Margaret Atwood Commentary
Margaret Atwood’s poem The Landlady presents a depressing and frightening experience of one living in a rented room. The landlady is very much the dangerous gaoler of this prison, and one who specializes in oppression. The poem is striking in its use of language, including imagery, sounds, and rhythms, that vividly portray the feared landlady and the shrinking tenant.
The comparison of the speaker’s living situation to that of a prison, a place of oppression, is the dominant thematic concern. While we might like to think that our home is the place where we can be free and be ourselves, in The Landlady we see how home is turned into a place where a sentence must suffered through. The danger is concentrated in the image of the landlady, the one who is in control. The speaker, who we assume is Atwood when she was a poor university student, never does escape her confinement, either physically or mentally.
The poem is structured into nine stanzas of varying lengths, with the shorter ones coming at the beginning and end. The variety of stanza lengths and the multiple spacings to divide the stanzas support the tension, the feeling of being caught, the danger that can intrude at any time. The short stanzas, and indeed the generally short line lengths, force the reading to slow down which further supports the idea of the speaker being caught in this rooming house prison. The effect is to help immerse us in the speaker’s ongoing suffering. Except for stanza 6, the speaker approaches her description of the landlady through a variety of senses, beginning with the sounds (‘raw voice’, ‘slams/my days like doors’), then with smells (‘that bulge in under my doorsill’), and finally with sight (‘a bulk’, ‘blocking my way’). By processing the landlady from the sounds of the lair below the speaker’s rooms, to the smells sliding under the door, to her actual physical presence,
The comparison of the speaker’s living situation to that of a prison, a place of oppression, is the dominant thematic concern. While we might like to think that our home is the place where we can be free and be ourselves, in The Landlady we see how home is turned into a place where a sentence must suffered through. The danger is concentrated in the image of the landlady, the one who is in control. The speaker, who we assume is Atwood when she was a poor university student, never does escape her confinement, either physically or mentally.
The poem is structured into nine stanzas of varying lengths, with the shorter ones coming at the beginning and end. The variety of stanza lengths and the multiple spacings to divide the stanzas support the tension, the feeling of being caught, the danger that can intrude at any time. The short stanzas, and indeed the generally short line lengths, force the reading to slow down which further supports the idea of the speaker being caught in this rooming house prison. The effect is to help immerse us in the speaker’s ongoing suffering. Except for stanza 6, the speaker approaches her description of the landlady through a variety of senses, beginning with the sounds (‘raw voice’, ‘slams/my days like doors’), then with smells (‘that bulge in under my doorsill’), and finally with sight (‘a bulk’, ‘blocking my way’). By processing the landlady from the sounds of the lair below the speaker’s rooms, to the smells sliding under the door, to her actual physical presence,