Rooftoppers

A whimsical paean to nonconformity, Rooftoppers hymns the misfits, rebels, and fringe dwellers of the world and the less beaten paths they travel. First among these are the rooftoppers themselves, who do not use paths, streets, or sidewalks at all, almost never setting foot on the ground. Their “sky-stepping” freedom from confinement—literal and societal—comes at the price of multiple dangers, including potential starvation, as well as injury or death from exposure, falls, or attacks from the violent, territorial gariers. However, the defiant life of a rooftopper offers an intensity of experience beyond the grasp of the timid earthbound: Aloft on a tightrope, far above the “Fabergé-egg” beauty of the city of Paris, Matteo feels “like a king” (157). Sophie, too, is drawn to heights and the “music”-like freedoms they offer, and she chafes at the pedantic Miss Eliot’s rules of feminine comportment and the repressive Victorian norms they represent. Guided by memories of her long-lost mother, she insists on wearing trousers and learning the cello, ignoring others’ protests that it’s not a lady’s instrument. This resistance is not simply aesthetic—it is an act of survival for Sophie, a refusal to shrink herself or be boxed in by limiting ideas of what a young girl should be. In Paris, a freer society than London, Sophie joins the rules-flouting community of rooftoppers, who have found a way to live entirely on their own terms. In the rough-and-tumble world of the rooftops, Sophie discovers the practicality of men’s trousers, and her stubborn affinity for the cello eventually leads her to her mother. Through her defiance of her era’s societal norms, Sophie exposes their superficiality, seeing her own life choices validated and rewarded.

Similarly, her guardian, Charles, pays little heed to the protocols of polite society, casually going against the grain in his lifestyle, diet, convictions, and raising of Sophie. Charles uses toast to mark his place in his beloved books, stacks of which fill his house, and he speaks “English to people and French to cats, and Latin to the birds” (4). Infatuated with books and language as a kind of music rather than as a means to an end, Charles defies the stuffy pragmatism of Victorian society, cherishing the imagination and a childlike sense of wonder far more than profitability or worldly ambition. He also scoffs at Miss Eliot’s objection that he, a single man, should be raising Sophie at all, believing that love alone should be the only criterium for a parent or guardian—a radical departure for the Victorian times. When the National Childcare Agency, indignant over Sophie’s clothing, diet, and education, tries to revoke Charles’s guardianship, he tells her to pack her cello so that they can flee the country; the alternative, for Sophie, would be a stern and loveless upbringing in a state orphanage. A model of loving, enlightened nonconformity, Charles encourages Sophie’s own bold choices, even telling her at one point to keep secrets from him, as keeping one’s own counsel makes one “tough.”

The first model for Sophie’s rebelliousness, however, is her mother, whom she remembers faintly as a cellist dressed in men’s trousers. Though she has not seen her since the age of one, her mother’s brash exuberance (kicking her trousered legs to “wonderful music”) emboldens her own nonconformity, such as her taste in clothes and her interest in the cello, both scandalously unconventional for a girl. Later, she discovers how far her mother took her own rebellion, e.g., to the lengths of disguising herself as a man, complete with a mustache, to pursue a musical career as a cellist on the Queen Mary. In doing so, her mother embodies the most radical form of defiance in the book—not only resisting societal expectations but also reshaping her environment in order to survive and thrive. Like the rooftoppers, her mother’s secret life was lived partly on the rooftops of Paris, where she practiced her cello to the beat of her own inner drum, provocatively playing requiems at jaunty double time. Miss Eliot, who told Sophie that her mother was almost certainly dead, turns out to be wrong about this, as she is about many other things, and only by defying society’s censorious rules and expectations can Sophie fight her way back to her mother and to freedom. High above Paris, Sophie’s own cello music, like the lyre songs of the Hell-conquering Orpheus, “resurrects” her mother. Her physical courage in the face of death-defying heights becomes a metaphor for her spiritedness in forging her own path in life—a path shaped not by obedience but by wildness, love, and the stubborn will to be fully herself.