29 pages • 58 minutes read
Doris LessingTo Room Nineteen
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1958A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Susan Rawlings
At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes Susan in almost completely conventional terms—and almost completely as others see her. Susan and Matthew are well-matched, their friends believe, “[B]y virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others come for advice” (2544). She has an appropriate education and a well-paying job at an advertising firm, which she willingly relinquishes in order to raise their children. She is a dutiful wife—even when Matthew engages in extramarital dalliances, she does not, and she attempts to forgive him for his transgressions—and a sensible, caring mother.
However, the story also depicts Susan, from the beginning, as a protagonist on a quest for meaning: She wonders what the point of her very existence is, and especially whether she has meaning beyond her roles as mother, wife, and member of a particular social class. She yearns for solitude, for creative retreat, and for access to privacy and her own space; these desires conflict with her prescribed domestic roles and cause irreconcilable tension in her marriage. She is haunted by a feeling of emptiness and an indefinable restlessness that she personifies as demons, lacking other language to articulate her dissatisfaction with female gender roles. After a time, these feelings overwhelm her: “In the dark she lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away” (2557). She is profoundly alienated from a sense of her own identity, and while her sojourns “to Room Nineteen” alleviate some of these feelings, they do not quite free her from the bonds of her family or the traditional expectations of a wife and mother in mid-20th-century England. Rather than return to those roles, Susan dies by suicide, a sudden act that highlights how deep her estrangement—from herself as much as anyone else—runs.
Matthew Rawlings
Matthew is a stable, caring, and largely conventional husband and father. Within his partnership with Susan, he provides the financial support, and the narrator notes his love for Susan despite his occasional affairs. Unlike other men of his time and socioeconomic class, Matthew “[is] a full-time husband, a full-time father, and at nights, in the big married bed in the big married bedroom […] they [lie] beside each other talking” rather than harboring unspoken resentments (2545-46). As Susan changes and asks for things for mysterious purposes—five pounds a week, an au pair to help with the children—Matthew acquiesces to her requests, at least for a time.
The reader’s access to Matthew’s thoughts (and therefore to much of his character) comes only through the filter of Susan’s suppositions: “He had, she [Susan] knew, diagnosed her finally as unreasonable” (2555), and “[S]he understood that he hoped she did have a lover, he was begging her to say so, because otherwise it would be too terrifying” (2560). However, there is no indication that Matthew changes throughout the story; indeed, in Matthew’s final appearance he suggests that he and his lover meet Susan and her lover for lunch, presumably hoping to restore the status quo of their marriage and family life. It is unclear whether Matthew will mourn Susan’s death (though it is clear that he will misunderstand her motives) or quickly move on to reestablish what he sees as the ordinary life—supportive wife, loving children, lucrative job—to which he is entitled.
Sophie Traub
Sophie’s youth, apparent good humor, and satisfaction with domestic duties make her a foil to Susan. An au pair from Germany, she ostensibly wants to learn English, though “she already [speaks] a good deal” (2557). While the story does not explore Sophie’s inner life, Susan sees her as intelligent and capable, perhaps even too insightful: “Sophie laughed her deep fruity Fraulein’s laugh, showed her fine white teeth and her dimples, and said: ‘You want some person to play mistress of the house sometimes, not so?’” (2557). Sophie clearly plays the part well, quickly stepping into a maternal role with the children and bringing a pleasant warmth to the house.
While the narrator never explicitly states that Sophie endeavors to replace Susan, it is clear from the point at which the reader meets her that she could easily do so, as she “[is] a success with everyone, the children liking her, Mrs Parkes forgetting almost at once that she [is] German, and Matthew finding her ‘nice to have around the house’” (2557). As Susan determines to end her life, she thinks that Matthew should remarry Sophie, “who [is] already the mother of those children” (2565). The narrator implies that Sophie will accept and even embrace the domestic arrangement that proves to be Susan’s undoing.
“Michael Plant”
While technically not a character, the invented Michael Plant represents the final distancing of Susan from her marriage and family. Loathe to open herself up to further misunderstanding—her previous pleas for privacy and self-determination have fallen on deaf ears—Susan “confesses” to Matthew that she has been having an affair with a publisher named Michael Plant. Immediately, she questions her choices: It’s a “silly” name and a random profession, but it fits the conventional narrative more neatly than the truth. This dishonesty, coupled with Matthew’s confession of his own betrayal, appears to be the breaking point: “[S]he had let herself in for it—an interminable stretch of time with a lover, called Michael, as part of a gallant civilised foursome. Well, she could not, and she would not” (2564). She ends her life rather than participate in and thus condone a system in which she fulfills everyone else’s expectations but her own.
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