a woman on a roof 作品简介

1、,At a glance:,First Published: 1963 Type of Plot: Sketch Time of Work: A June week during the early 1960s Setting: London Characters: Harry, Stanley, Tom, A woman sunbather Genres: Short fiction, Sketch Subjects: 1960s, England or English people, London, Weather, Voyeurism, Summer, Heat Locales: Lon

2、don, England,A minimalist plot,“It was during the week of hot sun, that June,” Lessing begins, and tells a story of three London workmenHarry, Stanley and Tomwho are replacing gutters on a roof, one with “a fine view across several acres of roof.” When they spot an attractive woman sun-bathing who “

3、wore a red scarf tied around her breasts and brief red bikini pants,” they are annoyed and yet excited. Stanley, recently married, and Tom, seventeen, keep walking over to stare at her, to the dismay of Harry, who is older and responsible for the crew completing the gutter job.,Feminist Criticism,Do

4、ris Lessings short story A Woman on a Roof depicts gender crisis in the unequal power relations between three workmen and a sunbathing woman. The male gaze from three workmen, which objectifies sunbathing womans body, denotes patriarchal surveillance of transforming her female body into docile body.

5、,Feminist Criticism,The sunbathing woman rebels against patriarchal domineering power through indifferent attitudes, rejecting to be internalized by social norms of patriarchy. With the articulation of bodily expressivity, her silence, as away of resisting entering the symbolic order, expresses an a

6、lternative voice of defying three workmens predominance in patriarchal discourse, which in turn reverses her gender role in power positions.,Marxist criticism,A Woman on a Roof is not just about the conflict between both genders, but the war of class differences concerned we can learn from it. The heroine sunbathing and the heroes of three work men in different ages share the same hot sun but live the totally distinguished life. And the people in lower