Lady Or The Tiger Characteristics

The story of The Lady or The Tiger is meant to make you debate in your head which door the princess told her lover to go to. The story never gives you an answer which makes you that much more curious. I think that if you take a look at the princess’ characteristics, that you can make a better guess as to whether it was the lady or the tiger behind the door. The three characteristic I will be talking about are resourceful, cold hearted, and semi-barbaric. I think these are some of the biggest characteristics shown in the story. The first characteristic I noticed about the princess is that she is semi-barbaric. I came to this conclusion from multiple points in the story. First, when it first mentioned the princess, I said that she had a soul as fervent and imperious as his own (paragraph 9). I think that this means she is semi-barbaric because the story said that her father was semi-barbaric. The second reason I found that she was semi-barbaric is that she showed up to her lover’s trial. I think that if she were a normal person, she would not want to see whether or not he got torn to pieces by a tiger, or got the “reward” of the lady. That is

I think that because all she did was raise her hand that it made her seem cold hearted. She didn’t give an encouraging smile or anything to her lover which I would think she would do. Secondly, is that fact that she actually debated on whether or not to show her lover to the tiger. In the story, the princess thought “Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity. And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood.”(paragraph 24) This shows that she was only thinking about what she would have to see if she pointed to the tiger. I think she wasn’t thinking about what was best for him, but what was best for her. I think that this alone proves that she was cold