31 pages • 1 hour read
A Woman on a Roof
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Symbols & Motifs
Heat
From water that sizzles then steams on the rooftop, to sun so punishing it bruises the men’s skin, heat emerges as a motif in the story, one that represents both anger and sexual arousal alongside the anxiety and hostility that result when men feel unseen and unheard. If the heat motif amplifies the battle between the sexes theme, the story’s first line foreshadows the heat wave as an inciting incident to this conflict: “It was the week of hot sun, that June” (72). The frustration the heat instigates for the men is exacerbated by the distraction that is the nameless, topless, sunbathing brown woman with black hair. She, too, becomes a source of heat in the forms of anger and sexual arousal. In particular, Stanley is infuriated by her indifference, as indicated when “his sun-heated face was screwed into a rage” (77). He later becomes “sullen” because “they said the heat wave’d break” and he resents having to work in it, while “It’s alright for some” (specifically, the woman who is financially independent of and sexually indifferent to him) who “lie about as if it’s a beach up there” (79).
Ladder
The image of a ladder appears repeatedly through the story, and it is something the working-class men must always eventually climb back down. Even though the men often enjoy the rooftop views that make them feel “above the rest of humanity,” they do not always have a choice about whether to climb up there. Someone else tells them when to climb the ladder, and the matter of weather and punishing working conditions appear to be of no concern to the person who buys the working man’s labors. Fortunately, Harry is mature enough to understand when the combination of heat wave and the indifference of their employer and The Woman has become too much for Stanley, and thereby all of three the men who work as a unit. “He fitted himself into the open square in the roof and watched his feet on the ladder” (224). The two younger men follow him down the ladder; Harry tells the foreman Matthew that they’re quitting until the weather breaks; and Stanley goes home.
Tom makes one more attempt to climb the social ladder, when he scales the iron ladder to The Woman’s skylight and “emerges onto the rooftop,” unannounced (225). He meets with a humiliating rejection that ultimately sends him right back down the ladder, where he started.
Triangle
For Tom, the “red triangle” of the woman’s bikini is a flashing sign indicating promises both sexual and otherwise. The narrator notes this image twice: First, when Tom “had caught her in the act of rolling down her little red pants till they are no more than a small triangle” (75), and again when she “was apparently asleep, face down, her back all naked save for the scarlet triangle on her buttocks” (76). In this second instance, the choice of the word “scarlet” and the image of a brand may allude to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a novel in which an adulteress is made to wear the letter A around her neck. Stanley’s harsh judgment of the woman does align with the hostility directed at Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s novel. For Tom, early on, the symbolism is different. The triangle signals the promise not only of sex but of everything sex itself represents to him: tenderness, care, comfort, freedom. Only after she turns him away does his infatuation curdle into hostility. When Tom returns to the roof, in changed weather, the bright red signal has disappeared from view, and his words indicate that if it appeared again, it would have a different meaning for him—one closer to Stanley’s.
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