The Lady, or the Tiger?: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

The narrator describes the kingdom and its king, who has refined the system of trial by ordeal into a spectacle. An accused man enters the arena and chooses between two doors. Behind one is a beautiful woman, selected by the king as an appropriate match; the man must marry her immediately, regardless of any prior relationship. Behind the other is a hungry tiger. The outcome — marriage or death — is entirely random and is declared to be the impartial justice of fate.

Rising action

The king's daughter is described as semi-barbaric like her father — passionate, strong-willed, and possessive. She falls in love with a handsome young courtier below her station. When the king discovers the relationship, the young man is imprisoned and placed in the arena. The princess uses her influence and wealth to discover which door conceals the tiger and which the lady. She also learns that the lady behind the right door is a woman of the court she particularly dislikes and suspects her lover once admired.

Climax

On the day of the trial, the young man enters the arena. He looks immediately at the princess in the crowd, and she — with a slight, swift movement — signals him to the right door. He walks to it without hesitation and puts his hand on the latch. The narrator pauses here and addresses the reader: what came out of the opened door — the lady or the tiger?

Ending

The story ends with the question intact. The narrator refuses to answer it. Instead, he poses the question that the reader must resolve: the princess loved the young man — but she also had a 'hot blood' and a fiercely jealous soul. Did she send him to the woman she hated, or did she send him to the tiger? The answer, the narrator implies, depends on the reader's understanding of human nature.

The princess

The princess is the story's most fully drawn character, and the question of the ending is entirely a question about her psychology. She is passionate and loving but also jealous and semi-barbaric. She has two possible motivations in each direction: she loves him and could not bear to see him killed; she loves him and could not bear to see him married to another woman. The narrator presents both motivations as genuine and does not tip the scale.

The young man

The courtier is defined almost entirely by his role as the object of the princess's love and the arena's mechanism. He trusts her without qualification — he walks immediately to the door she indicates, without hesitation or independent deliberation. This trust is either the story's most poignant detail or the measure of his naivety, depending on what the reader decides the princess chose.

The open ending as argument

Stockton famously refused to provide an answer when readers demanded one. The refusal is the story's deepest point: the question of what the princess chose is the question of what love is when it conflicts with self-interest. If the reader thinks the princess sent the young man to the lady, they are arguing that love chooses the beloved's wellbeing over its own pain. If the reader thinks she sent him to the tiger, they are arguing that love can be indistinguishable from possession. Neither answer is obviously wrong. Like An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the story uses structural ambiguity to implicate the reader in its meaning.

The arena as justice

The arena system is described with straight-faced irony as perfectly impartial: it does not matter what the crime was, who committed it, or what the evidence shows. Fate decides. The irony is that the system is entirely corruptible — the princess has bribed her way to the secret of the doors — which means the impartial justice of the arena is no more reliable than any other system of justice that depends on human honesty.

Love and jealousy

The story's ultimate subject is the conflict within love between selflessness and possession. The princess loves the young man enough to have discovered the secret of the doors for him. She also hates the woman behind one of those doors intensely enough for the narrator to dwell on it. These two facts sit in the same soul. Stockton's insight is that this conflict is not unusual or monstrous; it is the ordinary condition of passionate love, and the extraordinary circumstance of the arena only makes it impossible to evade.