Explication of Doris Lessing’s ‘A WOMAN ON THE ROOF’
Lessing starts off the story with a description of three men at work on the roof during the week of the hot sun. I believe Lessing wanted to emphasize the characteristics of men of the construction class. These guys were tough, they were constantly exposed to heat, hard headed, domineering and egoistical. The scene is set where there were buildings and roof tops which symbolizes hardness, coldness, both of which reflects the characteristics of men. In the middle portion of the paragraph, Lessing brings us to a part where the men see a woman sun bathing in the nude at another part of the building. They were excited over the fact initially but they became rather annoyed eventually, at least one of them was rather angry. Perhaps her boldness and she not being bothered about their presence caused in the men insecurity, also the source of their irritation. They could see she was just like them but she was a woman and they couldn’t accept that. To them she was inviting trouble, sunbathing like that, in a public place, in the nude. This further reflects the narrow mindedness of the men, restricting the woman’s freedom from within their minds even. Another thought about the setting is that it speaks about 'space', personal and
In the middle of the passage, we note that the men take turns to go have a peek at the woman whilst working and they report to one another of the progress that she’s made. When it came to Tom’s turn he did not report the truth of what he saw. He lied to them apparently because ‘he wanted to keep what he had seen to himself: he had actually caught her in the act of rolling down the little red pants over her hips, till they were no more than a small triangle. She was on her back, fully visible, glistening with oil’. Tom, I believe was under the impression ‘hey, I saw it all! This sight was especially for me, I mean something to her, that’s why I was the one to see her naked’. He not only had intruded the woman’s privacy by watching her sunbathing but by assuming that he meant something to her in his mind. Stanley of his woman on the roof. Again Tom is in his own world somewhere, I’d like to end this explication with an excerpt I found on the internet written by an unknown person on Transcendence. But society, through education, has taught you to love your mother,
Some topics in this essay:
,
Harry Tom,
Stanley Harry,
Lido You’d,
Harry Stanley,
Ironically Stanley,
Ironically Harry,
Oxford Street,
Tom Harry,
Sufism Lessing,
woman roof,
tom harry,
harry tom,
woman roof sunbathing,
woman couldn’t,
stanley whistle,
lessing reveals,
towards paragraph,
male chauvinist,
feel tom,
i’d soon stop,
little red pants,
woman doing,
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Approximate Word count = 4111
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)
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