Ss.

CYRIL AND METHODIUS UNIVERSITY Faculty of Philology "BLAZE KONESKI" - SKOPJE Department of English language and literature

SPECIAL COURSE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Seminar paper

Topic: Doris Lessing-To Room Nineteen- There is another way

by student Svetlana Dimovska

Tutor: Prof. D-r.Sonja Vitanova-Strezova

Doris Lessing - To Room Nineteen There Is Another Way

Doris Lessing is supremely gifted, enigmatic and diverse writer, never wasting a word, and equally at home presenting precisely crafted plot, incident, meditative or reflective description that suggests the workings of deep layers of the psyche, thus powerfully engages the reader. As Patrick Parrinder says: Readers throughout the world have followed her progress in the last three decades from orthodox Communism towards feminism, irrationalism, Sufism, anti-psyhiatry and most recently, cosmic mysticism.1 Truly, Lessings fiction, which is inclusive, spiritual and intricately
1 Parrinder, Patrick: 'Descents into Hell: The Later Novels of Doris Lessing'. Critical Quarterly 22.4, 1980: 525.

woven, embodies and displays a spacious panoply of themes specific to late-twentieth-century consciousness: race, the conflict of the generations, the psychological dimensions of male-female relationships, women and womens experiences, politics, philosophical questions about life, the nature and planes of reality, the labyrinths of the human mind, exploration of madness and mystical forms and modes of consciousness. Addressing such actual themes, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. Speaking of Lessing Margaret Drabble says: for a writer who consistently foresees and confronts the worst, she is neither depressing nor apparently depressed2. We may add, as an architect of the soul, she urges us to understand and comprehend the nature of the world we live in. While Lessing consistently refuses to align herself with any kind of movement or any traditional label, it is possible to see her humanistic commitment to the liberation of women and men in this world and her engagement with womens search for identity. Not a collective, imposed identity, however, but personal identities painfully sought out and worked for through the gradual shedding of social trappings and the slipping of masks, disguises, roles, attitudes and customs. In one of her interviews Lessing says: Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so. The short story To Room Nineteen contradicts this statement absolutely. And I think that both the statement and the story bare immense amount of truth in themselves and they are both very receptive. It depends on ones personality, state of mind and of course of the living circumstances. And the truth I think is a compromise between these two aspects, the aspect that we can achieve almost anything if we are given a chance and the aspect that everything does not mean everything . Of course we all feel emptiness and despair sometimes, but we should try to fill in this emptiness in the best way we know. Everyone has his own way, someone by religion, someone by intellectual work, someone by work itself, by different hobbies and interests e.t.c. There is variety of ways, but the important thing is they should occupy our time, our mind and most of all they should make us satisfied and keep us moving forward, improving us as persons and if possible giving us social acknowledg-

2 Drabble, Margaret, Doris Lessing: Cassandra in a World under Siege, Ramparts 10.8, 1972: 50.

ments. Susan Rawling has all this from the very beginning, and maybe this is her disadvantage, she has nothing existential to fight for. Susan Rawling, the main character in Doris Lessings short story To Room Nineteen, fights against her inner emptiness and the roles she is supposed to play as a mother, a wife, and a house manager. This painful battle leads her to an utterly denying attitude towards her intelligent marriage and domestic life. At the onset of the story, Susan Rawling lives in a large, white, and gardened house. Although one may possibly infer her husband and she lead a wealthy life and that their house is likely to be comfortable, scarcely can the reader find any detailed description of both the house and the furniture this house is bound to have inside. Along the story, many are the passages where the reader can clearly perceive that this is an intelligently organized structure managed mainly by her. Everything is perfect, they had everything they had wanted and had planned for. And yet...(TR19 p.2336) At a certain moment, Susan realizes that there is something wrong with her life. Despite the fact that apparently she leads a flawless life, ... why did Susan feel as if life had become a desert, and that nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own(TR10 p.2339). Susan tries to draw herself back from this structure when she perceives she does not totally belong to that place, since there she is not really herself, but the mother, the wife and the house manager, in other words, Mrs. Rawling. Inside the house, Susan has to perform her domestic roles, not being able to see her own essence, as if she were in abeyance, as if she were in cold storage(TR19 p.2340). She hopes once all her children are at school, she will have enough spare time for herself and hence will be able to reencounter her essence. Nevertheless, this yearning gives rise to more inner conflicts due to her fear of encountering the real Susan, who might not match the white house. As an attempt not to be repressed by it, but also conflicted, she takes action to move herself to the big garden. There as Susan watches the river passing among the lively trees, she hopes to be really alone so that she can look for her inner self. However, this search arises a dubious feeling, since she is eager to encounter herself but she feels that encountering herself means encountering the demon a wild and unintelligent side of her. Despite being terrified of it she still visits the garden once in a

while in search for some shelter from her emotional distress. But then, once, she ends up visualizing her fears as a demon: One day she saw him. () He was looking at her and grinning.. At this moment she recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized(TR19 p.2346-2347). Realizing that this demon is nothing more than the wild state of her own essence she has been looking for, she decides not to plunge into it, but to go into forgetfulness. Aiming to forget about herself and where she comes from, she decides to have a place where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was(TR19 p.2347). Then, she starts to isolate herself in a hotel room room 19 so as to unchain herself from her duties as Mrs. Rawlings. There, at last, Susan can have a setting of her own where she does not have to think about anything, but only observe the time passing by, with neither past nor future. She is totally empty there, feeling emptiness run deliciously through her veins like the movement of her blood (TR19 p.2353). These journeys, which range from one to five times a week, last (for) a year. These days of loneliness enable Susan to play her part as a mother and wife easily since she is not Mrs. Rawlings anymore, she is an impostor, completely detached from this family. Susan, (...) or the being who answered so readily and improbably to the name of Susan, was not there: she was in Freds hotel, in Paddington, waiting for the easing hours of solitude to begin(TR19 p.2354) Nevertheless, Susans husband, puzzled with her absence, hires someone to verify where she spends her afternoons. Being aware of the existence of this refuge of hers, room 19, he questions her about the place, assuming that she has a lover. Instead of facing it all, Susan decides to play another part, and confirms her husbands guesses. Meanwhile, she tries to return to room 19 many times to look for herself, but these attempts are not successful, since there she finds nothing but the unnamed spirit of restlessness(TR10 p.2356) instead. Because her husband had discovered about room 19, this place is no longer paramount to a representation of the safe freedom she utterly needs. At this moment, Susan understands that there is only one way to escape from playing parts: suicide. Here we can see Lessing draws extensively on womens inner, private experiences and on their departure from the unsatisfactory reality of life, their roles imposed on them by the society, roles they consciously or unconsciously assume, until they come to awareness of who they are through

painful rejections of certain roles. Susan doesnt have enough strength to strip off her roles in the household, and yet to continue living. She finds her freedom in suicide and that is what I find debatable. Her husband suggests that she should find a job, he does not make scene when she tells him that she has a lover. She has a lot of opportunities but she does not use any of them. Through the years she has lost her identity and she now suspects her intelligence, her capabilities and she is scared. Instead of killing her self she could have found a job, she could have found a lover, but she feels lost and disoriented. Maybe this was true for women in the early twentieth century. And Lessings way of ending the story has its goal. To emphasize womens dis-integration between body and self, image and identity, women and society. At various points of her writing she tries to examine the development of female identity and the characters struggle to come into being. Lessing is an author who has spent her life writing about the subject of women and their inner voyage into the self and psyche. Her preoccupation with the dimensions of the female mind, which maybe are not part of our shared, socially acknowledged experience: the minds soliloquy in solitude, rather than the psychology of personal intercourse3 is surely a remarkable manifestation of her feminist tendencies, which are an important characteristic of Lessings way of thinking. By showing the reader the conflict between Susans inner self and the self she portrays to the outer world, Lessing is driving home the point that a womans role in society is not always acceptable to or an accurate expression of the woman herself. In this long story, Lessing appears to be testing the angst of identity or what might happen in the new era to a woman of the old dispensation who is not only enwebbed in the image of the cultural construct of Woman but who has also accepted her traditional roles of mothering and nurturing and of what has become too often a part of the territory-the role of betrayed wife. Susan Rawling who feels locked into her own cocoon of stereotypical roles and who is seen through her various collective imposed identities-the suburban, understanding wife, the ever-available mother and good time party girl-wearies of the role of sustainer and comforter, and having experienced a psychic death, resists the culturally stultifying enclosures and constraints, discards the various garments and social roles she has worn and adopted, and retreats into her own room. As mentioned before, through
3 Woolf, Virginia, A Room of Ones Own, New York: Harcourt, 1957 (1929): 5.

her over a-year daily visits to room nineteen and through her own self-communings, she battles to wake up out of the web of non being or nothingness and begins slowly to strip away the masks of social roles and to search for her autonomous self, which is now a persistent pattern of female heroism in literature. She confronts the fact that she has been virtually a non-person all her life and comes to know that there is a core of genuine identity which can only be confronted if she chooses to live outside the cocoon of social approbation. Susans reclusive stay in room nineteen serves a healing, redemptive function enabling her to break down her emotional sterility and isolation and find more satisfying ways of being-becoming. Her inner voyage into the psyche delivers her into autonomy and into another region of being, perception and experience, and her retreat into the space of elsewhere of consciousness is a liberation, a release from the cage of labels and culturally defined roles and expectations or what can one call the represented consciousness of the collective society that would fix her identity. Susan is not prepared to return to children and husband. When Matthews enquiries intrude on her precious solitude, she prefers to die then to capitulate to conventionality. She chooses death over compromise with the crushing image of the ideal woman, the monolithic scripted self which patriarchy have called upon women to produce and create. In her novel The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing through her character Anna Wulf states the following: It seems to me like this. Its not terrible thing, I mean it may be terrible, but its not damaging, its not poisoning, to do without something one really wants. Its not bad to say: My work is not what I really want, Im capable of doing something bigger. Or Im a person who needs love, and Im doing without it. Whats terrible is to pretend that the second rate is the first rate. To pretend that you dont need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well that you are capable of better4. This quote from The Golden Notebook describes Lessings uncompromising, courageous character and point of view. She and her heroines do not accept anything less but the best. Im not sure if that is so in real life. Surely Lessing has had an exceptional life, but not all people are with so many distinguished qualities, not all people are above average clever. There are a quite a few
4 Lessing, Doris: The Golden Notebook. London: Grafton Books, 1962

average people who struggle with everyday problems and they are not always successful in solving them. They would surely appreciate life like Susans. In fact they would be quite happy in her position. But I think that maybe that is the curse of every person, every man and every woman, to want something better or something else, once one goal is achieved. And that is quite all right, because it leads one to progress, one step forward, but sometimes like in Susans case it can have devastating consequences. I do not think that suicide is Susans victory and gaining of freedom, if she would have found another solution, if she did not pretend that she doesnt need love (to use Lessings words), if she had fought for her husbands love, if she had tried something new in her life and she certainly has had opportunities to do so, then maybe her end would be completely different. It is not like she had to do all that she has been doing. She had help in the house and the au-pair maedchen could have come earlier. But I do not think that is the message that Lessing is trying to convey to us both in the story and the above mentioned quote. It is about consciousness, about being aware what is going on in our lives, and not deceiving ourselves that something is good when in fact it is not. I think she tries to tell us that we should confront our problems and not run away from them. She is making a point about womens position in the society and how it can be improved. This question maybe more actual and more important in our society and in our culture than in that of England in the twentieth century. We are far behind, and that is why we should greet and accept Lessings message of less than a century ago. Because, in response to the traditional social dictates of Woman, Susan turns away from the social prescriptions for her or for her predetermined identity and embarks on a journey towards self-discovery, for the first time leaving her family and marriage-her identity-behind. She begins to ask Woolfs questions: Who am I ? and How can I tell the truth about myself, my body? In her internal quest for authentic selfhood, she finds a gap between the dominant cultural ideology or her social role as Woman and her own lived experience as a woman. She slips into other consciousness which she finally recognizes the culture would consider mad. Because the masculinist point of view is by definition the rational and intelligible one, anyone occupying the cultural position of Woman and expressing another point of view is to utter truths by convention so unimaginable that they are likely to be dismissed.

Although Susan tries to search for words to express the place of elsewhere and to claim it is a foundation for a new identity, she is unable to articulate her subjectivity from this place and to integrate it in any significant way with her culturally produced self and identity. She, however, becomes absorbed in the other reality and becomes conscious of the collapse and disintegration of her culturally produced ego which to her is now like a dress off the rack which she can choose to put on or not. Understandably, Susan cannot numb herself and live a lie for the rest of her life, and she cannot find a compromise she can accept with the figure Woman. Her greatest forte is not only her discovering of the deep ramification of the split between Woman and women, but also her passionate desire for freedom, self-determination and self-satisfaction. Rather than be annihilated, Susan annihilates herself. She moves progressively away from the cultural and social trappings that have defined her life and enters the realm of death willingly. The situation that causes her severe psychic disruption is her husbands infidelity. For ten years, Susan as Woman, has functioned to bolster her husbands sense of himself, as the looking glass of A Room of Ones Own possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size5. He, in the mean time, dallies in sexual liaisons but with a discretion based on guilt; in him fidelity is hypocrisy and self-indulgence. Lessing portrays Susans husband as a dependent baby, demanding emotional support from others while remaining blissfully ignorant of those others emotional needs. Even though Susan tries to deny the painfulness of her husbands betrayal and treat it as banal, not important, and resort to her props of education discrimination and judgment, she is left feeling irritable, bad-tempered, annoyed; there is, she finds, something unassimilable about Matthews infidelity and confession. She cautiously allows herself understanding but not forgiveness, since forgiveness belongs to the savage old world(TR19 p.2338) of wickedness and brute passion. But her misguided behavior wears her out and her traditional feminine virtues of endurance, renunciation and compassion which uphold the patriarchal status quo weigh her down. As time goes by, Susan begins to feel confined to her home in Richmond, burdened by intense feelings of hurt, anger and jealousy. Having denied validity and expression to her intensely
5 Woolf,Virginia: A Room of Ones Own, New York: Harcourt,

1957 (1929).

felt emotions and having turned solely to her reason, for her marriage was grounded on intelligence, Susan begins to feel arid, living in a state of exilic consciousness, which in this case involves an unfixed identity, and to her everything seems absurd. She capitulates to housewifery, and de facto if not de jure matrimony, and submerges her subjectivity in the patriarchal paradigm. She functions as child superintendent, counselor and sometime sexual counselor of the male head of the house, and thus we can say she has accepted being an object. The denial of the subject-self necessary means a fundamental falseness. It means engaging in a perpetual lie. But Susan might move beyond these socially determined, limiting personas into a sense of self which is both wholly her own and thoroughly disconnected from everything she believes unique to Susan Rawlings. She might separate what she really feels from the socially fabricated and break the vicious circle of convention that defines and determines women and reinforces the conventional notion that a wife and mother should be self-sacrificing, good , kind and above all calm and controlled. She might assert herself and stop assuming the self-sacrificing role which she had previously felt she must assume, even when she herself had felt oppressed by it. When she takes a holiday alone, she desires to move beyond the isolated world of her familial duty, reinforcing her individual network of identity, but as she prowls over wild country, she begins to see her job as the hub of the family or the Angel in the house has occupied and consumed ten years of her life. And than, from a loving wife who feels bound to her family, content with being nothing except the role of Mrs. Rawlings, Susan gradually changes into a woman imbued with a sense of spiritual sterility and despair. She sits in the garden and confronts what she calls the enemy who represents quite simply, her introjected, conditioned weaknesses and her strongest feelings or impulses of restlessness, rage, irritation and resentment that she projects or externalizes. An intelligent and introspective woman, Susan is intellectually aware of her crisis and feels depressed. She begins to look on her mothering skills and her years of household management as a form of dementia rather than a virtue and becomes increasingly aware of something in her self that has remained unfulfilled. Manifestations of hollowness in herself drive her to the point where she can no longer stay in her house, having lost touch with her inner self. Therefore, she rents a cheap room in

Freds hotel, and, in solitude and isolation, through self-analysis and fertile meditation, she confronts her essential self, a daring act which shows an evidence of the subtext to the scripted self. Like Virginia Woolf, Lessing believes that a woman, particularly at middle-age, must find a room of her own and spend some time discovering who she really is. After Susan finds her real self, the Other Susan as speaking subject or the consciousness that is elsewhere, she begins to speak to Matthew from this new self. When Susan speaks to Matthew from her new self, it is usually with Susan in front of a mirror brushing her hair, quite a provocative position from a psychoanalytic perspective. In the mirror is the self which Matthew recognizes as the real Susan, the prim and the proper image of Woman. In the chair looking into the mirror is the Other Susan, who begins to identify more and more as her real self. As an observer of her reflection in the mirror, Susan has the authority of the observer over the observed, of the self-subject over the object-self. She is more the watcher and the observer of her self as she used to be, more the subject than the commodified object she has been. Patricia Meyer Spacks explains how the mirror interested both Virginia Woolf and Simeon de Beauvoir as metaphor and reality a key to the feminine condition6. The mirror confronts Susan with the split between what she is and feels and the faade she presents to the world. Susan perceives her duality: Matthews wife or her fictive other and her authentic self. For the first time in her life, Susan learns to heed her own perception of herself or the alternative self she has created instead of the internalized patriarchal portrait of femininity that usually dominates the mirror, and she begins to reinscribe her own subject position, to rewrite her reality, and to grow stronger. As her place of escape is discovered, she feels threatened. Threat of non-being Susan feels it is her responsibility to protect her authentic self and deliver it to total emancipation. And she chooses to die rather than to lose herself and compromise her reality. She chooses personal truth and personal awakening rather than renunciation and despair. Her final emotions as she drifts off into the river, which is an alternative to an imprisoning rigidity, is contentment and tranquility.

6 Beauvoir,

Simone de, The Second Sex, Trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Bantam, 1961 (1949):

23.

At least that is what Lessing wants to show us. That is Lessings way out for Susan. In my opinion death is not victory. Susan has a number of other possibilities. There are not only two solutionsdeath or despair. She could have used her position as well situated woman to find herself a job, she could have made a career and thus regained her self esteem. She will always be the mother of her children and no au-pair could replace her. She is somewhat selfish when it comes to her children. Everyone can understand that during the years of housewifery she has lost her identity to some extent, but she has regained it during the last year in room nineteen, and she might have found middle ground. To go your own way, as Susan wants, you have to fight for it. Life is a struggle, and if you want something you have to fight for it, if you want respect you need to earn it. Nobody is responsible for ones life but himself. There are women leaders in Muslim countries where the woman has almost no rights at all, and there are housewives who have lost their identity in western countries although women have equal rights with men and well established position in society. The society on its part, I agree, should provide us best possible living conditions, but we on the other hand should do our part of the job. There is no ideal society, but we should try to improve it, and suicide is not the way to do that. To write a story about the undesirable position of the woman in the society is a good way to fight the problem, and for that I understand and admire Lessing and her efforts. Her philosophy and way of thinking about the womens role in the society deserves complete respect. I completely agree with her insights about the right to have greater individual freedom and self-development, about the need to forge a healthy self and social world, about the need for a new organization of consciousness, about the need to speak with an authentic female subjectivity and to communicate it to other women. Lessing suggests the strength to be gained when a woman turns to her own self-portrait or new perspective of self instead of the self within the masculinist framework of femininity. The way we gain strength is individual and different for everyone. It is true that Susan does not use her voice and does not show great visible strength, but her silence is not the silence of absence, of emptiness or of passivity. It is a silence of presence and fullness. Feminine silence is described as absence because one notices only the surface of a gesture, a look or a text, and fails to attend to the language of the interior. One must listen very closely for both the richness and the

barrenness of silence, since what appears to be a whisper may be the echo of a laugh, or a scream transformed. From this point of view we might understand Susans end. Everyone has his own way when fighting their own battles, and we should respect and not judge it. At the end Susan has an extremely rich emotional life and also peaceful and calm thoughts and may be that is the other way. Or to quote Lessing: Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.7

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abbreviation-TR19 for To Room Nineteen. Source of the story -Northon Anthology Alcoff, Linda, Cultural Feminism Versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity of Crisis, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3: 405-36.

Beauvoir, Simone de, The Second Sex, Trans. H. M. Parshley, New York: Bantam, 1961 (1949): 23. Bikman, Minda, A Talk with Doris Lessing, New York Times Book Review, 30 March 1980: 24-7. Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, New York: Norton, 1997 (1963)
7 Interview with Amanda Craig, Grand dame of letters whos not going quietly, The Times, London, 23 November 2003.

'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Gardiner, Judith K., A Sorrowful Woman: Gail Godwins Feminist Parable, Studies in Short Fiction 12.3, 1975: 286-90. Halisky, Linda H.: Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of A Sorrowful Woman and To Room Nineteen, Studies in Short Fiction 27:1, 1990: 45-54. Huma, Ibrahim, Bessie Head: Subversive Identities in Exile. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996. Hunter, Eva, Madness in Doris Lessings To Room Nineteen, English Studies in Africa 30:2, 1987: 91-104. Irigaray, Luce, Speculum de lautre femme, in The Daughters Seduction, ed. Jane Gallop,
Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 56-79. .

Kaplan, Carey and Ellen Rose, Doris Lessing: The Alchemy of Survival, Athens: Ohio UP, 1988. Laing, Ronald D., The Politics of Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Lessing, Doris: Collected Stories, Vol. 1, London: Jonathan Cape, 1978, 305-36. 1962: The Golden Notebook. London: Grafton Books. 1973: The Summer Before the Dark. London: Grafton Books. 1975: Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Knopf. 1979-1983: Canopus in Argos: Archives. New York: Knopf. Millet, Kate 1970: Sexual Politics, Garden City: Doubleday,1970 Ornstein, Robert E.: The Psychology of Consciousness, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman1972. Parrinder, Patrick: Descents into Hell: The Later Novels of Doris Lessing, Criticall Quarterly1980,22.4: 5-25. Rich, Adrienne: When We Dead Awaken: Rewriting as Revision (1971), On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978, New York: Norton,1979, 33-50. Showalter, Elaine: A Literature of Their Own, British Women Novelists from Bront to Lessing, Princeton: Princeton UP,1977 Spacks, Patricia Meyer: The Female Imagination, New York: Knopf,1975 Waugh, Patricia: Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern, New York: Routledge,1989 Wilson, Elizabeth: Yesterdays Heroines: On Rereading Lessing and de Beauvoir, Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives. Ed. Jenny Taylor, London: Routledge, 1982, 57-74. Woolf, Virginia: A Room of Ones Own, New York: Harcourt, 1957 (1929) Virginia Woolf 'Professions for Women'. Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing. Ed. Michele Barrett. New York: Harcourt, 1979, 57-63.