Over the weekend, The New Yorker’s ‘Classics’ newsletter headlined with Road Dahl’s 1959 short story, The Landlady. In the digital publishing world, where clicks are currency, it’s perhaps no surprise that The New Yorker wanted to capitalise on recent Dahl-focused headlines following Puffin’s controversial decision to edit the language in his children’s books. They initially published the story in 1959, so there were no rights payments to make; Dahl was already in the news and his name was drawing attention – so why not?
The semantics of The New Yorker’s introductory paragraph makes it sound as though Dahl’s successful career in children’s literature was thanks, in part, to them: “In the nineteen-forties and fifties, before Dahl wrote his most famous books for kids, he contributed stories to The New Yorker,” the newsletter states. This sentence not only enables The New Yorker to pat themselves on the back for being so savvy as to get involved with Dahl early in his career, bu minimises the link between the adult and children’s literature. There is a clear divide between the two audiences: Dahl wrote for adults, and then he wrote for children. But that’s not accurate; Dahl continues to write adult fiction at the same time as his children’s literature. As the editor implies that The Landlady is a standalone story, they further imply that the two catalogues of adult/children’s literature are standalone. But that’s simply not true.
This story is standalone in the sense that the characters are not repeated nor the plot reprised, but it features imagery and language which is used repeatedly throughout Dahl’s entire catalogue. The most obvious image is: woman as monstrous. Immediately we think of the women in The Witches (1983), Mrs Trunchbull in Matilda (1988), Aunts Sponge and Spiker in James and the Giant Peach (1963), among others, These women destroy, either through physical violence or verbal degradation. Their violence is notable because they are women; the incongruity of violence in women is what alters the character to monstrous. The language embellishes the unnaturalness and wrongness of these women being violent, and specifically the unnaturalness of being violent towards children.
There are many (many) examples of monstrous women in Dahl’s adult fiction, and few are quite as sinister as the titular landlady in Dahl’s 1959 tale. In this story, Billy moves to Bristol the night before starting a new job. He intends to stay in a room above a pub, but is drawn to a boarding house en route. The landlady seems eager to get him to stay and Billy feels an unusually strong, surreal pull to stay there. It’s then revealed that the only two previous guests of the B&B were reported missing and never found – because the landlady has seemingly drugged and stuffed them to preserve on the upper floors. There is a sexual element to the story: the landlady describes these boys as “perfect” and “blemish-free”, and it is implied they have fallen prey to the landlady’s taxidermy habit. That they lie in situ in their rooms creates a sinister intimacy between the woman and her prey, clearly reveals the power structure, and presents this situation as a sexual fetish or taboo which she feels the urge to satisfy.
The question remains for me, though: is this element monstrous because she is a woman who is sexually self-aware enough to satisfy herself? (There is a motif in Dahl’s oeuvre of female sexuality being dangerous to men – Georgy Porgy, Princess Mammalia, My Uncle Oswald, William and Mary, Nunc Dimittis, The Visitor… the list goes on.) Or is this sexual element monstrous only because of the violent aspects?
If the latter, I wonder why the male protagonists who dream of harming women through intercourse (often explicitly detailed, as in The Great Switcheroo and the multiple stories featuring the character Oswald Cornelius) are not framed as monstrous?
So for The New Yorker, this story may be an interesting literary relic which garners their readers’ mousepad activity – but for me, it’s another stone upholding the Dahl monument.
rosiegailor 