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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Garden and the River
The Rawlings’s garden becomes a potent symbol for Susan in her quest for autonomy. With its biblical associations, the garden is clearly a fallen paradise—a place Susan avoids lest the emptiness of her situation consume her. In the garden lives “the enemy” (a common euphemism for Satan): “She looked out into the garden and saw the branches shake the trees. She sat defeating the enemy, restlessness. Emptiness. She ought to be thinking about her life, about herself. But she did not. Or perhaps she could not” (2550). All that was innocent about her ideal marriage has been lost amidst the affairs and the limiting expectations. The garden is also symbolic of Susan’s domestic entrapment; it is the tame counterpart to the jungle in which her “wild cat” should be stalking (2555).
The river beside Susan’s house represents the slow but steady current carrying her away from her family and herself: “[S]he looked at the river and closed her eyes and breathed slow and deep, taking it into her being, into her veins” (2551). When she embarks upon her final act, inhaling the fumes that will kill her, “[S]he drifted off into the dark river” (2565), floating away (or perhaps returning) to some primordial place. The river thus bears associations with Styx, the river that ferries the dead to the underworld in Greek mythology. More broadly, the natural world, in the form of both the garden and the river, stands in stark juxtaposition to the artifice of Susan’s domestic life.
Devils, Demons, and Snakes
Interspersed with the compelling imagery of the garden, there is the predictable figure of a devil or demon. Again, the biblical connections are evident: “He was looking at her, and grinning. […] He was absent-mindedly, out of an absent-minded or freakish impulse of spite, using the stick to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or grass snake” (2553). This apparition is literally stirring up trouble, tempting Susan away from the conventions of her family life. Unlike the “snake biting its tail” that earlier symbolizes Susan’s marriage (2545), this snake “[is] twisting about, flinging its coils from side to side in a kind of dance of protest against the teasing prodding stick” (2553). Susan’s devil—emptiness, restlessness, unhappiness—is teasing apart the threads of her marriage, disrupting the expectations and routines that rule her daily life.
Later, as Susan brushes her hair in the bedroom, the sound of static electricity is also the sound of a snake: “hiss, hiss, hiss” (2560). This scene comes on the heels of Matthew asking Susan if she wants a divorce, but she remains “absorbed in watching the black hair making shapes against the blue” wall (2560). The original ouroboros of their marriage, the cyclical sameness of their routine, is subsumed by Susan’s Medusa-like presence. The biblical and mythological imagery serve to emphasize the shifting nature of the union, and in particular the disruption of innocence that Susan’s (monstrous?) need for solitude and independence causes.
Affairs of the Heart
Published in the early 1960s, the story reflects the mores of post-World War II London, where strict rules continued to govern gender roles and sexual orientation: Divorce was still rare, and heterosexual norms were still enforced. Nevertheless, England experienced a hedonistic revolution during the “Swinging Sixties” that inspired new styles in fashion and art while influencing sexual attitudes. Coming out of the hardships of the war period, London in particular was ripe for change and open to more “modern” ideas. This is the backdrop against which Lessing sets her story about a woman’s search for personal identity and autonomy.
Thus, Susan’s ambivalent reaction to Matthew’s affairs reflects both a relaxed modern attitude regarding fidelity in marriage and an unfashionable throwback to a more traditional view. In the end, even the very concept of marriage, and of love, comes under question: “Good Lord, why make love at all? Why make love with anyone? Or if you are going to make love, what does it matter who with?” (2564). Susan’s seemingly pedestrian predicament—how to reclaim one’s own identity after becoming a wife and mother—coincides with the larger concerns of her cultural moment, including the question of whether love as a concept could even survive the depredations and degradations of two world wars.
Room 19
At its most fundamental, the hotel room Susan escapes to represents freedom, especially from traditional gender roles. The greenness of the room’s furnishings—curtains, bedspread, and armchair—evokes the natural world, building off the imagery that links Susan to a wild animal confined to a domestic space. The room also serves as the site of illicit affairs and probably prostitution, while Susan’s “longing” for the room underscores the association with transgressive sexuality.
However, the freedom Susan finds in the room is itself not sexual. Instead, it involves retreat into and communion with herself—what the story describes as a “dark creative trance” (2561). In this state, Susan sheds the personas of wife and mother, and if she doesn’t quite forge a new identity for herself, she does achieve an anonymity that is productive in its own way. The room is thus intertwined with Susan’s identity and consciousness, which explains the violation she feels when her husband discovers where she has been spending her days; he has encroached on a mental space she was just beginning to claim as her own.
Related Titles
By Doris Lessing
