and female roles.

For the first ten years of her marriage, Susan has allowed, in Lawrence’s terms, her mental consciousness to exert “a tyranny over the bloodconsciousness” by dictating her life choices. Yet, as the last of her children start school, Susan’s “blood consciousness” begins to emerge, threatening the fabric of her family, as well as her sanity.

Susan and Matthew have handled their relationship “sensibly,” marrying late in their twenties, moving to the suburbs, and adopting conventional roles. Their “foresight and their sense” prompted them to decide that Susan would give up her job with an advertising firm and take care of the house and the children while Matthew would support them, both determining that “children needed their mother to a certain age.” In the early days of their marriage, they, along with their friends, were certain that they had chosen “everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose.” Their “intelligence” kept them from wanting more and ensured that they would appreciate what they had.

Yet at the beginning of the story, this “balanced and sensible” couple begins to experience a sense of flatness, which becomes most pronounced for Susan. Initially, she responds by throwing all of her energy into the care of her children and the upkeep of the house. She struggles, though, to find a point for her hard work, a raison d’être, for she could not say “for the sake of this is all the rest.” The closest she comes to finding a reason for her sacrifice is in their love for each other. Yet, she feels a growing sense that this is not enough, not “important enough, to support it all,” especially when she discovers that Matthew is having sexual relationships with other women.

Susan finds that she has little to say to Matthew when he comes home, other than the details of the day-to-day life of the household. She has become dependent on him to connect her to the outside world that she had once been an active part of. As she struggles to keep in check her hidden resentment, she does not, according to her “intelligent” sensibility, “make the mistake of taking a job for the sake of her independence.” Her mental consciousness asserts its influence as “the inner storms and quicksands were understood and charted. So everything was all right. Everything was in order. Yes, things were under control.”

As the narrator notes, however, in the first line, “this is a story . . . about a failure in intelligence,” the intelligence on which the Rawlings’ marriage is based. Susan reaches a point where she can no longer suppress her passionate desire for freedom. When her youngest children begin school, she embarks on an intense process of self-examination. As a result, she acknowledges that in order to survive, she must break the hold that her intelligence has had over her and follow the instincts of her blood consciousness, which impel her to establish self autonomy—physically and emotionally.

Yet Susan’s struggle to break the tyranny of her mental consciousness, which compels her to resist the urge to abandon her family, pushes her to the verge of madness. As she recognizes that even the embrace of her beautiful twins becomes a “human cage of loving limbs,” she begins to visualize a void, at first “something was waiting for her” at home, then “an enemy,” then a “demon,” then a “devil,” that appears to her in her garden. She gains solace only in an empty hotel room, the Room Nineteen of the title. When Matthew spies on her daily sojourns there, he shatters the sense of freedom she gains and unwittingly forces her to attempt what she deter mines to be her only outlet—suicide. After turning on the gas in the hotel room, Susan drifts “off into the dark river” that “seemed to caress her inwardly, like the movement of her blood” echoing Lawrence’s assertion that blood-consciousness “is one half of life, belonging to the darkness.”

The story presents an ironic reversal, however, of Lawrence’s insistence that death will result when mental consciousness takes over. Lessing suggests the reverse—that Susan’s consuming desire to be free, to allow her blood consciousness to take control, leads her to suicide, the only option she sees. Susan’s tragedy results from her inability to allow her “unreasonable” emotions and desires to surface earlier and more gradually. The battle that inevitably ensues between her intellect and her emotions drives her mad. Yet her madness becomes her path to freedom, as she slips “into the dark fructifying dream.”

Linda H. Halisky, in her article for Studies in Short Fiction, notes the ironic use of madness in the story. As Susan’s true self is emerging, those around her, including Susan, determine that she is not “herself.” Halisky insists that when Susan expresses this thought, what she means is that “she is no longer the self she set herself willingly, sensibly, reasonably to become. Some deeper self has hold of her; some inexplicable, non-rational self is rearing its head and asserting its due.” Susan has been “programmed, by the reason her culture has taught her to consider definitive, to label the expression of that self ‘madness.’”

Janina Nordius writes in her article for The Explicator that in “To Room Nineteen,” Lessing offers a “woman’s perspective on the alienation fostered by modern society and its celebration of ‘intelligence.’” As Lessing explores the midtwentieth century restrictions placed on women’s freedom and search for an authentic self, she also engages in a dialogue with D. H. Lawrence and his views on the interplay of contradictory human impulses. “To Room Nineteen” reflects this dialogue as it details the tragic result of the tyranny of the intellect.

Source: Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on “To Room Nineteen,” in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2005.

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. 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.

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. 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,” 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 “his, his” of her hair under the brush, for example. The “hiss, hiss” in Lessing’s story signi- fies 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 as well as classical mythology. The Edenic garden which is the prominent setting of the “happy” marriage soon turns into an arid “desert” as innocence is lost: 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”—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.”

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.” It is by turning to the river for comfort, “taking it into her being, into her veins,” 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.” 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.

Whereas in Eliot the use of myth and allusion seem ultimately to suggest some hope and consolation, 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. 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.

Source: Janina Nordius, “Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen,’” in Explicator, Vol. 57, No. 3, Spring 1999, pp. 171–73.

Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” is a story of repression, alienation, and suicide. Lessing describes Susan Rawling’s search for inner tranquility, during which she vacillates between “the big white house” in Richmond—an image that consistently suggests the emptiness, stagnation, and constraint of her lifestyle—and the green garden with its “slowmoving brown river”—green and brown being associated here with the freedom of nature and procreation. Susan is “driven” to seek peace of mind away from the estate—first, in the “ordinary and anonymous” room of Miss Townsend’s hotel, then on the hillsides of Wales, “brilliant with ferns and bracken, jewelled with running water,” and finally in the green-accoutred room 19 of Fred’s Hotel, which constitutes an artificial surrogate for the natural green sanctuary of the garden.

Lessing imbues the main settings that Susan encounters in her progression from the white house to the green room 19 with colors appropriate to her character’s changing mental state. Accordingly, the outset of the story lacks color imagery altogether but, as Susan gradually becomes a more desperate personality, Lessing’s references to color become more frequent, more noticeable, and more signifi- cant for the understanding of Susan’s character. Not until the Rawlings have moved to the white house does Lessing explicitly indicate that something is “wrong” with their marriage. She says that outwardly it appeared as if “they had everything they had wanted and had planned for. And yet . . . there must be a certain flatness . . .” Susan repeatedly attempts to rationalize and subjugate her discontent with her artificially controlled life. Gradually, Lessing reveals the extent to which Susan is hopelessly bound to her roles as wife and mother— eventually calling the house in Richmond “the big white house, on which the mortgage still cost four hundred a year”—using white to intensify the representation of the house as the embodiment of Susan’s seemingly inescapable existence, with all its purposelessness and its absence of individuation. The white house, like Susan’s life, is a prison, “for she knew that this structure . . . [and everything that was associated with it] depended on her, and yet she could not understand why, or even what it was she contributed to it.” Even the holidays in the white house with her family were “like living out a prison sentence.”

Susan goes to the garden to escape. In the story’s imagery, the “emerald grass” and the “brown river” of the garden typify the naturalness of a fertile and productive life—the antithesis to Susan’s “colorless,” structured, and barren subsistence in the stark white house. Where white is present in the garden, it reinforces the meaning of the white house. Susan’s “white stone seat” is a static, lifeless object like the house, like the inert routine of her daily life, which contrasts strikingly with the movement of the river, or the movement of crowds on the street, which Susan later longs to join. Likewise, the “snakelike creature,” “whitish and unhealthy to look at,” enhances the picture of Susan’s entrapment; it is “twisting about, . . . in a kind of dance of protest.” The snake’s writhing protest is imagistically associated with Susan’s disillusionment with her lifestyle. Lessing tells us that “something inside her [Susan] howled with impatience, with rage . . . And she was frightened.”

Susan attempts to evade her impending selfawareness as she dreams of “having a room or a place, anywhere, where she could go and sit, by herself, no one knowing where she was.” She finds this place in Fred’s Hotel. Room 19 “had a single window, with thin green brocade curtains, a threequarter bed that had a cheap green satin bedspread on it, . . . and a green wicker armchair.” The green of the room, like that of the garden, suggests the verdant existence that Susan has been denied. Yet this color—an artificial green obviously associated with debased sexuality (evidently prostitutes commonly patronized the place)—accentuates Lessing’s portrayal of the room as Susan’s “last resort,” a “hideous” substitute for the natural garden. This artificial green venue provides Susan temporary relief from her emotional turmoil until Matthew’s detective discovers the hideaway, and all is ruined. Thereafter, “several times she returned to the room, to look for herself there, but instead she found the unnamed spirit of restlessness, a prickling fevered hunger for movement, an irritable self-consciousness . . .” Again, Susan’s emotions—anger and betrayal over her discovery—challenge her, stirring up this “irritable self-consciousness” that she has heretofore managed to suppress by creating a new identity as the anonymous Mrs. Jones, the inhabitant of room 19.

Susan returns to the room several times looking for “herself”—that is, Mrs. Jones—and encounters Susan Rawling and her “demons [emotions] that made her dash blindly about, muttering words of hate . . .” She knows now that she must once more move onward in her quest for emancipation from her inner discord. Ultimately, Susan returns to the artificial green surroundings of room 19 to find that this time “the demons were not here. They had gone forever, because she was buying her freedom from them.” Susan’s struggle ends as she listens to “the faint soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain, as she drifted off into the dark river”—the eternally moving natural current of death. This is the final tie between the green room and the green garden, where she had previously gone “by herself, and looked at the slowmoving brown river; . . . and closed her eyes and breathed slow and deep, taking it into her being, into her veins.” In fact, the “dark river” in the artificially green room 19 seems a more fitting destiny in view of Lessing’s subtle and constant use of color as a motif embodying and intensifying the story’s depiction of Susan’s ever-growing need for release.

Source: Glenna Bell, “Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen,’” in Explicator, Vol. 50, No. 3, Spring 1992, pp. 180–83.

The Devil that appears to Susan Rawlings in Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” does not entice her to “partake of forbidden fruit” but to “open her eyes.” Total insight into Susan’s dilemma for both Susan and the reader rises or falls upon a correct view of the “son of the morning.” Failure to apply a Jungian interpretation to the demon has caused critics to prematurely evaluate “To Room Nineteen” as a “horrifying study of insanity creeping on,” or as “a meaningful story about a personal failure in marriage that represents a failure of the relationship between man and woman in our society.”

Calling the demon, who appears in a garden with “a long crooked stick [that he uses] to stir around in the coils of a blindworm or a grass snake”—obvious phallic symbols—an image of Susan’s latent evil nature and sensual cravings leads to the interpretation that Susan resents her husband’s infidelities and wishes for equal sexual freedom. Her statement describing the devil as one who “wants to get into me and to take me over” might seem to support such a theory. However, a feminist evaluation, and Lessing has been called a feminist writer, or a Freudian interpretation in “Young Goodman Brown” style offers no clarification of the reasons for and consequences of Susan’s inability to attain individuation. Ironically, Jung, who has been criticized for his “failure to understand feminine consciousness, with consequent errors in literary evaluations and interpretations,” has the illuminating theory that adds great depth and understanding to Lessing’s Susan. A Jungian interpretation of the devil and the accompanying phallic symbols gives insight to Susan’s demon and Susan’s female consciousness simultaneously. As Susan later says in regard to making love, “The idea made her want to cry with sheer exhaustion. She had finished with all that . . . [it] made her want to run away and hide from the sheer effort of the thing.” Clearly, a Freudian analysis fails to understand the nature of Susan’s trauma. There is much more at stake than latent physical desire.

The devil, as the personification of Susan’s animus in Jungian theory, as the complement to her Ego, as the Self who reveals the deficiencies in Susan’s life and character, is an ally rather than an enemy. His stick is still a phallic symbol, but one which represents potency, life, and strength rather than sexual desire. The second time Susan sees him, he carries a “leafy twig.” Indeed the leaves are evidence of the life-producing capabilities of the twig. Susan’s trauma has resulted from her subjugation of her talents and strengths—“her old firm, missing her qualities of humour, balance, and sense, invited her often to go back”—to her husband—she is “now dependent on a husband for outside interests and money”—and to her children—“Children needed their mother to a certain age, that both parents knew and agreed on.” Susan is impotent. She needs to recognize the power, the wholeness, the strength her devil/animus represents and incorporate him, allow him “to get into [her]” and complete the process of individuation, “a conscious dialectic relationship between ego and Self.”

Tragically, Susan fails to understand and accept her animus. She erroneously looks for health by rejecting both her Self and her current role as mother and wife and by seeking solitude in Room Nineteen in a dingy hotel. Jung says, “The connection between ego and Self is vitally important to psychic health. . . . When the connection is broken the result is emptiness, despair, meaninglessness and in extreme cases psychosis or suicide.” Obviously, Susan’s solitude is not healing. Her condition deteriorates until she is “impelling herself from point to point like a moth dashing itself against a windowpane” and finally enters Room Nineteen for the last time to “[listen] to the faint soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her brain.” The nature of Susan’s demon is understood and her actions and subsequent suicide are predictable when a Jungian approach is applied.

Source: Irene G. Watson, “Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen,’” in Explicator, Vol. 47, No. 3, Spring 1989, pp. 54–55.