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.
Themes
Marriage and Family: Explorations in Identity
The central conflict of the story is Susan’s lack of and search for an identity independent of her role as wife and mother. These are the identities the gendered expectations of the time mandate, and they are so routine as to seem natural: Susan is to relinquish her career for the sake of child-rearing and housekeeping, while Matthew is to pursue a financially stable—and, presumably, satisfying—profession in order to support the family. This is what “reasonable” and “intelligent” couples do.
Thus, Susan subordinates her personal pursuits to this marriage. At the beginning, she and her husband share goals, including making “sensible” choices and cultivating “their infallible sense for choosing right” (2545), with “right” being whatever social convention dictates. They will fulfill their predetermined roles for the sake of raising well-intentioned children and preserving the tradition of the nuclear family. If all of this seems a bit sterile, then Susan reminds us that “intelligence forbids tears” (2547). This is an arrangement based in rational thinking, not in emotional abundance; Matthew’s indiscretions are merely the expected outcome of a sensible arrangement. In these terms, the concept of marriage seems an inherently limiting and arid one, especially for the woman, whose traditional role relegates her to the family entirely.
Consequently, when the last of the children leave the house to attend school, Susan finds the transition unsettling: She must undergo a “slow emancipation away from the role of hub-of-the-family to woman-with-her-own-life” (2548). The use of “emancipation” to describe this evolution is telling; she will emerge from her enslavement to the family to find her own personal freedom. At first, she puts this process in simple terms: “Not for one moment in twelve years have I been alone, had time to myself. So now I have to learn to be myself again. That’s all” (2549). The problem, however, proves more complicated and intransigent. By this point in her life, she has lost her individual sense of self amidst her gendered roles: It will take more than a few hours of soul-searching to rediscover herself. At the same time, the continuing demands her husband and her children make on her block her quest for self-actualization.
She finds some solace in the anonymity of her alias “Mrs Jones,” who spends time in Room 19. This is better than the all-consuming emptiness or restlessness she feels at home, where she chafes against expectations. However, she still lacks the time and space to establish an individual identity, and her forays into Room 19 only make her feel an imposter at home. Integrating these two identities—her role as wife and mother versus her exploration of who Susan is separate from her obligations—seems impossible.
In the end, external forces and predetermined expectations cut Susan’s journey—by now crucial to her very survival—short. Female independence is so anathema to the healthy family unit that even adultery would be preferable; Matthew wants to believe in an affair because the idea that Susan might desire an autonomous identity, unattached to another man or to her family, is so threatening. Susan, though, knows better, and her decision to end her life rather than to submit to convention shows a grim commitment to self-determination.
Space and Time: Into the Room
Susan’s experience in Room 19 isn’t simply that of an overworked woman who needs a break from her familial responsibilities. Instead, the story alternately characterizes it as an erotically charged liaison, an illicit investigation of self (or self-abnegation), or even a mystical, creative undertaking. After her initial experience in Room 19, Susan returns home to her family “thinking all the time of the hotel room […] longing for it with her whole being” (2559), as if for a forbidden lover. What she craves there is anonymity, and as much as she may be working to find herself, she is also working to repudiate the self that she has become: “[S]he was alone, and she had no past and no future” (2559). Finally, she is shedding the “thought that nothing exist[s] of [her] except the roles that went with being Mrs Matthew Rawlings” (2559). The “wool-gathering” she does in the room becomes her life force, and the “dark creative trance” she enters while there sustains her as equally as her family drains her (2561).
Lessing’s later work explores the limits (and potential limitlessness) of time and space, as well as the related mysteries of consciousness and identity. “To Room Nineteen” represents an early stage in this quest: Women, authors, and other visionaries in Lessing’s work endeavor to see beyond the conventional walls that imprison their identities and limit their possibilities. Their inner worlds—externalized in Room 19—offer them an arena for doing so that might exist outside of ordinary space and time. Susan’s journey inwards is not so expansive, however; the expectations of others continuously disrupt her attempts at self-discovery. If she had time and space, Susan might unlock her untapped potential or even bring about an evolution of consciousness—one that moves beyond culturally determined personas into a sense of self that is wholly her own.
Female Desire and Convention: Strangers and Madwomen
Throughout the story, Lessing investigates the tropes that surround women who reject the routine of domestic life and seek something besides selflessness. Not only does her family find Susan’s behavior uncharacteristic, but Susan herself also questions her need for independence. At first, she is uncertain about how to occupy her time after the last of her children have gone to school: “She [keeps] herself occupied every day” (2549), responding to her new-found “freedom” with disorientation. She finally determines that she is in fact not free at all. Further, she finds that she is estranged from herself. Her fears of being left alone in the garden or of being unoccupied mask a deeper and more disturbing truth: that she suffers from an unusual “irritation, restlessness, emptiness, whatever it was, which keeping her hands occupied [makes] less dangerous for some reason” (2549). Without tasks to complete or family matters to contemplate, she must confront her alienation from her own identity—a “dangerous” proposition. When Matthew cannot (or will not) understand Susan’s unhappiness, she begins to distance herself from him just as she is distanced from herself: “[S]he lay beside him, feeling frozen, a stranger. She felt as if Susan had been spirited away” (2557).
Susan and those around her construe not only her estrangement but also her need for independence as illness, disability, or even addiction. She compares her feelings to people who have “crippled arms” or are “deaf” (2552). She is treated as an unreasonable invalid when she asks for a room of her own. When Matthew’s inquiries into her activities sully Room 19, she “[is] as ill as a suddenly deprived addict” (2561). Most tellingly, looking at herself in the mirror, she sees “the reflection of a madwoman” (2556).
The “Madwoman in the Attic,” a phrase coined by Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar in their landmark 1979 work of the same name, describes the ways in which literature portrays unconventional or uncontrollable female characters (or sometimes authors). While some of the ideas within this seminal work have fallen out of fashion, the basic premise that women who do not conform to society’s expectations of them must be “mad” still holds merit. “To Room Nineteen” is one of many works that investigate the implications of confining women to a limiting set of gendered behaviors. From Maggie Tulliver (The Mill on the Floss) and Tess Durbeyfield (Tess of the d’Urbervilles) to Edna Pontellier (The Awakening) and Jane in her wallpapered room (“The Yellow Wallpaper”), the woman who does not conform to society’s expectations must be punished, incarcerated, or eradicated altogether. We can interpret Susan’s fatal decision either as this sort of punishment or as her taking her life quite literally into her own hands.
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