was not wrong. If so, the reader can infer that the lover was not eaten by the tiger after all.
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