Doris Lessing's "To Room 19"

Doris Lessing's "To Room 19" -- the similarities between Susan Rawlings and women today On the surface, it might seem as if women today share few emotional and practical commonalities with the protagonist of Doris Lessing's short story "To Room Nineteen." The central figure seems hemmed in by conventional norms more typical of the early 20th century, namely the belief that a woman should have no life beyond her husband and child.

However, upon a deeper examination of Lessing's portrayal, it is possible to see striking similarities between Susan Rawlings' plight, and the plight of women who are unable to find their own place, and own space in the world today. Even if a woman has a career as well as a family, there is no guarantee that her family will give her the necessary emotional space and time to develop herself as an independent personality.

The plot of the story is fairly simple: Susan Rawlings, feeling unfulfilled and bored after her children are all in school and no longer need her constant attention, hires a room in a cheap motel, Room 19, where she can be completely alone several times a week. "What did she do in the room? Why, nothing at all. From the chair, when it had rested her, she went to the window, stretching her arms, smiling, treasuring her anonminity, to look out.

She was no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs. Parkes and of Sophie Traub…She was Mrs. Hones, and she was alone, and she had no past and no future…there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles….if I never saw any of my family again, here I would still be… (Lessing 1015). Susan needs this time alone to reaffirm her separate self in a way that she cannot as a mother in her home environment.

Eventually, she becomes more and more drawn to her solitary life, and even hires an au pair to take care of her children because she feels so distanced from her married life. She is, in some sense, 'cheating' with herself, on her husband Matthew. Away from her husband, Susan no longer feels a need to be the perfect wife and mother. This also implies that she is free of conventionally constructed gender norms regarding femininity and her place in the world.

Even today, women who strive to 'have it all' often feel as if they must meet a specific standard of perfection, as if their lives must meet conventional, commercial status markets of success in terms of the beauty of their homes and the beauty of their bodies. In fact, in the world of Desperate Housewives, the pressure may be even greater in terms of the standards women feel compelled to meet.

Also, women, because they often must work to ensure that their families are solvent, may feel continually torn in terms of their identity -- they cannot 'win' either as mothers are career women. They too may feel tempted to seek a Room 19, as this secret life becomes a kind of half-way house for women like Susan, where they can feel some peace and comfort because they are outside of the demands placed upon them in terms of work and family.

Women cannot find a Room 19 in the home because, as seen in the case of Susan, she feels intense guilt when she wants to pull away from the needy grasping of her young children. In Room 19, she is not a mother, merely herself. Some might argue that Susan's problem is a lack of sexual, rather than personal fulfillment. It is true that Lessing stresses from the very beginning of her short story that the Rawlings' marriage was founded in rationality, and supposed defiance of romantic conventions.

The couple married in their late twenties, almost by accident, given that they were usually the type of people to whom others came for romantic advice, not people who were the subjects of romance. But Lessing frames their coupling in terms of identity construction, not sexual attraction or sexual frustration: "They had played the same roles, male and female, in this group or set, if such a wide….constellation of people could be called a set" (Lessing 996).

In her language, Lessing first suggests the idea of 'roles,' namely how men and women play roles in society rather than live as their true, inner selves. Before they are married, Susan and Matthew actually play similar roles amongst their friends in an androgynous fashion: "It was one of those cases of a man and a woman linking themselves whom no one else had every thought of linking, probably because of their similarities' (Lessing 996).

Before marriage, some sexual ambiguity is allowed -- both work in the same profession (the media), Susan works as a commercial drawer, Matthew as an editor. But instantly, when they marry, everyone in their set breathes a sigh of relief that the man and woman have done what they are supposed to do. Susan becomes pregnant, quits her job and they move into a new apartment in a conventional, fashionable area of London. Even the order in which Susan has her children, a son first, is considered correct.

Once they are placed within the social institution of marriage, both of them began to lose their individuality, but particularly Susan. Although Susan and Matthew try not to sacrifice everything for the sake of their children, the absence of purpose in Susan's life make her constantly wonder who she is beyond a fairly dull marriage to a man with a fairly dull occupation. Matthew, even if he is not perfectly happy, never questions the fact that he does not have a self that is worthy of fulfillment.

To this emptiness Susan takes refuge in Room 19. Of course, some modern women balancing full-time work and motherhood might say that this type of time and boredom and loneliness Susan experiences is a luxury. Yet the hectic pace of modern life also makes a Room 19 even more of a needed respite for modern-day women. Competitive admissions, even to nursery school, demand that children are eternally stimulated by academic achievement programs, sports, and other enrichment activities designed to get them into the best colleges and graduate programs.

"A society that measures status in consumer goods and hard-to-come-by symbols of achievement -- grades, awards, brand-name colleges -- the scramble for advantage is bound to propel American upper-middle-class parents into exponentially goofier displays of one-upmanship" and mothers bear the brunt of that burden, whether they are working or not (Shulevitz 2005). These activities often mean that mothers must eternally ferry their students back and forth in a car, without any chance to do things just for themselves.

Even when occupied, they are occupied with the needs of others which can make them feel as empty as Susan, when she takes the twins to school: "First, I spent twelve years of my adult life working, living my own life. Then I married and from the moment I became pregnant for the first time I signed myself over, so to speak, to other people. To the children. Not for one moment in twelve years have I been alone, had time to myself.

So now I have to learn to be myself again. That's all" she says (Lessing 1002). In the story, Matthew Rawlings has little understanding of his wife's needs and her emotional desperation. He is not an absent father and husband, physically. Lessing stresses that the Rawlings have arranged their marriage so that Matthew does not spend long times in the city, working, while his wife and children are at home.

As men and women spend less time together, even though they are married, they grow less understanding of one another, Lessing suggests: this is inherent to the human condition in a socially imposed, artificially idealized institution like marriage where men and women play rigid roles. "The good marriage, the house, the children, depended just as much on his voluntary bondage as it did on hers. But why did he not feel bound?" (1006).

The answer, Lessing suggests, is because women must feel as if they cannot feel selfishness, because they have no individual outlet and world that is just for themselves. "Why didn't he chafe and become restless? No there was something really wrong with her, and this proved it," thinks Susan, although Lessing.