Essay Questions

What is Mrs. Packletide’s motivation for shooting the tiger?

Mrs. Packletide’s aim to pull the trigger on a tiger motivated by her shallow rivalry with another London socialite. The desire for a dead tiger isn’t really even about having killed a tiger which might well assume would the point and which would at least bear something resemble sense. Packletide’s endgame here is beyond all borders of common sense and exists solely within the strange and scary sphere relegated to people who have far too much money and free time on their hands and not enough intellectual capacity: she goes through all the trouble to kill the tiger simply to make a rug and tiger-claw brooch for the purpose of making her rival envious.

How can the title be interpreted both literally and metaphorically?

The literal interpretation of Mrs. Packletide’s tiger is, of course, the tiger that dies as a result of her accidentally shooting the goat. By the end of the story, however, Louisa Mebbin has been revealed as something of a metaphorical tiger to Mrs. Packletide. Employed as a companion whose loyalty is expected for the price of the ticket, Louisa presses the full extent of that transactional nature of their relationship by engaging in what some might term extortion and others might simply call a quid pro quo while most would suggest it is both: Mebbin’s silence about what really happened in India in exchange for a nice little summer cottage. Allegorically speaking, Louisa becomes the tiger who manages to eat the goat while Mrs. Packletide’s bullets flew harmlessly over her head.

Who is the antagonist of this story?

By all standard rules of convention, it would appear that Lorna Bimberton takes on the role of antagonist to the more clearly defined protagonist function of Mrs. Packletide. The opening paragraph situates the rivalry between the two London socialites as the driving mechanism of the narrative and Loona is mentioned by name four times in just that paragraph alone. As previously mentioned, the entire stimulus behind killing the tiger in the first place is to humiliate Loona at a high society party. The problem, however, is that Loona does not herself actively engage Mrs. Packletide in any overt antagonistic way nor does she do anything which winds up causing Packletide to change. That role belongs solely to Louisa Mebbin and so it is she who must ultimately be identified as the story’s antagonist despite the characterization of their relationship as friendly, even if primarily as a matter of commerce.