Roald Dahl is known to be the master of dark humor, often tugging on the darker side of human nature and exploring the parts of us that we don't necessarily find suitable for public display. Whether it be the sexual perversions of Georgy Porgy's protagonist or the venomous lashing-out of Poison, Dahl finds ways to melt our shadow selves into his stories and display them in the spotlight to make us cringe, but also laugh.
An overarching theme of Dahl's stories is obfuscation--people deliberately hide parts of themselves that are later revealed in usually shocking manners. In Lamb to the Slaughter, we find out at the end that Mary Maloney isn't the sad, demure housewife that we rooted for during the entire story; she may have had other, darker things on her mind when she swung the heavy leg of lamb at her husband, as witnessed by her maniacal giggling at the end of the story. The same applies to the mild-mannered landlady that happens to have a thing for human taxidermy in The Landlady. One would never have guessed her more sinister intentions, yet here we are, as the camera slowly pans away from Billy, her newest victim, wondering what would happen to him and how he could escape--if he could manage to escape her trap. The best example of this obfuscation, however, appears in none other than The Way Up to Heaven.
Poor Mrs. Foster is on the receiving end of the marital blows in her mostly abusive relationship with her husband--he doesn't beat her literally, of course, but he has her wrapped around his finger in a rather cruel fashion. He plays with her nerves, and knowing that she has a terrible phobia of missing the train/plane/boat/what have you, deliberately makes her as tardy as she possibly could, thus wreaking havoc on her poor nerves every time. But Mrs. Foster is too kindly, too meek, to actually fight back against her husband and to put a definitive end to his antics. The reader feels very bad for her, as we see her fretting and sobbing desperately in the car as she waits for her husband to drop her off at the station. Other than just her victimized state, however, we see other parts of her character that make us feel at home with her: she is fond of her daughter, and also terribly fond of her grandchildren, making us think of her as the kind, gentle grandmother that we all know and love. Furthermore, her slightly neurotic state of being also reminds us of the stereotypical "gentle old lady" that makes us feel even more inclined to root for her. And this persona continues, until she finds out that her husband has been deliberately making her nervous all this time. There comes a shift in the narrative.
At first we don't notice her change in demeanor other than the fact that she suddenly has become more bold, stating that she has no time to wait for her husband. No real transformation has seemed to occur, seeing that she still writes nice chatty letters to her husband while she is abroad, and seeing how she treats her grandchildren with the typical love and kindness that we have come to expect of people like her. Yet there is an underlying uneasiness in the narrative: what could have made her so suddenly bold, bold enough to leave her husband behind? Was it simply because she found out Mr. Foster's ruse? Or was it the mysterious noise that she heard in the house, the noise that may have been more than just a sound? We don't find out until we read (or, in my case, re-read, because it wasn't very clear to me at first) the last scene. Then everything falls into place, and Mrs. Foster's actions take on a bone-chilling light. Mr. Foster had become stuck in the elevator, and his wife has left him there to die--she has finally freed herself from his abusive ways, but has done so in a very passive-aggressive, fatal way, and not in a way that we, the readers, might necessarily feel comfortable with. And how could we explain the fact that she continued to write her husband letters as if he were still alive, when she was the one who killed him? We must conclude that we never really knew Mrs. Foster's hidden depths at all; we didn't know what cruelty she herself was capable of. Dahl explores, rather subtly, the idea that the oppressed do not dream of equality, but rather retaliation, and to bully in turn the ones who have bullied them. It is not in any way a comfortable idea for any of us, but it is certainly undeniable, and a factor of human nature that we may have forgotten in our daily lives. Dahl's stories are here to remind us.
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