A Woman on a Roof

“A Woman on a Roof” takes place over the course of six days—a workweek for the male laborers who are the story’s main characters. As the heat wave burns on, Lessing develops a pattern of symbols and imagery to evoke Objectification and the Male Gaze and Class Inequality in the United Kingdom. The June heat wave described in the first line both establishes the motif of heat as symbolic of anger and sexual repression and exacerbates underlying hostilities related to the changing gender norms that emerge from Second Wave Feminism.

Lessing conveys the impact of the uncharacteristic weather in the story’s first two paragraphs. At this early stage of exposition, the three men still comprise one nameless working-class unit. Working on a roof so hot that the water on it “sizzled” (a term that literally evokes heat and figuratively refers to erotic passion), the men “made jokes about getting an egg off some woman in the flats under them, to poach it for their dinner” (72). The assumption that the flats below are full of women ready to hand out eggs to whoever asks reveals The Rigidity of Gender Norms in this era. The association of women with eggs is suggestive of both sexual reproduction and the comforts of domesticity, and the phrase “some woman” indicates the degree to which, for these men, all women are interchangeable. Indeed, Lessing’s choice to keep the nude sunbather nameless reinforces this ironic antagonist’s role as a sexual object, analogous to any important possession of crude men.

The voyeuristic conditions of their interaction reinforce this objectification: The men do not know the woman’s name, nor do they know anything about her. To preserve her freedom, she ignores their provocations, communicating only through performative indifference. To the men, she is only a body, interchangeable with others and notable only for its nakedness. When Stanley, threatened by her independence, exclaims “If she was my wife!”, the outburst makes clear what’s going on inside his head: To him, the woman is a stand-in for his wife, and her behavior thus undermines his sense of masculine authority (76). Tom believes that he sees the woman as a unique individual. By the end of the story, he has conducted an entire love affair with her in his mind—but the woman in his mind is imaginary, a construct he could have built on the foundation of any naked female body. When she points this out to him, he is devastated, and he turns his disillusionment with himself into hatred of her.

Diction and the dialogue between Stanley, Tom, and Harry are two literary devices through which Lessing reveals the theme of Class Inequality in the United Kingdom. When the men have the opportunity to work on the rooftop, they enjoy the view and the sense of being “on a different level from ordinary humanity” (74). However, their enjoyment is temporary and only available in between labors, unlike the middle-to-upper class occupants of the apartment building, who sunbathe, read, and behave like they have nothing to do except “lie around as if it’s a beach up there” (79). Their initial task on the rooftop is to “replace a gutter,” a phrase that appears twice within a few paragraphs, evoking not only demanding physical work but images of slime and muck and connotations of indecency, as in the common expression “get your mind out of the gutter.” When Stanley asks the housewife Mrs. Pritchett if she ever goes up to the roof, her response is “Went up once, but it’s a dirty place, and too hot” (79). When the typical London weather returns, the same setting is described as “black rooftops, slimy with rain” (82). The men’s working conditions are still dirty and undesirable in cool weather, but the work itself is more easily done. In these conditions, visibility is limited, and there’s nothing much to see anyway: “No one [comes] to sun themselves” on the “damp drizzling roofs” (82). The heat wave has broken, and with it the sense of possibility and promise that set the story in motion.

Lessing uses color to evoke both emotion and theme throughout the story. The environments in which the men work are cast in shades of gray, especially in the final scene, after the clouds and rain return. Against this drab backdrop, the woman’s skin, first “scarlet and white” then “brown” (74), and the bikini bottoms that make a “scarlet triangle on her buttocks” (76), stand out as vivid signals of life and lust. Initially, The Woman, is described as “scarlet and white” (76) highlighting the contradiction that she is an untouched object of lust, an idea exemplified in the trope of the Madonna-Whore. A concept first described by Sigmund Freud, the Madonna-Whore complex attempts to explain a theory of male arousal that idealizes the pure woman, but sexually desires the degraded one. On the first day of the heat wave, when Tom reports back to his co-workers the lie that the woman has not moved, it is because he “caught her in the act of rolling down the little red pants until they were no more than a small triangle” (74), a shape symbolic of the woman’s pubis. Use of the word “caught” suggests that she is doing something wrong. Tom’s choice to withhold her movements as a secret suggests an early attempt to possess the woman, a desire that grows over the course of the week, as evidenced by the young man’s internal dialogue on day five, when he is “pleased” that the woman moves out of their line of sight during lunchtime, feeling “that she was more his when the other men could not see her” (78). Tom begins to picture the woman in the traditional role of wife and possession.

In the final scene, the woman makes clear that she is no one’s possession but her own. After Tom climbs up to her roof to “make [her] acquaintance”—having already lived out a whole love affair with her in his mind—she utters two simple sentences that instantly deflate his romantic image of himself: “If you get a kick out of seeing women in bikinis, why don’t you take a sixpenny bus ride to the Lido? You’d see dozens of them, and without all this mountaineering” (81). Tom feels that the accusation is deeply unfair, but in fact it stings because it’s true. He knows nothing about her. His fixation on her is all about himself. Instead of experiencing a moment of epiphanic self-awareness like the narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby”—another young man whose romantic infatuation is revealed as vanity—Tom turns his anger toward her, and when the rain returns to drive her inside, he thinks “Well, that’s fixed you, hasn’t it now? That’s fixed you good and proper” (82). The “black roofs, slimy with rain” (82) are Tom’s usual working environment, and the story concludes with a suggestion that it’s where he’ll stay.