The Lady or the Tiger?

Playing Forum Games, Wordplay, and Challenges
1

@CMG noted that Frank Stockton’s short story “The Lady or the Tiger” (1882) can be considered proto-IF. The full text of the story is available from Project Gutenberg (as is the text in eBook format). It’s only 2700 words long and quick to read.

So…

The Lady or the Tiger?
  • the lady
  • the tiger
0 voters
2 Likes
2

My thoughts on this story have changed a lot over the years. It’s really fascinating. This time, I voted for…

Summary

…the lady with the reasoning that, like her father, the princess would probably have an authoritarian streak and dislike having anything taken away. With her lover still alive, she could contrive to subvert the system, in the future, to reclaim him–just as she already subverted it by learning the secret of the doors. That act of bribery demonstrates that she doesn’t fully buy her father’s principles of “poetic justice.” She is willing to break rules to get her way. If she already broke them here in the arena, why not again afterward?

For the longest time, though, I favored the tiger. The story is couched in a half-serious half-comic critique of “barbarism” versus civilization, and the fact that the tiger is even a viable choice, in this context, seems designed to highlight the “barbarism.” One gets the sense that Stockton believes in the barbarian/civilization dichotomy, even as he mocks it with the “semi-” and the arch tone of the opening paragraphs; it is a worldview that he knows is flawed, and that he criticizes, but that he still nevertheless, deep down, faintly believes–as though the entire story exists to lend legitimacy to the tiger. So the question expands to become, not simply what the princess thinks, not what the reader thinks, but also what the author thinks, and how this triple set of prejudices might inform the answer.

Really, of course, there is no answer. All possibilities are superimposed atop each other, frozen in stasis. It’s a game with multiple endings where the player picks all the endings, and “all the endings” therefore becomes the singular true meta ending.

There are so many angles to look at this story, both from within the fiction and from the outside, and the story is about the angles. In some respects, I feel like everything that I have ever written is just a remake of “The Lady, or the Tiger?”

10 Likes
3

My favorite riff off the story is the They Might Be Giants song from the perspective of the lady and tiger. The lady has laser vision also. But it ends in a similar ambiguous tone as the original, and I find the last line very striking - Who’s speaking and who’s roaring is an open question.

5 Likes
4

The ambiguity is the point, but given the choice, I vote the lady for two reasons:

  • the story establishes that the need to know the truth of things is in the princess’s nature
  • not all revenge is immediate
5 Likes
5

Funny how the votes are split perfectly 50/50 right now. I’d be curious to hear other people’s reasoning!

3 Likes
6

Maybe a bit contrarian, but here’s my preferred theory:

Summary

Unable to decide “after days and nights of anguished deliberation,” the princess made the decision at random (by coin flip or similar). So even with full understanding of the princess’ psychology and decision-making process, the answer is still ambiguous.

Arguments:

  • The narration deliberately doesn’t provide clarity regarding whether the princess’ despair or jealousy will win out, which to me suggests that neither emotion is powerful enough to conclusively overpower the other. We don’t know what she will pick because the princess herself is not able to decide.
  • The princess’ “semi-barbaric” nature is inherited from her father, in whom it is expressed in the tendency to resolve important questions through chance; perhaps she ultimately inherited this trait as well.
  • On the meta level, it is not aesthetically satisfying to claim that the princess was able to make a decisive decision in the context of a story that is clearly about ambiguity. A “trick answer” that preserves ambiguity is more satisfying.
  • Conversely, it is aesthetically satisfying to think that the princess thought she could gain control by acquiring more information, but was ultimately foiled. In fact, finding out who the lady was actually made the question “what door should I signal” harder, just as learning that the princess made her decision at random would actually make it harder to answer the question of “what came out of the door?”
  • The narration implies that “how did the princess decide” and “what came out of the door” are functionally the same question, but crucially, they are not synonymous, and it is only the latter question that the story actually directly asks in the title and at the end.
  • EDIT: Actually, thinking a bit more, it occurs to me that the exact wording of the title is itself ambiguous, potentially referring both to the decision faced by the princess and the question posed to the reader. Again, it is aesthetically satisfying to think of the title itself as ambiguous, but recognizing this ambiguity requires us to recognize that these two questions are not the same, which is another reason to prefer an interpretation in which those two questions have different answers.
6 Likes
7

FYI to those who haven’t cast a vote: it’s now 2-to-1 in favor of one of the options.

I’ll close the poll after it’s been up for a week.

EDIT: I managed to forget about this, but I’ve closed the poll now.