Doris Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’: Summary, Themes, and Analysis
Doris Lessing and ‘To Room Nineteen’
Doris May Lessing (Kermanshah, Persia, 22 October 1919 – 17 November 2013, London, England) was a British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer, and short story writer. In 1925, Doris’ family moved to present-day Zimbabwe. Lessing was educated at the Dominican Convent High School, a Roman Catholic all-girls school in Salisbury. Later, she worked as a nursemaid, where she encountered the first materials that inspired her to write.
After her first divorce, she became interested in the Left Book Club, a popular communist book club.
Her first published novel was ‘The Grass Is Singing’ (1950). Other important novels include the ‘Children of Violence’ series, ‘The Golden Notebook’, ‘The Good Terrorist’, and ‘Canopus in Argos’ series.
Lessing was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, the eleventh woman and the oldest person ever to receive the award. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British literature. In 2008, ‘The Times’ ranked her fifth on a list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’.
After a mini-stroke, she began to focus her mind on death, questioning whether she would have time to finish a new book.
‘To Room Nineteen’: Summary
Susan appears to be the perfect wife, but she discovers her life feels empty. Seeking solitude, she rents a hotel room (room nineteen). Her husband assumes she is having an affair and tracks her down. Ultimately, she takes her own life in that room.
Key Elements
- Author: Doris Lessing
- Narrator: No explicit narrator (implied voice)
- Protagonist: Susan
- Narrative Perspective: Third-person, omniscient narrator
Major Themes
- Irrational Fate: Life is inherently unpredictable, and loss is inevitable, regardless of one’s actions. Even a seemingly perfect love story can end tragically.
- Emotions vs. Rationalism: The story explores the conflict between logic and emotion. Even a meticulously organized life, designed to avoid the pitfalls of other marriages, may fail to fulfill personal needs and goals.
Key Passages and Their Significance
Excerpts from the Story:
- “And so they lived with their four children in their gardened house in….and had planned for.”
- “Well, even this was expected, that there must been a certain flatness.”
- “It was now, for the first time in this marriage….had foreseen.”
- “It was a long time later that Susan understood……with each other.”
- “Resentment. It was poisoning her.”
- “She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own.”
- “That was he—a gingery, energetic man and he wore a reddish hairy jacket unpleasant to the touch.”
- “She dreamed of having a room or place, anywhere; where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.”
- “Miss Townsend, my four children and my husband are driving me insane.”
- “She disliked very much this woman who lay here, cold and indifferent beside a suffering man, but she could not change her.”
- “A fireplace with gas fire.”
- “Yet there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs Mattew Rawlings.”
- “Several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness.”
- “I am alone, I am alone I am alone.”
- “She could stay here all day, all week, indeed all her life.”
- “But she had let herself in for it…..and she would not.”
- “The demons were not here. They had gone forever because she was buying her freedom from them.”