A Woman on a Roof

“A Woman on a Roof” takes place over the course of six days—a workweek for the male laborers who are the story’s main characters. As the heat wave burns on, Lessing develops a pattern of symbols and imagery to evoke Objectification and the Male Gaze and Class Inequality in the United Kingdom. The June heat wave described in the first line both establishes the motif of heat as symbolic of anger and sexual repression and exacerbates underlying hostilities related to the changing gender norms that emerge from Second Wave Feminism.

Lessing conveys the impact of the uncharacteristic weather in the story’s first two paragraphs. At this early stage of exposition, the three men still comprise one nameless working-class unit. Working on a roof so hot that the water on it “sizzled” (a term that literally evokes heat and figuratively refers to erotic passion), the men “made jokes about getting an egg off some woman in the flats under them, to poach it for their dinner” (72). The assumption that the flats below are full of women ready to hand out eggs to whoever asks reveals The Rigidity of Gender Norms in this era.