46 pages • 1 hour read
Roald DahlThe Landlady
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Billy Weaver
Billy Weaver is the protagonist of this story. We do not know very much about him, other than that he is 17 years old, comes from the city of London, and is visiting the town of Bath for an unspecified job. The story, while written in the third person, is also written from Billy’s point of view; even so, his point of view has something generic and anonymous about it. We learn that he is ambitious (he walks “briskly” in order to emulate his superiors at his job) but is also somewhat complacent (Line 33). He is quick to categorize, as we see in his dismissal of the landlady as a harmless, dotty old woman, and is not as observant as he thinks he is.
Billy seems intended, as a character, to be somewhat bland and blank: a blandness that is in purposeful contrast to the weirdness and malevolence surrounding him. His thoughts are either shrugging and dismissive—“The old girl is slightly dotty, Billy told himself. But at five and sixpence a night, who gives a damn about that?”— or are, at most, mildly bewildered (Lines 175-77). Throughout the story, he never evinces a strong emotion or reaction to anything, even while the story’s sinister mood heightens and the reader understands him to be caught in a trap.
Billy’s lack of understanding and self-preserving reflexes (he does not even recoil from touching the dead dachshund) ultimately makes him seem almost as odd as the landlady. At the same time, his shortsightedness seems like a marker of his conventionality. He can be understood as a typical creature of his class, a striving young businessman with little interiority and ready-made manners and habits. As such, he is easily duped by the landlady’s own patina of conventionality, and is unable to see her for who she really is.
The Landlady
The landlady is the antagonist of this story; that is, she exists in opposition to Billy, although Billy himself does not quite realize this. The fact that she is unnamed makes her seem more like a creature–or a monster–than a person. At the same time, her namelessness points to her reassuring anonymity, in Billy’s eyes, therefore underscoring Billy’s (fatal) lack of curiosity. Billy feels no need to find out her name because she is a familiar type to him, and because she seems quite harmless.
Billy and the landlady are in some ways complimentary opposites as characters. While Billy has an air of big city shrewdness and knowingness, he is ultimately gullible and naïve; conversely, the landlady seems sheltered and provincial–fussing over the state of Billy’s room, and constantly getting his name wrong–but is actually cunning and ruthless.
While we have access to Billy’s thoughts, we do not have access to the landlady’s. We therefore do not know how she thinks of herself, and what inspires her to act in the way that she does. One of the mysteries in the story is whether her effusive, absent-minded demeanor is just a ruse, intended to draw in boys like Billy, or whether she is this way all of the time. It is quite possible that she is both a killer and the doddering, sentimental homebody that she seems to be. At one point in the story, Billy speculates that she “might have lost a son in the war, or something like that, and had never got over it” (Lines 253-55). Whether or not this is true, she is certainly someone who is attached to hearth and ritual, and who likes to have things in her house just so.
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By Roald Dahl
