Roald Dahl’s The Visitor tells the story of Oswald Cornelius, a “a bachelor with unsavoury but glamorous habits”. We meet Oswald through the eyes of his nephew, who inherits Oswald’s decides to publish an excerpt despite Oswald’s advice for the diaries to “remain in the family”. In the excerpt, Oswald is travelling through Egypt and waiting for a new fan belt for his car when Mr Aziz arrives and offers to put him up for the night at his family home. Mr Aziz introduces Oswald to his wife, Mrs Aziz, and their daughter, Diana; Oswald spends that evening seducing them both, in the hope that he may have sex with one of them. That night, an anonymous female enters Oswald’s room and has sex with him, but he cannot tell which of the women it is, and it is still unclear the next morning. Only after leaving is Oswald told of a third woman living in the house: Mr Aziz reveals he has another daughter with leprosy, which can only be caught through “the most intimate contact”. It is unclear whether Mr Aziz does actually have a second daughter or if he is playing a trick on Oswald as revenge for seducing Mrs Aziz or Diana.
The Visitor was published in Playboy’s May 1965 issue – one of seven stories Dahl published in the magazine. While this particular story certainly isn’t the most egregious case of misogyny and gender-based sexual violence against women, it is fruitful for establishing narrative devices that Dahl employs to present such themes to his audience. Throughout the story, Oswald treats and views women in an undeniably misogynistic way, and yet the twist in the ending turns this story into a morality tale. As such, we are invited then to judge Oswald for ourselves and learn from Oswald’s mistakes – sexual promiscuity being one of them, and misogyny possibly the other. However, I posit that the humbling of Oswald’s sexual hubris via the twist-in-the-tale is not enough to negate the misogyny present in the previous pages. Let’s dive in.
In The Visitor, there are a number of problematic aspects: the language of admiration used to relay Oswald’s chauvinistic sexual activity, which presents the mistreatment of women as an aspirational characteristic; the patriarchal ownership Mr Aziz asserts over his daughter and wife; the use of direct address to encourage reader complicity; and the language used to describe the women in the story, who are patronised and silenced by Oswald. These motifs are repeated through Dahl’s works. Here, I want to look at the power and sexual dynamics between Oswald, Mrs Aziz, Diana and Isabella.
Animal Instincts
The language used in The Visitor to describe the women Oswald encounters follows a prey/predator lexis, in which Oswald is always the predator. Terms such as “white anaconda”, “eyes so dark they were almost black”, “snaky”, conjure images of animals, which not only works to dehumanise the women, but to render them powerless to their baser animal instincts. For instance, take the following passage from The Visitor’s dinnertime/seduction scene:
The face of my hostess was bright with excitement, and whenever she looked at me across the card-table, those huge dark velvety eyes would grow bigger and bigger, and the nostrils would dilate, and the mouth would open slightly to reveal the tip of a moist pink tongue squeezing through the between the teeth. It was a marvellously lascivious gesture, and more than once it caused me to trump my own trick.
In this excerpt, Mrs Aziz is unable to control what Oswald interprets as her physical signs of arousal. The reader is led to believe that these actions are a product of Oswald’s seduction; however, these actions may not express desire and might be unrelated to arousal of any kind. As this is a first-person story, the reader can only see Mrs Aziz’s actions as relayed to them by Oswald. Immediately this sparks the question: is Oswald a reliable narrator? The opening sequence of the story works hard to present Oswald as both believable and reliable, but a discerning reader may see that Mrs Aziz’s actions here may be completely innocent but are sexualised by Oswald.
Voicelessness
The use of animal descriptors renders the women voiceless – animals can’t communicate verbally – hence the focus on Mrs Aziz’s physical arousal. Of particular interest is the “moist pink tongue squeezing through the between the teeth” – here, the narrator conjures the image of a tongue being kept in a cage. This works to show that although Mrs Aziz may wish to communicate, she cannot; she is restricted. This is either because of the current circumstance of being in the presence of her husband; or being “socially constrained to control [her] own bodily appetites and suppress [her] own desires, since these are deemed ‘unnatural’ or at least unseemly”(1); or through symbolism of voicelessness equating to powerlessness. In Mrs Aziz’s case, this is established when she first meets Oswald. She descends the stairs in silence, pauses until Mr Aziz notices her, and then only speaks when she is spoken to – as though waiting for the correct social cue or appropriate permission to speak.
Namelessness
Oswald also asserts authorial power by rarely calling Mrs Aziz or Diana by their names. Mrs Aziz is referred to as: “the woman”, Queen Semiramis, “his/the wife”, “my hostess”, “the parent” or “the mother”, “cunning beautiful bitch” – and only once is she referred to as Mrs Aziz. Oswald never refers to Diana by name; he calls her “the girl”, “the Princess”, and “the daughter” or “her daughter”. (By way of comparison, Mr Aziz is referred to by his name 24 times and as “my host” six times; Mr Cornelius is referred to by name 12 times, and is otherwise called “my dear fellow.”) This works to commandeer the autonomy of the female characters; they are referred to as characteristics or physical attributes, and not given the respect of addressing them by their name. Not only is it disrespectful in practice, but it could be read as a technique which strips Mrs Aziz and Diana of any power they might have in terms of contributing to the narrative. Not using their names means that any reference to them is seen, interpreted and relayed solely through the eyes of Oswald.
Fetish and Taboo
The repeated use of “mother” and “daughter” points towards the sexual taboo of seducing both mother and daughter from a family unit. By using these nouns in a sexual context, by referring to their arousal and seduction, the words become hypersexualised. The women become depersonalised – they could be anyone; they both become archetypal ‘mother’ and ‘daughter’ figures. This means the reader can attach any sort of physical attribute or fantasy ideas to them as they are non-specific outlines waiting to be coloured in. It could be any mother or daughter – the point is, the relation to each other is what makes the desire for both of them a fetish. In terms of sexual power dynamics, this pits Mrs Aziz and Diana against each other to win Oswald’s attention. From his perspective, every action and facial movement is for his benefit – either to indicate sexual arousal, or to catch his eye. Oswald does not explore any other possible intentions for their movements.
Infantilisation
In the opening of Oswald’s diary entry, we are introduced to Isabella. She’s described as “supposedly aristocratic” and as a “jealously guarded mistress of none other than a certain notorious and dyspeptic Royal Personage”. The “supposedly” does a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence: not only is a hierarchy established (her social rank is tenuous, but her lover’s is presented as fact), but this word also presents Isabella as haughty. It questions her status and asks the reader to question it, thereby presenting Isabella as someone who repeats a claim to aristocracy, a position above her social station. Ultimately, this pegs her as someone ripe for a lesson in humility – we are geared up to desire her to get her ‘just desserts’ for being greedy.
Oswald’s published diary entry begins after their tryst on top of the pyramid of Cheops, from which they narrowly escaped the “Arab thugs” sent by Isabella’s lover. Driving away from the scene, Isabella says: “‘He’ll chop off Isabella’s head if he catch her now’”. Her use of third person instead of first makes her voice become childlike; using her name instead of ‘I’ is typical of a toddler learning self-referential conversation. This works to take away some of Isabella’s power – by introducing her to us as childlike, she is framed as being dependent on Oswald to take care of her, unable to fend for herself. Much of their documented interaction follows the parent/child power dynamic:
‘To Luxor?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘And Isabella is going with you.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘It is against my principles to travel with a lady,’ I said.
Oswald’s monosyllabic responses evoke the authoritarian parent who doesn’t have the energy or desire to explain themselves to a child; the parent has made a decision and, as the child has no power to change this decision, they aren’t privy to the logic or reasoning. This imagery is repeated later, during the sex scene in Mr Aziz’s house, when Oswald refers to the “childlike and innocent” sexual technique which led him to “swearing it was the daughter”. This also works to fetishize Diana’s age; Oswald is aroused by a “childlike” sexual performance and her innocence – symbolic of sexual inexperience – provides Oswald the chance to become the aggressor in the situation.
Oswald’s Authorship – and Censorship
When Oswald drops off Isabella despite acknowledging she is in danger of being hurt by her jealous lover, Isabella attempts to reclaim some of her lost power by shouting at Oswald. Yet Oswald censors her by using reported speech instead of direct speech, thus rendering her power move impotent. He writes that Isabella “poured out upon me a torrent of language so filthy yet so fluent that I had heard nothing like it from the lips of a lady…” (p.16). By omitting the specifics, Oswald rewrites the narrative to suit his own preferences – he doesn’t like “bad manners in a pretty girl” (p.16) and so censors them accordingly. This leaves Isabella voiceless, powerless and in hiding for her life after being abandoned by Oswald in Cairo.
Combined, these aspects of The Visitor present an undeniable – and troubling – amount of misogyny. Although the ending could be read as a twist through which Oswald learns his lesson and doesn’t womanise again, the reader leaves Oswald as soon as he learns of the second daughter. We don’t know his fate. He may well change his ways, or he may disregard the information and continue on. Either way, my position is unchanged: I do not believe that this plot point is enough to dismantle Oswald’s character foundations of misogyny and chauvinism.
(1) Holland, Janet, et al. “Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality.” Feminist Review, no. 46, Sage Publications, Ltd., 1994, pp. 21–38.
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