Making Meanings
The Landlady
Reading Check
a. What are Billy’s first impressions when he peers through the window of the boardinghouse?
b. Why does Billy enter the boardinghouse, even though he likes staying in pubs?
c. Describe the landlady’s house. What in the house is not what it appears to be?
d. Billy keeps thinking he knows something about Mulholland and Temple. What is it that he knows but can’t recall?
First Thoughts
1. Review your reading notes.
• At what point in the story did you first become suspicious that things in the boardinghouse were not quite normal?
• What predictions did you make? Did events turn out as you predicted?
• Were any questions left unanswered at the end of the story?
Shaping Interpretations
2. What seems to be the landlady’s idea of a perfect guest? What happens to her guests, and how do you know?
3. One relevant fact you may not know is that potassium cyanide, a favorite poison in mystery and suspense stories, has a faint bitter-almond taste. Go back to the text, and find other clues throughout the story that foreshadow Billy’s fate. (Can you find a hint in the very first paragraph?)
4. What do you think happens just after the story ends? (Does Billy realize the danger he faces? If he does, is it too late, or does he escape?) Explain.
5. Skim back through the story to find the points at which Billy makes fateful decisions. Choose one of these moments, and describe what Billy does and why he does it. How might a different decision have changed the outcome of the story?
Connecting with the Text
6. What do you think Dahl’s reasons were for not making the house seem frightening from the beginning?
Extending the Text
7. Both “The Landlady” and “The Listeners” (see below) present a lone traveler arriving at a house that hides a secret. What descriptions of the “phantom listeners” and the “lone house” in the poem could also be applied to the landlady and her “bed and breakfast”?
The Listeners
Walter de la Mare
“Is there anybody there?” said the Traveler,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
5 And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveler’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
“Is there anybody there?” he said.
But no one descended to the Traveler;
10 No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his gray eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
15 Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
20 By the lonely Traveler’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
25 For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head—
“Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,” he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
30 Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
35 And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Click here to navigate to the story: The Landlady.
----