"Mrs. Packletide's Tiger"
The tiger itself takes on several symbolic meanings through the narrative, each respective its placement within the story. Relative to the treatment of the tiger by the Indian villagers and Mrs. Packletide, the tiger is symbolic of class divide—specifically how privilege, position and wealth should not be used as marker of intellect or ability. The villagers have managed to survive the presence of the tiger for many years, including those during its prime one suspects. They lived in peaceful co-existence with the predator, learning how to get along. Mrs. Packletide is not only too incompetent even to kill it in its final hours of old age, but she can’t even learn how to get along with Loona Bimberton.
Names
Bimberton. Packletide. Miss Mebbin. Clovis. The names of the characters actually given names in this story resonate within the subject of the same sort of foolish foppery and high society shenanigans. And looming over all is Bimberton’s first name: Loona. The author is using the time-honored practice of naming characters as a symbolic shorthand for how he actually views them. These people are so removed from reality that the looniest actions seem perfectly normal to them.
The Party
At her moment of triumph when she still believe she has successfully carried out her plan to kill the tiger herself—before the reality of what actually happened sets in—everyone else is celebrating the action. But Miss Packletide can think of nothing but the party she will be holding at her home sometime in the near-future. The party ostensibly thrown in celebration of Loona, but for the real purpose of rubbing her own triumph with the tiger hunt in Loona’s upwardly pointed nose becomes symbolic of that chasm which exists between those living in a bubbly remove from reality and the rest of us.
The Cottage
Miss Louisa Mebbin is the paid companion who seems always to be at Packletide’s side. She is there when the shooting takes place and becomes the first to recognize and drawn attention to the fact that the bullet fired from the rifle didn’t actually enter the tiger, but rather killed the live goat used as bait. Mrs. Packletide is well aware that many villagers know the truth, she herself knows the truth, obviously, and Louisa as well. She is also fully confident that the payment all those witnesses received for one reason or another will suffice as recompense to keep the truth forever hidden from the light of day. The story draws to a close, however, with Louisa proving herself to be less a real friend than a person paid to be loyal and uses that leverage to get herself a fancy new summer cottage for free. And for doing nothing other than not talking. The cottage becomes the premier symbol of the consequences of living a transactional life devoid of real connections.
Mrs. Packletide’s "tiger"
By the end, the truth about the title is finally revealed. Mrs. Packletide’s tiger is a not a reference to the Bengal cat whose passage into the afterlife she facilitates by means of stimulating a heart attack. That tiger cannot in any true sense of the word said to be the possession of Mrs. Packletide despite its fur skin acting as a beautiful rug in her home. No, the only tiger that can be argued to have once been owned by Mrs. Packletide now enjoys rent-free accommodations at a cottage near Darking featuring a garden of tiger-lilies and now known as Les Fauves, weekend home to Louisa Mebbin, now less a paid companion than an always dangerous tigress which Packletide must now learn to live in peaceful co-existence with on considerably different terms.
