Love (Motif)
Love is a major motif throughout "The Lady, or the Tiger?" Every prisoner that enters the king's arena has a 50% chance of opening a door that holds a lady whom he will immediately marry. However, this union is not based on love. In fact, as the narrator points out, it does not matter if the prisoner is in a relationship with another woman: "It mattered not that he might already possess a wife and family, or that his affections might be engaged upon an object of his own selection: the king allowed no such subordinate arrangements to interfere with his great scheme of retribution and reward. The exercises, as in the other instance, took place immediately, and in the arena" (46).
In other words, those who are subject to the king's power are not given true freedom to love fully. The starkest example of this is the princess, who, even though she is the king's favorite person, cannot choose her own lover. The princess falls in love of her own accord: "Among [the king's] courtiers was a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens. This royal maiden was well satisfied with her lover, for he was handsome and brave to a degree unsurpassed in all this kingdom" (47). The princess loves the courtier passionately: "she loved him with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to make it exceedingly warm and strong" (47). Despite this, however, when the king finds out about the affair he puts her lover in jail and subjects him to the trial of the arena. It is thus in the princess's hands to decide whether her lover lives and marries another, or dies.
Is love truly possible within a system such as this one? Anyone but the king who falls in love must live with the knowledge that their love is vulnerable to destruction at any moment. Should something go wrong and one of the lovers be sent to trial, the relationship will be automatically destroyed. Either the lover will be killed, or he will be forced to marry another.
The King's Arena (Symbol)
The king's arena is a symbol of absolute power and of the passions of the soul. The king builds this arena for the purpose of carrying out his unique system of justice that is entirely based on chance. However, the princess corrupts the impartiality of this system when she takes it upon herself to discover what each door is hiding. Thus, it is suggested that impartial justice can never exist and that power corrupts justice in the end.
The king's arena also symbolizes something else: the human soul. The description of the architecture of the arena is similar to that of the princess's psyche. The narrator describes the king's arena: it is a "vast amphitheater, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages" (45). Later, he extends his description: "[t]hrough these thick doors, heavily curtained with skins on the inside, it was impossible that any noise or suggestion should come from within to the person who should approach to raise the latch of one of them" (48).
Later in the story, the narrator describes human nature using similar terms: "The more we reflect upon the question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a study of the human heart which leads us through devious mazes of passion, out of which it is difficult to find our way" (50). Note that both the arena and the princess's character are described as labyrinths in which one can easily get lost. This suggests that the king's arena is a tool through which we learn about—and question—human nature, which is ultimately unknowable. "The Lady, or the Tiger?" has no concrete conclusion because we do not know the princess's soul—not even the narrator has that power—and thus, like a prisoner who is wandering the hallways of the amphitheater, we are in the dark about what the truth might be.
The Doors (Symbol)
There are two doors in the king's arena. One door hides a tiger that will eat whoever opens it. The other hides a lady who will immediately be married to whoever opens it. These doors function as symbols within the world of "The Lady, or the Tiger?" On the first level, they symbolize life and death. Because humans do not know the future, we can never truly be sure whether the decisions that we make will lead to our salvation or our destruction.
In this way, the doors also are symbolic representations of free will. The prisoner is given the choice as to which door he will choose. He does not know the outcome of his choice until there is no escape from it. This is very similar to how we live our lives. We always have the power to choose how our life turns out, but we will not know the outcome of that choice until it is happening to us in real time. The exercise of free will will always be a gamble between a likely outcome based on reasoning and the absolute unknown.
