ruled.多丽丝莱辛的短篇小说“关于女人的屋脊”我们带到一个不太复杂的时间，到60年代初，当男人和女人的角色更明确，在性革命和女权运动，到时候“资产阶级”道德与父权制统治。 Yet this deceptively simple story doesn't seem dated, even nearly some 45 years later, in an age of “Sex and the City” reruns and “Girls Gone Wild” videos, because in it Lessing surfaces some elemental questions about male aggression and female sexuality, and about class and power.然而，这看似简单的故事似乎没有过时，甚至有些近45年之后，因为它，在一个“性别与年龄的城市”重播和“女孩狂野”的影片，莱辛表面约男性和女性的一些元素的侵略问题性，以及有关阶层和权力。
“A Woman on a Roof” relies on a minimalist plot. “一个女人在一个屋顶”的最低限度的阴谋依赖。 “It was during the week of hot sun, that June,” Lessing begins, and tells a story of three London workmen—Harry, Stanley and Tom—who 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 “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.
The next morning when they return she is “already there, face down, arms spread out, naked except for the little red pants” and when Stanley whistles, she picks up her head, looks straight at him, and drops her head. This is enough to spark their hostility:
Harry was doing it in parody of the younger men, making fun of them, but he was also angry. They were all angry because of her utter indifference to the three men watching her. “Bitch,” said Stanley.
“She should ask us over,” said Tom, snickering.
But how can we blame her? She wants to sun bathe in peace, to be left alone, and she has done nothing provocative…except for who she is and what she looks like.
The men are stung at being dismissed by a desirable young woman—her indifference hits at their male pride, leaving them feeling powerless. As this is England, there is also the class question: is she ignoring them because they are working men?
Does her indifference suggest that they are so far below her on the social ladder that they no longer count as male in her eyes?
The roofers in “A Woman on a Roof” won't leave the situation alone: they have been diminished and they resent it. Later, Stanley and Tom scramble across several rooftops so they can move closer to the woman. They find her reading a book and smoking and, once again, feel compelled to bother her. They whistled. She looked up at them, cool and remote, then went on reading. Again, they were furious. Or rather, Stanley was. His sun-heated face was screwed into a rage as he whistled again and again, trying to make her look up. Young Tom stopped whistling. He stood beside Stanley, excited, grinning, but he felt as if he were saying to the woman: Don't associate me with
him , for his grin was apologetic. Tom, who has been fantasizing
about the woman, convinced that he has acted to protect her from Stanley, sneaks over to see her, and is rebuffed. She tells him to go away and “in a low reasonable voice, where anger was kept in check, though with difficulty” she adds “if you get a kick out of seeing women in bikinis, why don't you take a ride a sixpenny ride to the Lido? You'd see dozens of them, without
all this mountaineering.” It is a few minutes before Tom accepts that his fantasy-lover is just that—a fantasy. Lessing tells us: He got drunk then, in hatred of her. Next day when he woke the sky was gray. He looked at the wet gray and thought, vicious: Well, that's fixed you, hasn't it now? That's fixed you good and proper.
This innocent woman, trying only to enjoy the summer weather, has become the target of abuse and hostility.这个无辜的女人，试图只享受夏季的天气，已成为虐待和敌对的目标。 The men see her as a “bitch,” and Tom, who has dreamed about her, now hates her.
We are not far from the territory of degradation and rape, here, where the motivation is power, not sex. Even with the greater sexual openness of the past 45 years, and the advent of “sexual liberation,” even with more gender equality and autonomy for women, male sexual aggression—often expressed in ugly terms—has not disappeared from the scene. (Sexual harassment remains a continuing problem, even in the most seemingly “progressive”
institutions—universities,
hospitals,
the
United
Nations—despite years of consciousness-raising and training.)
“You've come a long way, baby” is more than an advertising slogan; there has been a social revolution in the status of women since 1963. In most Western societies a woman is expected to control her own sexual destiny;
barriers to employment and schooling have been dropped; domestic violence is now prosecuted; sexual harassment is frowned upon; male supremacy is considered an outmoded concept. The woman could, and would, respond more assertively, perhaps matching any verbal aggression with some choice words of her own. The men might very well back off, letting her enjoy the sunny weather in peace. Small beer, the English might say, as far as progress goes, but progress nonetheless.