A Woman on a Roof

“She’s stark naked,” said Stanley, sounding annoyed… “She thinks no one can see,” Tom said, craning his head all ways to see more. Stanley said: “Someone’ll report her, if she doesn’t watch out.”

Stanley’s attitude suggests that women do not have the right to be alone in their own homes and skin without the supervision of or possession by a man. Tom’s generous assumption juxtaposes Stanley’s. The newlywed Stanley appears to believe that the woman should be punished for her indifference to the men’s attentions.

“Small things amuse small minds,” Harry said.

Harry’s use of repetition shows his disdain. As a long-married, middle-aged man, he understands that Stanley’s rage and Tom’s romantic ardor are equally misplaced. The woman’s actions have nothing to do with the men.

“‘She’s on her back,’ Stanley said, adding a joke that made Tom snicker and the older man smile tolerantly.”

Stanley’s diction perpetuates his attitude that a woman’s place is in the bed or the kitchen. His tone suggests that she is merely an object, either of derision or sexual pleasure in the absence of reciprocating.

“She was on her back, fully visible, glistening with oil.”

In this instance, Tom watches the woman the same as Stanley. However, through the point-of-view of this third person omniscient narrator, the reader sees the imagery inside Tom’s head, which betrays a fascination that contrasts with Stanley’s derision.

“‘Christ,’ Stanley said virtuously, ‘If my wife lay about like that, for everyone to see, I’d soon put a stop to it.’

Harry said: ‘How do you know? Perhaps she’s sunning herself at this very minute.’

‘Not a chance, not on our roof.’ The safety of his wife put Stanley in a good humor, and they went to work.”

Harry’s innuendo that Stanley’s wife may be sunbathing nude while the men are at work inspires Stanley to express his authority as the man of his house, which puts him in a better mood. His wife’s safety is synonymous with her invisibility to other men.

“They played their little games with the blanket, trying to trap shade to work under; but again it was not until nearly four that they could work seriously; and they were exhausted, all three of them. They were grumbling about the weather now. Stanley was in a thoroughly bad humor, when they made their routine trip to see the woman before they packed up for the day.”

Although each man occupies a distinct age group, and his respective behavior accurately reflects that age at various places in the story, this scene shows that men return to boyhood when they engage in certain types of situations together. In this case, they are faced with a sexually attractive woman who serves as a psychological distraction from their work, which they resent having to conduct during a heat wave.

“She was apparently asleep, face down, her back all naked save for the scarlet triangle on her buttocks.

‘I’ve got a good mind to report her to the police,’ said Stanley, and Harry said: ‘What’s eating you? What harm’s she doing?’

‘I tell you, if she was my wife!’

‘But she isn’t, is she?’ Tom knew that Harry, like himself, was uneasy at Stanley’s reaction. He was normally a sharp young man, quick at his work, making a lot of jokes, good company.”

Stanley purports to criminalize female sexuality that refuses to conform to the patriarchal notion of men having dominion over women. It had been the case for centuries that a woman was the property of her husband, and despite The Woman’s Married Property Act of 1882, which supposedly improved this condition for British women, the idea was much slower to change. Stanley’s language here confirms that.

“Tom was pleased. He felt she was more his when the other men could not see her.”

This time, when the men finally spot the woman, and she sees them gawking, she moves to a different spot on the roof where they cannot see her. This internal dialogue foreshadows Tom’s change from a romantic and naïve boy into a possessive man similar to Stanley.

“They had taken off their shirts and vests, but now they put them back again, for they felt the sun bruising their flesh.

‘She must have the hide of a rhino,’ said Stanley, tugging at guttering and swearing.” 

By evoking the image of an animal, Stanley insults the woman. The image of him “tugging at guttering and swearing” accentuates the fact that the problem is him and no one else. Moreover, the woman’s physical ability to withstand the vibrant sun and hot weather suggest that she is her healthier and thus stronger than the men in these climactic conditions.

“‘What do you want?’ She asked.

‘I … I came to … make your acquaintance,’ he stammered, grinning, pleading with her.

They looked at each other, the slight, scarlet-faced excited boy, and the serious, nearly naked woman. Then, without a word she lay down on her brown blanket, ignoring him.”

This marks the moment when Tom’s naïve romanticism transforms into bitterness. He feels rejected and misunderstood, but in fact the problem is only that the woman he meets is a real person, not a figment of his imagination.

“She raised her head, set her chin on two small fists. ‘Go away,’ she said. He did not move. ‘Listen,’ she said, in a slow reasonable voice, where anger was kept in check, though with difficulty; looking at him, her face weary with anger, ‘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, without all this mountaineering.’

She hadn’t understood him. He felt her unfairness pale him.”

Again, the color white symbolizes something different for the men in this story than it does the woman. In the innocence of Tom’s imagination, his fantasies of intimacy with the woman occurred in her house with white carpet and her bed with white headboard, symbolic of a marriage bed that suggests the woman belongs to him. However, when the woman rejects him, the shame and embarrassment apparently drain the color from the young man’s face.

“He looked up at the sky where the sun seemed to spin in heat; and over the roofs where he and his mates had been earlier. He could see the heat quivering where they had worked. And they expect us to work in these conditions! He thought, filled with righteous indignation.”

In contrast to the freedom the men had felt earlier in the week when they were on the roof, Tom now feels trapped by the fact that his livelihood is determined by someone else. In his fall from innocence, Tom has become bitter like Stanley. Representative of sensuality (again), Tom notices the heat quivering, as a young man excited by the prospect of sex might quiver. Being turned down by the woman has transformed that feeling of being above men into one of being trapped by them.

“What do they think we are, lizards? I’ve got blisters all over my hands.”

This is the second time Stanley evokes animal imagery when he speaks. As in the first scene, Stanley and the men are working with guttering in this one. The suggestion is that whoever hires him out as labor for wages doesn’t think of him as a man, but as a reptile.