A Woman on a Roof

The primary conflict of “A Woman on a Roof” occurs in response to a woman who says nothing at all until the story’s resolution. The story’s action takes two forms. The first is an ongoing argument between the three men as they assert their varying forms of masculinity in response to this strange apparition: a woman sunbathing on her own London rooftop. The second is a wordless dialogue between the men and the woman as she responds to their aggressive spectatorship first with performative indifference and then, when that strategy fails, with attempts to evade their gaze. 

In her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the critic Laura Mulvey introduced the concept of the male gaze—a mode of depicting women in in cinema and art as passive objects of aesthetic and erotic pleasure for a presumptively male and heterosexual audience. When the woman first appears on the rooftop, she is lying prone on a blanket, nearly nude, completely at ease and apparently unaware of the men looking at her, much like any number of reclining nudes in the history of European art. From her own perspective, she is simply trying to enjoy the unseasonable warmth and sun. It is the male gaze of the workmen that transforms her into an object to be appreciated, resented, judged, and above all, possessed.

Because the woman does not speak to the men, they are free to interpret her actions according to their own misguided rubrics. In reality, her actions have nothing to do with the three men, and she ignores them out of a recognition that any engagement on her part will only make the situation worse. The men, however, cannot imagine that the presence of this nearly nude woman on the rooftop below is not somehow about them. They expect something from her. Tom and Stanley each lay claim to her in their own way, and even Harry is not above becoming angry when she fails to respond to their catcalls. On the second day of the heat wave, in one of several instances during which Tom, Stanley, and Harry attempt and fail to elicit a response from the woman, “They [a]re furious. Or rather, Stanley [i]s. His sun-heated face [i]s screwed into a rage, as he whistle[s] again and again, trying to make her look up” (75). After failing to get her acknowledgment, later that same day, Stanley threatens for the second time to report her to the police, exclaiming, “I tell you, if she was my wife!” (76) As Tom points out, the woman isn’t Stanley’s wife. Yet, having played the role of husband for three months now, Stanley regards the woman’s independence as a threat to his own masculine authority. Transparently, he fears that his own new wife might exhibit similar independence—a fear Harry needles him for: “How do you know, perhaps [your wife]’s sunning herself at this very moment?” (74)

In Tom’s mind, for most of the story, he remains firmly on the woman’s side of the unnecessary and hyperbolic conflict Stanley has created. He imagines himself as the protagonist of a chivalric romance: The other men treat her as a common sex object, but his love for her is pure and unique. The problem is that the woman he loves is imaginary. At one point, he climbs a chimney to catch a glimpse of her, lying to Stanley that she has gone inside for the day. He feels virtuous for his lie, thinking that “he ha[s] protected her from Stanley, and that she must be grateful to him. He c[an] feel the bond between the woman and himself” (78-79). At the end of the story, he climbs to her rooftop, expecting to meet the woman he has dreamed of—one who “ha[s] held him in her arms, stroked his hair, brought him where he sat, lordly, in her bed, a glass of some exhilarating liquor he had never tasted in his life” (81). What offends him most in her response is the implication that she is only a body to him, interchangeable with others. She suggests he go to the Lido, where he can see dozens of women in bikinis with less effort. Tom feels misunderstood by this remark, but of course she understands him better than he understands himself. He doesn’t know the woman at all. She could have been any other young woman sunbathing on the rooftop. He has merely used her near-naked body as a springboard for his romantic imagination. When the woman asserts her independent reality—when she reveals that she is herself and not the woman Tom has created in his imagination—his love curdles into hatred. He climbs back down the ladder and out of the building to the nearest pub, where he “[gets] drunk in hatred of her” (82).

One a newlywed young man, the other a sexually inexperienced teenager, Stanley and Tom’s internal experiences regarding the woman are distinct. And yet, each man arrives at the same hostile conclusion after being ignored. Their gaze is proprietary: In their minds, this woman they have never met already belongs to them. In addition, their gaze erases her independent existence and replaces it with a figment of their own imaginations. Stanley imagines the woman as an analog for his own wife and thus experiences her freedom as a threat. Tom imagines her as an idealized object of romantic love, evidence of his own goodness and worthiness, and thus experiences her indifference as a negation of his whole person.   

The woman’s initial choice to sunbathe has nothing to do with the male gaze. She only wants to get a tan and be left alone, and when confronted with these catcalling strangers, she ignores them to preserve her freedom. For her, Tom, Stanley, and Harry comprise a single harassing unit, and the fine distinctions they make between themselves have no meaning for her. The woman’s safest recourse in this “fight”—an argument that she neither started nor continued—is to remain quiet and wait for the men to go away, but even this effort is doomed to fail, since the men’s proprietary gaze transforms the woman’s every action into a statement about themselves.

In the post-World War II era, as men returned from the battlefield to displace the women who had temporarily joined the workforce in their absence, and as an expanding middle class meant that many more families could afford to get by on one income but couldn’t afford domestic help, the role of housewife became a newly salient feminine ideal. Mrs. Pritchett exemplifies this norm, and her friendly domesticity makes Stanley, Harry, and Tom comfortable. Thus, they “sat around Mrs. Pritchett’s kitchen an hour or so, chatting. She was married to an airline pilot. A smart blond of about thirty; she had an eye for the handsome sharp-faced Stanley and the two teased each other, while Harry sat in the corner watching, indulgent, though his expression reminded Stanley that he was married” (79). While Tom envies the ease with which Stanley flirts with Mrs. Pritchett, in his naïveté, Tom also feels reassured that their flirtation somehow leaves Stanley less interested in the woman on the roof.

In her role as the friendly housewife, Mrs. Pritchett serves as a foil to the nameless, topless sunbather who ignores the men as best she can.

Although the sunbathing woman appears to be home alone, she neither wants nor needs the men’s attention. Her independence seems to threaten Stanley’s sense of worth—perhaps because it reminds him that he has lost some of his own independence by getting married.

In the past, it seems Stanley had a way with the ladies. Mrs. Pritchett not only reminds him of this by flirting with him, but she also attends to the men’s needs by quenching their thirst, keeping them company, and providing them with a place to cool off. This makes Stanley, Tom, and Harry comfortable, a state-of-being they refuse to allow the independent woman to experience for as long as she ignores them.

The men treat Mrs. Pritchett politely and deferentially, in marked contrast to their aggressive catcalling of the woman on the roof. This contrast suggests that male civility is grounded in gender norms that imply a transaction in which the woman serves the needs of the man in some way. Mrs. Pritchett is a housewife who remains in her socially prescribed position—literally in her kitchen—and so she is worthy of respect. By appearing naked and alone on her rooftop—by leaving the confines of her prescribed social role—the sunbathing woman has, in the men’s minds, waived her right to that same respect.

Stanley’s courtesy towards Mrs. Pritchett is a quid pro quo, an exchange for tea and flirtations reciprocated. Tom, too, reveals the conditional nature of his tender feelings for the woman when he finally meets her. As long as Tom’s immature fantasies allow him to believe that the woman might reciprocate romantic and/or sexual interest, his feelings for her are good-natured and “protective.” When he sneaks up to her rooftop uninvited and introduces himself to her, reality intrudes on his fantasies. In this moment, it becomes clear that the woman has not been indifferent at all but increasingly angry at the men’s invasion of her privacy. She tells Tom that if he wants to look at women in bikinis, he should go to the Lido—exposing his interest in her as merely voyeuristic and puncturing his romantic self-image.

After this encounter, Tom’s attitude toward the woman is as vicious as Stanley’s. He “g[ets] drunk in hatred of her,” and when the rain returns, driving her inside, he thinks “Well, that’s fixed you, hasn’t it, now? That’s fixed you good and proper” (82). Through Stanley and Tom’s responses to Mrs. Pritchett and The Woman, Lessing suggests men’s civility rests upon women’s upholding traditional gender norms, and that women may be better off not to make the trade.