In her illuminating discussion of Doris Lessing's debt to T. S. Eliot, Claire Sprague traces allusions to The Waste Land and other poems in four of Lessing's novels.¹ In addition to those instances, The Waste Land is also an important subtext in Lessing's short story “To Room Nineteen.” Charting the failure of communication and subsequent decline of love in a mid-twentieth-century marriage, Lessing both pursues one of Eliot's most central themes in The Waste Land and writes back from the woman's point of view.

“To Room Nineteen” addresses Eliot's tableau in part 2 of The Waste Land that features a woman sitting before a mirror, brushing her hair:

Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.(2)

The scene is reproduced twice in Lessing's story, as Susan Rawlings sits “running the brush over her hair again and again, lifting fine black clouds in a small hiss of electricity,” while watching her husband in the mirror.³ In Lessing as well as Eliot, this scene stands out as an icon of the failure of genuine communication, even between would-be lovers, that both writers clearly blame on the general cultural and spiritual climate of the twentieth century; this might also, by some readers, be seen as a phenomenon of gender. The discourse of “intelligence,” which so completely dominates the Rawlingses in Lessing's story, effectively excludes speaking of any other, not-so-rational experience. And whereas historically, on a broader scale, this discourse may be seen as resulting from the seventeenth-century “dissociation of sensibility,” from which Eliot famously claims “we have never recovered,”⁴ it is often viewed by feminist readers as working specifically to the disadvantage of female self-expression.

By shifting the focus from the man to the woman in the sterile scene in front of the mirror, Lessing radically transforms Eliot's “story.” Thus, whereas the anonymous woman in The Waste Land comes across as plain neurotic and totally insensitive to her partner's more refined inner monologue, in “To Room Nineteen” the man is the one who fails to appreciate the register used by his wife. As Susan Rawlings gives up on intelligence, her experience of self “glows into” another kind of “words”—into the “hiss, hiss” of her hair under the brush (379), for example. The “hiss, hiss” in Lessing's story signifies much and draws as much on the imagery and the literary and mythical allusion used by Eliot as on The Waste Land itself. In this register of imagery and allusion, never voiced except as “hissing” but nonetheless manifest in Susan's thoughts, we are given an alternative story of Susan Rawlings.

In this alternative story, Lessing has her protagonist intuit the decline of her marriage in images of general cultural decay by drawing—like Eliot—on biblical as well as classical mythology. The Edenic garden which is the prominent setting of the “happy” marriage (353) soon turns into an arid “desert” as innocence is lost (357): Matthew embarks on his extramarital affairs and Susan finds herself a prisoner in her role as self-sacrificing angel-in-the-house. But perhaps the loss of the golden age might in fact be inherent in the construct of “intelligent” and responsible marriage itself. Thinking of her husband's affairs, Susan finds herself “secretly wishing […] that the wildness and the beauty could be his” (357)—the “wildness” and “beauty,” we are to understand, of unrestricted joy and delight, unhampered by marital bonds or moral obligations. But, she realizes, “he was married to her. She was married to him. They were married inextricably. And therefore the gods could not strike him with the real magic, not really” (357).

Just as Eliot did in The Waste Land, Lessing conspicuously uses the images of river and water as vehicles for her protagonist's critique of modern marriage. For Susan Rawlings, water comes to represent the vitalizing element in the dubious domestic bargain she enters into with her husband, a bargain that sentences “her soul” to stay put in the house, “so that the people in it could grow like plants in water” (373). It is by turning to the river for comfort, “taking it into her being, into her veins” (364), that Susan barely survives the draining of her powers implicit in this nurturing commitment. As it runs past the Rawlingses' garden-turned-wasteland at Richmond, the river Thames also serves to evoke, once more, the lost vitality of love. The contrast between “civilized” love gone stale and its lost “wildness” is poignantly captured in the image of the Rawlingses' “big civilised bedroom overlooking the wild sullied river” (358). Yet, the river is also said to be “sullied,” if not by the “empty bottles, sandwich papers, [… and] other testimony of summer nights” that litter Eliot's “Sweet Thames,” then by the same cultural squalor and spiritual decay affecting love and marriage that made Eliot look back to Spenser's wedding song for a lost golden age.⁵

Whereas in Eliot the use of myth and allusion seem ultimately to suggest some hope and consolation,⁶ no such relief awaits Lessing's protagonist. The “hissing” that we attribute to the snake in the garden and hear literally reproduced by the stream of gas sends her drifting “off into the dark river.” It suggests, in the end, only insanity and death (367, 386). This, then, is perhaps Lessing's most significant departure from Eliot: She uses his nostalgia to produce a woman's perspective on the alienation fostered by modern society and its celebration of “intelligence,” then finally dismisses this nostalgia, too, as an impracticable approach to contemporary life.

Notes

1. Claire Sprague, “Lessing's The Grass Is Singing, Retreat to Innocence, The Golden Notebook and Eliot'sThe Waste Land,” Explicator 50.3 (1992): 178.

2. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1922; London: Guild, 1969) 108-10.

3. Doris Lessing, “To Room Nineteen,” To Room Nineteen: Collected Stories, vol. 1 (1963; London: Harper, 1994) 372-73, 378. All quotations from the story are from this edition.

4. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (1921; New York: Harcourt, 1975) 64.

5. Eliot, The Waste Land 176-79. Eliot's reference in line 176 to “Sweet Thames” echoes Spenser's refrain in Prothalamion.

6. Eliot, The Waste Land 431.