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True Love Prevails

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TRUE LOVE PREVAILS

True Love Prevails
Wendy Cook
Rowan Cabarrus Community College

Abstract The Lady or The Tiger is a beautiful little story that leaves the reader hanging at its end. This is a paper arguing the possible outcome of the story.

No one can ever doubt the power of true love. Even when faced with the darkest of decisions, when love is present, it always wins one way or another. Frank Stockton poses this age old question to his reader in the short story The Lady or the Tiger. Literally, he leaves it to your discretion to decide whether a barbaric princess chooses her lovers fate to be death at the hand of a tiger or …show more content…

The princess was also very jealous of her lover which is a true sign of love. When the day arrived for her lover’s trial, she knew which lady would emerge from the door if the “correct” one was chosen, and she “hated her.” (page 5). When the princess was with her love, she had seen this lady casting flirty glances at her lover. The princess even thought that her lover might be returning them as well! Just like any woman smitten with jealously she imagined every conversation the two had to be intimate even though in her heart she must have known better. Regardless, the princess knew that “the girl was lovely…and with all the intensity of the savage blood transmitted to her thougth long lines of wholly barbaric ancestors, she hated the woman who blushed and trembled behind that silent door.” (p. 5) If the princess did not truly love the young man there would be no jealousy, the love would not be true love, and she would have cared less about this lady.

No one, not even the king, was given the information of which door held the lady or the tiger, but the princess pull all the strings to know the answer. Why would she have gone through the trouble if she didn’t want her lover to live? She sat “paler and whiter than anyone in the vast ocean of anxious faces around her” and directed her lover to a door when he asked. Would she have been pale and white if she wanted him to die at the hand of a tiger? Of course not! Her barbaric

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