31 pages • 1 hour read
A Woman on a Roof
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Background
Authorial Context: Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was born in 1919 to British parents in Kermanshah, Persia (modern-day Iran), where her father worked as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia. The family relocated in 1925 to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which was a British Colony at the time. Lessing remained in Rhodesia until 1949, marrying twice in that time. She had two children with her first husband, Frank Wisdom, and a third with her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. When her second marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, taking her younger son with her and leaving her two older children with their father, Wisdom. This move led some critics to describe her as having abandoned her children. In the patriarchal environment of the British Empire at mid-century, Lessing was not the only woman who found it difficult or impossible to balance serious ambition with the demands of motherhood. “I haven’t yet met a woman who isn’t bitterly rebellious,” she wrote in a letter to her friend John Whitehorn, “wanting children, but resenting them because of the way we are cribbed cabined and confined.”
Lessing was an activist as well as a writer. Her early experiences in Rhodesia made her an ardent opponent of British colonialism, and while still living there, she joined a local Communist Party comprised of young, predominantly white Rhodesians who hoped to bring about an end to the racist regime. By the time A Man and Two Women was published, Lessing had left the British Communist Party over its tolerance of Soviet human rights abuses, but she remained committed to a Marxist critique of the social inequality perpetuated by industrial capitalism. Even as “A Woman on a Roof” critiques the male gaze that transforms the sunbathing woman at its center into an object of aesthetic and erotic appreciation, it remains sympathetic to the workers for whom this woman comes to symbolize all the promises of capitalism—beauty, leisure, freedom—from which they have been shut out.
Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. The committee called her, “that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.” Doris Lessing wrote approximately 50 books across genres that included extensive experimentation. Although she began selling short stories to magazines at the age of 15, her breakout novel was The Golden Notebook, which was published in 1962.
Literary and Cultural Context: Second-Wave Feminism and Intersectionality
After the Allied Victory in WWII, rising prosperity in Europe and the United States led to an expanding middle class and a new emphasis on the nuclear family as the central unit of political and economic life. At the center of the idealized, middle class nuclear family was an idealized woman: a wife and mother whose only role was to raise as many children as possible and keep the household running smoothly. Women who, during the war, had done every manner of work now found themselves “cribbed, cabined, and confined,” as Lessing complained in a letter to her friend John Whitehorn. In 1963—the same year Lessing’s A Man and Two Women was published, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a massively influential book that gave voice to what Friedan, in the title of one of her essays, called “The Problem That Has No Name”: the unspoken sense of dissatisfaction many middle-class housewives felt with a life that left them “free to choose automobiles, clothes, appliances and supermarkets” but not careers, identities, or dreams (Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W.W. Norton & Co., 1963). Almost from the beginning, the book was criticized for describing white, middle-class women as if they were the only women in existence, ignoring the very different struggles faced by working-class women and women of color. Nonetheless, it became a touchstone of second-wave feminism.
Doris Lessing’s own relationship to feminism was always complicated. Her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook is widely regarded as a feminist classic, documenting the inner struggle of a brilliant female novelist to define herself and her work independently of the patriarchal culture around her. At the same time, Lessing did not identify as a feminist, and she was in many ways a poor fit for the narrow confines of the second-wave feminist movement, which has been criticized for its tendency to prize the self-actualization of relatively privileged women over the liberation of oppressed people more broadly. In “A Woman on a Roof,” Lessing offers a characteristically nuanced depiction of the intersections between gender and class inequality. The titular woman wants only to enjoy the sunshine, and the men are invading her privacy, harassing her, and impinging on her freedom of movement. They offer a textbook example of what the critic Laura Mulvey would later term the male gaze—a form of attention that aestheticizes, sexualizes, and objectifies her, robbing her of her independent selfhood. At the same time, Lessing is sympathetic in her depiction of the men as set apart and excluded from the holiday world by the nature of their menial work. They work in the basement and on the roof—both settings that sequester them from the rest of humanity. The gutters are hot enough to burn the men’s hands, and by the end one of them may be suffering from heatstroke, but they are expected to keep working regardless of the conditions. What emerges by the end of the story is a patriarchal capitalism that damages the lives of both men and women, preventing them from seeing one another—or themselves—clearly.
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