To Room Nineteen by Doris Lessing, 1963
TO ROOM NINETEEN
by Doris Lessing, 1963
"To Room Nineteen," first published in the collection A Man and Two Women in 1963, pursues Doris Lessing's intense interest in the consciousness of women under the stresses of modern life. It reflects the concerns of the period in which it was written and foreshadows the sort of feminist explorations that were to become much more common after 1970. The story's ancestry is traceable to D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and other writers of the earlier part of the twentieth century. And it looks forward to the work of Fay Weldon and others.
The Rawlings appear to have everything that a couple could want; having married late "amid general rejoicing" (Lessing deliberately offers us this cliche to put us on our guard), they have four healthy children and create what seems to be a stable and comfortable home. Matthew Rawlings is briefly unfaithful, which ultimately seems acceptable but puts a small piece of grit into the perfect machine of their marriage. Nothing else goes wrong, but the result is that Susan Rawlings goes slowly mad inside the meaninglessness of her life. She finally commits suicide. There is not much more to the plot than that, but this forces readers to explore the text in detail to try to see exactly what it is that drives Susan to such desperate lengths when there is so much that is right with her life and so little that is wrong.
The story is delicately balanced between possible explanations: Susan may be a victim of her class and place in the world (bored middle-class housewife stereotype), or of her gender (things go wrong because once she has given up "being herself" in order to be a wife and mother she cannot recapture what she once was), or of the human condition (her suicide seems to transcend local or gender questions to some degree—life is just too much for the sensitive perhaps). All three levels are hinted at in the opening paragraph, where the narrator intrudes into the fiction to make the apparently reliable observation that "this is a story" about "a failure in intelligence." At first this seems to mean that Susan has failed to live up to the ideals of being sensible and rational—ideals that are key to the success of her marriage to Matthew. When she becomes irrational and even mad she can no longer function as wife, mother, or anything else. But then we begin to wonder if intelligence is not rather lacking in Matthew's sensible world, for he is unable to help or to understand Susan when things start to go wrong. There may even be a suggestion that "intelligence" should bear its military meaning: what is lacking is the right sort of information about the nature of human life and relationships.
What seems to be missing in the apparently ideal world of the Rawlings is pain. They are forever sensible (the word is repeated half a dozen times) and balanced; they always choose the right ways so they have managed an "abstinence" (curious word) from "painful experience"—they are, in fact, excluded from a "painful and explosive world." For this reason, perhaps, they have no reason for living. Lessing explicitly canvases the options: children or Matthew's work cannot in themselves provide a reason for living; their love for one another seems a good candidate, but if even that becomes hollow, not so much because of Matthew's infidelity as because everything always was too perfect and too sensible, there is nothing to live for. Where "intelligence forbids tears" and nothing can happen that is unforeseen, a void opens in Susan's heart. One of the merits of the story is that we can feel the madness that this brings on Susan; the void is first "something waiting for her at home," then "the enemy," then "a demon," then "a devil," then a sinister man with gingery whiskers whom she thinks she sees in her garden. Like the reader Susan is quite aware that these are symptoms of madness.
Susan has lived a lie. She needs to learn that emotions, however absurd they may be, are still felt, but it is too late; once Matthew has "diagnosed" her as unreasonable she does indeed lose her reason. Smaller doses of unreason and irrationality, taken earlier, might have saved her. Once her life-illusion of perfection has collapsed she cannot bear to be anything at all—she retreats to a hotel room and simply sits there, away from the demands of a now meaningless world. Her only freedom now is stasis, and this soon becomes a logical desire for the final stasis of death.
The final paragraphs of the story try to demonstrate the sanity of Susan's madness. Normal life is represented by planning to deceive her husband into believing that the lover whom she has invented really exists. (Matthew needs the rational explanation of a lover to understand his wife's distress; she invents one for his sake.) As Susan comments in free indirect speech, "How absurd!" So much for the normal. The mad world of suicide, however, is represented in a series of largely positive images: Susan slips into a dream that is "fructifying" and that caresses her "inwardly" like her own blood. The impression given is that her madness signals the absence of an essential dimension, the dimension emphasized by D.H. Lawrence following Nietzsche, the dimension of true selfhood, creativity, and a true knowledge of the body. The story ends with a covert reference to Lawrence as Susan "drifts off into the dark river" of her death.
—Lance St. John Butler