To Room Nineteen

The omniscient, first-person narrator of the story stays close to Susan’s mind throughout, though the unnamed speaker also speculates on how others in her social circle might respond to certain events and on what Matthew might be thinking. By using this style of narration, Lessing is able to expose the tensions between what her protagonist is thinking and how others around her might perceive those rather unconventional thoughts.

Indeed, the story turns on subverting convention in general. The Rawlings’s marriage is thoroughly conventional: The couple is well-matched; they lead a comfortable and stable middle-class existence; and the family unit, with two boys and two girls, a stay-at-home mom, and a working dad, conforms to the ideal. As soon as the story has established this, it upends the reader’s expectations with a straightforward yet emphasized phrase: “And yet…” (2545). The ellipsis indicates what can only be ominous anticipation—a warning of very different things to come.

The narrator then goes on to express what, exactly, might be wrong with the match: “Their life seemed to be like a snake biting its tail” (2543). This ouroboros represents an endless succession of identical days wherein each partner fulfills certain roles and performs particular duties to perpetuate the cycle. Susan begins to wonder about the purpose of this: “Children? But children can’t be a centre of life and a reason for being” (2545). Contrary to the prevailing conventional wisdom of the time, raising children does not wholly satisfy Susan; it fails to complete her sense of self, her raison d’etre.

Certainly, the purpose of the marriage isn’t for the sake of Matthew’s work or comfortable salary, nor is it solely because the couple once loved each other. The narrator ultimately concludes, “[T]his was life, that two people, no matter how carefully chosen, could not be everything to each other” (2546). It stands to reason, then, that Susan must discover something within herself that makes life worth living, and yet that is precisely what she is barred from doing, both implicitly and explicitly.

Throughout the story, Susan’s need for solitude and self-actualization is characterized as disability or illness—and eventually rendered as “madness” and martyrdom. For example, she thinks, “Some people had to live with crippled arms, or stammers, or being deaf. She would have to live knowing she was subject to a state of mind she could not own” (2553). When she asks for a private room in the house, the family treats her as if she were ill or incapacitated: “[S]he heard Harry [her oldest son] and Matthew explaining it to the twins with Mrs Parkes coming in—’Yes, well, a family sometimes gets on top of a woman’” (2552). The fact that her need for privacy and personhood beyond her familial role requires explanation exasperates Susan and reveals the gulf that divides her from the gendered expectations of her time and social class.

Later in the story, her continuing desire for solitude and selfhood, coupled with the casual disregard her family exhibits toward her needs, drives her to the brink of mental illness. She begins to avoid the garden—the place of original sin, in that it is only here that she can be alone with her thoughts—because “she [is] invaded by this feeling” of emptiness (2547). She begins to imagine that this emptiness, alternately construed as restlessness, is the work of some sort of devil or demon—a literal possession, or at least a temptation away from convention and sanity. Eventually, she experiences an actual vision of this demon, witnessing him “grinning” at her and “using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake (or some kind of snakelike creature: it was whitish and unhealthy to look at, unpleasant)” (2553). The demon of her desire deliberately disrupts the symbolic snake of her marriage, the ouroboros of endless and “unpleasant” sameness.

Susan’s predicament is reminiscent of a long tradition in Western history and literature, in which the transgressive woman unsatisfied with her domestic lot must be “mad” or possessed. Susan herself has internalized this narrative, thinking herself “mad” and realizing that Matthew finds her “unreasonable” (2555). When she sees herself in the mirror, she thinks, “[T]hat’s the reflection of a madwoman” (2556).

Later, on an ill-fated walking trip in Wales where she has to check in with her family at regular intervals, Susan thinks of these calls as “nail[ing] her to her cross” (2556). The implied martyrdom continues with her suicide, which can be read as a self-sacrifice for the sake of her family. Sophie Traub, the competent and good-natured au pair from Germany, was “chosen so well by Susan” that she can readily and more successfully take Susan’s place as wife and mother (2557).

At last, having secured some kind of freedom within Room 19, Susan contemplates the nature of her existence. Away from the demands of home and family (and society’s notions of acceptable female behavior), Susan can shed her externally imposed identities and simply “treasur[e] her anonymity” (2559). In Room 19, “She [is] no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs Parkes and Sophie Traub […] She [is] Mrs Jones, and she [is] alone, and she ha[s] no past and no future” (2559). Her alter ego is beholden to nobody but herself, disentangled not only from family but also divorced from history and society altogether. She is a person distinct from the identities that have been layered upon her heretofore stifled self: “[T]here have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs Matthew Rawlings. Yes, here I am, and if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be…how very strange that is!” (2559). The use of “Mrs Matthew Rawlings” serves to emphasize that even her name is no longer her own. She has been alienated from herself.

Her newfound freedom and self-discovery do not go unnoticed: Sophie, for all intents and purposes, is now “the mistress of the house” five days a week (2560), and Matthew begins to question Susan’s commitment to the marriage. She understands that he suspects she is having an affair—indeed, she speculates that he hopes she is having an affair, for the truth would be too confusing and, worse, “terrifying” (2560). Should Susan reclaim her own personal identity, the entire edifice would come crumbling down; the marriage depends upon the sturdy foundation of established gender roles, which preclude female independence. Matthew has his career, which supports the family, and his occasional indiscretions, which bolster his ego; Susan in turn has Matthew and the family, which she supports. This does not leave room for Susan’s Room 19.

Once Matthew discovers her secret visits to Room 19, the reprieve is over: “[T]he peace of the room ha[s] gone,” and with it, her fragile and fleeting inner peace (2561). Although she attempts to reconstruct “the dark creative trance” of the room, “It [is] no use, yet she crave[s] for it, she [is] as ill as a suddenly deprived addict” (2561). Lessing’s language here connects Susan’s purpose to the grander process of creation—especially the project of self-creation—making her a potential proxy for the writer-creator herself. It also yet again marks Susan’s needs, for they are more than mere desires, as dysfunctional: She craves that creative process so desperately that she withdraws from its loss like an addict bereft of her substance.

The final “failure in intelligence” between Susan and Matthew concerns the admission of infidelity. In his case, the admission is true, though the act itself is dishonest; in hers, the admission itself is deceptive, and this mutual dishonesty cements a belief in “her own irrelevance” (2564). She invents a lover with the “silly” name of Michael Plant in order to protect her husband from the terrifying truth: that she is happiest in Room 19, that “without it [she] [doesn’t] exist” (2562). Not only has she given herself up to this marriage and family entirely, but it has been a charade all along: In the end, “he [is] not her husband” (2564). Ultimately, it’s not that she feels betrayed by his specific acts of infidelity; it’s that she feels betrayed by a social (patriarchal) system in which she has to forsake herself for what amounts to nothing, or at least nothing authentic and enduring.

With no place for Susan in Room 19, there is no longer a place for her at all: “The demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them” (2565). Female freedom does not come cheaply. Susan’s suicide is in part an act of despair, but it can also be seen as an act of defiance: She leaves her house and family “without another look” (2564), and she feels “quite content” as she breathes in the poisonous gas that will at last liberate her (2565).