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.
Themes
The Anonymity of Modern Life
Part of the reason why Billy is so taken in (in all senses) by the landlady is because her house seems so inviting, compared to what is outside. Though only 17, Billy is already independent and working for a corporation, which sends him to cities where he knows no one. The fact that his job is unspecified, moreover, enhances the sense that it could be any office job at all, just as Billy himself could be almost any corporate young man at all. What we hear of his internal monologue indicates a young man who is something of a stranger to his own feelings, especially feelings of loneliness and fear. He seems instead resolutely superficial and flippant, prone to glossing over what makes him uncomfortable.
Because Bath is a strange environment for him, however, he is perhaps more aware of his loneliness here than in London. It is a quieter city than London, and there are fewer distractions for him here; therefore, he is thrown back more on his own devices. His loneliness can be seen in his attraction to the landlady’s house, which manifests itself as almost a bodily urge. While there is something of the supernatural in how he is drawn into the house–as if the landlady is hypnotizing him or casting a spell on him, from within–his attraction also has the bewildering force of a suppressed feeling: “The compulsion or, more accurately, the desire to follow her into the house was extraordinarily strong” (Lines 131-33).
The landlady herself is a lonely and isolated figure, in a way that seems a reaction against modern life. Rather than go out into the alienating modern world, she has instead created a shelter against it, one in which time is in all ways arrested. This is seen not only in her fondness for taxidermy–therefore keeping all of the creatures around her eternally young and malleable–but also in her customs, manner and decorating habits, all of which recall an earlier time. It is an irony that the very anonymity that she is trying to fend off is also what enables her to keep up her sinister practices; she is able to lure these young men into her boarding house partly because, it seems, no one knows where to look for them.
The Fetishizing of Youth
The landlady regards Billy with an admiration that would seem lecherous, were it a middle-aged man looking at a young woman. She exclaims over the softness of his skin and the whiteness of his teeth, and at one point declares him to be “the perfect age” (Lines 418-19).
While we are accustomed to seeing young women viewed in this assessing, predatory way, their youth treated as a commodity, it is less customary with young men. The landlady moreover comes across as a motherly type, and her interest in Billy does not seem sexual. Rather, it seems partly aesthetic and partly nostalgic. While admiring Billy’s youthful appearance, the landlady wistfully recalls her previous two boarders and their beauty and charm: “They were tall and young and handsome, my dear, just like you” (Lines 310-12).
Billy speculates that the landlady might have lost a son in the war, and that this is why she is so sentimental about beautiful young men. This might be true, but her sentimentality might also be more generalized and impersonal. It might simply be a reflection of the way that young men are exalted and idealized in the culture all around her, whether as explorers, dynamic young businessmen, or soldiers going off to war. Part of the allure of these young men, of course, is that they are not going to be young and idealistic forever, and are eventually going to be worn down and compromised by all of their worldly adventures. The landlady has found a way to freeze her boarders at the height of their youth and bravery, while the whole world is in front of them but before they have grown too disillusioned by it. Her actions are a reminder that young men can be every bit as objectified as young women, just in slightly different ways.
The Power of Convention and Social Customs
Both Billy and the landlady are, in different ways, creatures of convention and habit. This means that they immediately categorize one another, and fail to really see one another. Billy is an aspiring young London businessman, and is set in the ways of his striving big city milieu. He admires “briskness” above all other qualities, and maintains this briskness even when he is alone at night in a foreign city. This briskness is seen not only in his way of walking down the street, but also in his quickness to judge and dismiss the landlady. Rather than taking the time to listen to her and to be alarmed by her, he instead writes her off as “dotty”; he sees her as a type, rather than an individual (Line 175). The irony is that it is his very worldly impatience, his superficially wised-up attitude, which makes him vulnerable to the landlady. For this attitude is the opposite of thoughtfulness, and perhaps works better in business than in life.
While we do not have the same access to the landlady’s thoughts that we have to Billy’s, it is clear that she does not really see him, either. His appearance merely reminds her of her other two young boarders; this is why she opens her door to him. For her part, she is as attached to home and hearth in the same way Billy is to his job; indeed, she seems never to leave her house. While her world seems much smaller and stranger than Billy’s, however, it is hardly less narrow and exclusionary. Billy might ultimately be less disturbed and dangerous than the landlady, but his way of seeing her is almost as cold and transactional as is her way of seeing him.
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By Roald Dahl
