the lady or the tiger persuasive essay

The Lady or the Tiger?

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The Lady, or the Tiger? - Study Guide

Talk about a no-win situation: Frank Stockton 's The Lady, or the Tiger? (1882) is a fairy tale and fascinating allegory. We hope our study guide is particularly useful for teachers and students to fully appreciate the story's quandary and its themes. It's a great persuasive writing prompt.

Read the story: The Lady, or the Tiger? , Character Analysis & Summary , Genre & Themes , Literary Devices , Quotes , Discussion Questions , Paired Readings , Useful Links , and Notes/Teacher Comments

Character Analysis & Summary

The King - The semi-barbaric ruler, who enjoys administering justice by chance, in which the person on trial must blindly choose their fate, whether to die or live with a determined outcome.

The Princess - The King's daughter falls in love with a young man, who, once her father learns of their affair, subjects him to a perilous fate in which he must choose one of two doors. Behind one holds a tiger, who will eat him; the other hides a young maiden whom he must marry. The Princess, who is semi-barbaric as is her father, knows which door hides each creature, and signals the young man to pick the door on the right. Will she show her barbaric side (being impetuous and jeolous), or her humane side (allow her lover to live, but be with another). The reader is left to guess her decision.

The Lady - The lovely young maiden who waits behind one of the doors and would be the Young Man's bride if he chooses her door, is hated by the Princess.

Plot Summary : The story is set in a kingdom ruled by a semi-barbaric king, who rules calmly and wisely for certain things, but relishes public trials of chance to administer justice for things he cares about, primarly for his own pleasure.

Genre & Themes

The Lady, or the Tiger? is in the genre of fairy tale, rather than a short story, with the sub-genre of allegory. It has two levels of meaning: the first is the story itself, the second is its symbolic meaning and lessons it offers the reader.

Determinism versus Free Will (alternatively, Fate versus Choice) Since the King presents an out-of-their control, no-win "choice" for the Young Man (determinism), he and the Princess cannot pursue their love for eachother (free will). Ironically, the Princess can exercise free will deciding the fate of her lover, since she knows the secret of what's behind each door and can choose his fate.

Barbarism versus Progressiveness - Stockton emphatically described the King as "semi-barbaric" in his self-serving desires and "exuberant fancy" for public spectacles of cruelty (barbarism). Yet he has a "civilized" side in his commitment to administer justice in an impartial and incorruptible manner by chance, and "develop the mental energies of the people."

Trust versus Betrayal - Though the Princess seems to be deeply in love with the young man, and he trusts her with his life, she is faced with two opposing emotions: jealousy and hatred for the young maiden if her lover survives, or mortal anguish should he be devoured by a Tiger. We learn she has deliberated long and hard over both outcomes. The reader is given more clues that she's leaning towards the Tiger-door option (her barbaric half).

Covet versus True Love - If the reader is pulling for her civilized half, she might opt for the sentimental (butterfly) option: " If you love something, set it free." Wait, would this mean he's "free" to love the maiden? Clearly, it's an unsolvable problem for the Princess, consuming all her energy. Either result is a tragic loss for her. Ironically, the courtier has absolute trust in her decision, whichever it may be.

Literary Devices & Vocabulary

Literary devices.

Suppressed ending : Stockton uses the literary device of supressing the ending to create suspense for the reader, which creates more questions than answers. Just as the Princess deliberates on the "right" choice to guide her lover to his fate, the reader is left guessing, and wresting with terrible outcomes (particularly for the Princess). The problem described in his tale has become a literary expression meaning an unsolvable or impossible problem to solve. " Which will it be, the lady or the tiger? "

Symbols : Stockton writes an allegory, two levels of meaning, in which the deeper level is represented by symbols. The doors represent fate, the tiger represents death and punishment, the lady symbolizes innocence and reward (it's not her fault she's lovely and the Princess is jealous). "Doleful iron bells" represent mourning, while "gay brass bells" represent celebration and life. Stockton's symbols help readers broaden their appreciation for the deeper level of the story's meaning, and perhaps relate it to their own life lessons.

Interesting Vocabulary

Semi-barbaric : Half savage or uncivilized, brutal and cruel, the other half civilized or "not quite" barbaric. It's a confusing juxtaposition, which makes it a perfect adjective to describe the King and the Princess.

Barleycorn : While literally a grain of barley or unit of measurement based on the length of the grain, Stockton's description: "...every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy " may also be a reference to an ancient British folksong personifying the ill-fated: John Bar-Ley-Corn

Choristers : A member of a choir, or someone leading singing, used in the story to describe a "good" outcome: " Another door opened beneath the king, and a priest, followed by a band of choristers ' and dancing maidens blowing joyous airs on golden horns and treading an measure. "

Moiety : Each of two parts (another reference to semi-barbaric): " Had it not been for the moiety of barbarism in her nature, it is probable that lady would not have been there."

Explain what the following quotes mean and how they relate to the story:

"He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to self-communing; and, when he and himself agreed upon any thing, the thing was done."

"The arena of the king was built, not to give the people an opportunity of hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to enable them to view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict between religious opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far better adapted to widen and develop the mental energies of the people. This vast amphitheatre, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages, was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished. Or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance."

"The moment that the case of the criminal was thus decided, doleful iron bells were clanged, great wails went up from the hired mourners posted on the outer rim of the arena, and the vast audience, with bowed heads and downcast hearts, wended slowly their homeward way, mourning greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have merited so dire a fate."

"The decisions of this tribunal were not only fair, they were positively determinate: the accused person was instantly punished if he found himself guilty; and, if innocent, he was rewarded on the spot, whether he liked it or not. There was no escape from the judgments or the king's arena."

"Among his courtiers was a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens. This royal maiden was well satisfied with her lover, for he was handsome and brave to a degree unsurpassed in all this kingdom; and she loved him with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to make it exceedingly warm and strong."

"He had loved the Princess, and neither he, she, nor any one else thought of denying the fact; but the king would not think of allowing any fact of this kind to interfere with the workings of the tribunal, in which he took such great delight and satisfaction. "

"Possessed of more power, influence, and force of character than any one who had ever before been interested in such a case, she had done what no other person had done,--she had possessed herself of the secret of the doors."

"It was one of tile fairest and loveliest of the damsels of the court who had been selected as the reward of the accused youth, should he be proved innocent of the crime of aspiring to one so far above him; and the Princess hated her."

"She raised her hand, and made a slight, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw her."

"Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric Princess, her soul at a white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?"

Discussion Questions

1. Explain the meaning of " semi-barbaric " and why it's a perfect adjective to describe both the King and the Princess. How can someone be half cruel, brutal and uncivilized, and half not?

2. Stockton begs the question: " Which came out of the opened door,--the lady, or the tiger?" Write a persuasive argument for which choice the Princess ended up making, and why.

3. Explain why this situation poses an unsolvable problem.

4. Determinism versus Free Will is one of the story's themes. Explain both concepts as revealed in this tale. "

5. Think of this tale from the young man's point of view, if he could choose. If he was a Romantic , might he die rather than lose his true love? Or, is he a Realist , settling for survival with a fair maiden? Sure beats being dead.

6. Using the literary device of allegory, the story has two layers of meaning. Explain each layer and what the symbols represent.

7. Relate the concept of "fate" to a situation in your own life where a "choice" wasn't really up to you. Have you ever had to make a "lady or the tiger?" decision?

8. Read the sequel to this story, The Discourager of Hesitancy , and compare the King's "choice" offered to a visiting prince requesting a wife, with the young man's in this story.

9. Think of a story, book, or movie in which the ending was withheld, leaving the reader or audience to determine the ending, or guessing what happens next. (Can't think of one? Try the Harry Potter series). Discuss why this is an appealing technique to keep us coming back for more?

Paired Reading Suggestions

Compare The Lady, or the Tiger? themes and literary devices to these stories:

The Discourager of Hesitancy , the story's sequel, in which the reader eagerly hopes to discover which fate the Princess chose for her lover in the first story.

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs , which shares the literary device of a dramatically suppressed ending, leaving the reader to figure it out.

Marjorie Daw by Thomas Bailey Aldrich , offers a dramatic surprise ending.

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell , another story with an impossible "choice"-- both of deadly consequence.

The Travelling Companion by Hans Christian Andersen , compare the Princesses' character, motives, and "evilness."

The Cunning Little Tailor by The Brothers Grimm , compare the riddling Princess, and whether both stories share aspects of the fairy tale genre.

Choose one of these Morality Tales and compare its lesson to this story.

Useful Links

Biography and Works by Frank Stockton

Lesson Plans and Activities for The Lady, or the Tiger?

Barbarism and Civilization in The Lady, or the Tiger?

Storyboard That Differentiated Lesson Plan

Persuasive Writing Workshop

20 Great American Short Stories

Short Stories for High School

Short Stories for Middle School

Notes/Teacher Comments

Visit our Teacher Resources for recommended works, supporting literacy instruction across all grade levels

American Literature's Study Guides

A Summary and Analysis of Frank R. Stockton’s ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ is a widely studied short story by the American writer Frank R. Stockton (1834-1902). This classic short story, which was first published in The Century magazine in 1882, began life as a story Stockton told at a party; he published it when it received a strong response from his friends.

In ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’, we are presented with an ancient system of justice whereby a suspected criminal has to choose one of two doors. Behind one is a lady, whom he will marry; behind the other is a tiger, which will devour him.

Plot summary

Some time in the past, a ‘semi-barbaric’ king has an arena built, in which justice is administered. Any man arrested on suspicion of committing a crime has to choose one of two doors in the amphitheatre, without knowing what is concealed behind the two doors. All he knows is that behind one door is a lady, and behind the other door, a tiger.

Behind one door is a lady, who has been handpicked from the population as a suitable bride for the man. If he chooses this door, he will be married to the lady immediately in a wedding ceremony performed in front of the crowd. Even if he already has a wife, he must marry this new bride and be with her.

The alternative is far worse. For behind the other door is a tiger, which – if he chooses this door – will leap upon him and devour him in front of the audience. This is the king’s way of serving justice in his realm: effectively, he places responsibility for their fate into the criminal’s own hands, although of course it is purely a matter of chance as to which ‘prize’ they get.

One day, the king learns that his daughter, the princess, has fallen in love with a young courtier. He is horrified that a princess could have been led astray by a commoner like this, and he has the young man arrested. It is announced that he will face his justice before the whole kingdom, in the arena, and men are immediately dispatched to find a suitable potential bride for him. Meanwhile, the fiercest tiger in the whole land is sought out.

The princess, who loves the young man, is at the arena on the day of her lover’s ‘sentencing’. When the young man sees the princess, he can tell that she has done as he expected her to do: that she has used money and her powerful status at court to discover which door hides the lady and which the tiger. When he makes eye contact with her, he asks her, ‘Which?’, and she gestures to her right.

So she has signalled which door he should choose. But at this point, the third-person narrator of the story tells us that he cannot tell us whether the princess directed her lover to choose the ‘lady’ door or the ‘tiger’ door. He tells us, though, that she knows the identity of the lady concealed behind one of the doors, and it’s a beautiful lady at court who is clearly attracted to the young man; what’s more, the princess has suspected for a while that her lover likes this lady, too.

So, did she help him to escape the fate of the tiger’s jaws, and effectively give the man she loves to another woman, with whom he will probably be perfectly happy? Or did her jealousy get the better of her, and she gestured to the door behind which the tiger waits to devour him? The narrator leaves this question unanswered, instead encouraging us to think for ourselves about which decision the princess would have made.

In many ways, ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ resembles a fable or fairy tale, and indeed the story’s author, Frank R. Stockton, wrote a number of fairy tales for children. But this is a fairy tale with a difference, since Stockton concludes the story without providing us with the final denouement. We are left wondering what the fate of the young man was: did he marry a beautiful woman (albeit not the princess), or was he eaten alive by a tiger?

But in subverting the reader’s expectations on the final page, Stockton is doing more than providing a nice talking-point for dinner-party conversations (to hark back to the supposed origins of the story). Instead, he is tacitly inviting us to pause and consider narrative conventions by taking a step back from the story itself and acknowledging that it is just that: story, narrative, fiction.

The princess, king, and youth who appear in the story never existed, and are merely products of an author’s imagination. So, too, then, are their fates, including the unspecified fate of the youth who loved the princess. Most stories are what the French literary theorist Roland Barthes calls readerly texts: they provide the reader with everything he or she needs to understand the story, and the reader can passively sit back and simply enjoy being entertained.

By contrast, writerly texts – to use Barthes’ term – are those fictions which engage the reader more actively in the events of the story or novel. In a writerly text, the reader will have to work harder to make sense of the narrative. For the most part, critics apply Barthes’ term ‘writerly’ to the works of those authors who deliberately make us work hard from page one: Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and other modernists.

What is curious about ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ is that it begins, in Barthesian terms, as a readerly text, but then at the last moment Stockton subverts our readerly expectations and the story becomes a writerly text, throwing the onus on us to determine what we think happened to the young man.

If Stockton had simply told us that what door the man had opened, we would have been told what the princes had decided to do. But by withholding this crucial piece of narrative information from us, Stockton makes us examine the princess’s mental and emotional state more closely, based on the information we have been given, in order to deduce what she would be most likely to have done.

Of course, we still cannot answer the question posed in the story’s title, ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’, for certain (and note how even the question mark in the story primes us for a more active role than we might otherwise be used to when reading, or even analysing, a short story). This is what makes the story such a perennial favourite in classrooms: readers are unlikely to reach a consensus on what the princess decided to do.

But in withholding this information, Stockton created, in ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’, a forerunner to many twentieth-century modernist stories which would be similarly open-ended and ambiguous. Perhaps even without fully realising it himself, Stockton toppled the author from his godlike pedestal and made us , the readers of his story, the final ‘authors’ of the story’s conclusion.

In this, too, he anticipates Barthes, whose 1960s essay ‘ The Death of the Author ’ would argue that the godlike authority of the author must be resisted in favour of ‘the birth of the reader’.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Frank R. Stockton’s The Lady, or the Tiger?

Analysis of Frank R. Stockton’s The Lady, or the Tiger?

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 27, 2021

Frank R. Stockton (1834–1902) originally entitled this story “The King’s Arena,” and after its appearance in 1882, it became the most famous story ever published in Century Magazine. Related by a caustic first-person narrator  who clearly disagrees with the feudal nature of kings and courtiers who set themselves above commoners, the story takes place in an unnamed barbaric country. The king discovers that a handsome young man, a commoner, whose low social rank prohibits his marrying royalty, has fallen in love with the king’s daughter—a crime that, the author remarks wryly, became common enough in later years. The trial of the young man takes place in the king’s arena. He must choose to open one of two doors. Behind one waits a ferocious beast who will tear him to pieces; behind the other, is a beautiful maiden who will marry him immediately. If he chooses the beast, he is automatically guilty; if he chooses the maiden, he proves his innocence.

Frank R. Stockton/Wikimedia

Of all those in the arena—including the king— only the clever princess has discovered the secret of what lies behind each door. She has made her decision to send a signal to the young man, and she does so, indicating the door on the right. In reaching her decision, the princess has agonized between the dreadful images of the savage and bloody death, and of the young man married to the beautiful maiden of whom the princess is intensely jealous. The young man moves immediately to the door the princess has indicated, and the story ends with the narrator’s question to the reader: “Which came out of the door,—the lady, or the tiger?” (10). Although similar to a surprise ending, the final sentence differs in that it leaves the reader without a denouement. Five years later, Stockton followed with “The Discourager of Hesitancy” (1887), which promises to solve the puzzle, but in fact this story, too, leaves the question unanswered.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Stockton, Frank R. “The Lady, or the Tiger?” In The Lady, or the Tiger? And Other Stories. New York: Scribner, 1914.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Justice — The Lady Or The Tiger Summary

The Lady Or The Tiger Summary

• Categories: Fate Justice Love

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Words: 624 |

Published: Mar 25, 2024

Words: 624 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

The king's unique justice system, the protagonist's forbidden love, the princess's dilemma, the tantalizing cliffhanger, interpretations and questions, a timeless tale.

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