Critical questions
- In what way, according to the narrator, is this story about a "failure of intelligence?"
- Why doesn't Matthew "feel bound" by his responsibilities? Why does Susan feel more constrained?
- Why does Susan invent Michael Plant?
- Why does Susan do "nothing at all" in room nineteen? What does the room symbolize?
- Why does Susan kill herself? When does she make the decision? Is her death a defeat?
- Is Lessing echoing Virginia Woolf's dictum that a woman must find a room of her own?
For discussion
- Is this story about a special case of a failed marriage? Or a generalization about marriages?
- Is suicide ever an act of personal integrity?
- How do we balance the need for personal freedom and fulfillment against the commitments to others?
Besides Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (as referenced in the questions), the other work that To Room Nineteen reminded me of was Ibsen's A Doll's House:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtSGp72hoXE (start at 2:35)
A Doll's House ends with Nora walking out on her husband and children in search of a new life for herself. When the play premiered, there was such an outcry against this ending that Ibsen was forced to write an alternate ending, in which Nora collapses in tears, desperate and miserable but unable to leave her children. Ibsen himself resented this alternate ending and called it "a barbaric act of violence."
To me, Lessing's story is a modern reincarnation of this same dilemma--the same tension played out through different language and symbols. Unlike Nora and Torvald, Matthew and Susan are too "intelligent" to imbue the construct of marriage with much power of its own. To them, marriage is simply an outward manifestation of their private reality. While this removes pressure and self-consciousness from their marriage, it also deprives Susan of the escape that Nora finds in divorce. Nora's prison is societal. Her decision to walk out represents a radical break with others' expectations from her, but not with her expectations of herself. Nora's "enemy" is external, and this allows her to preserve her inner strength and integrity of thought. Susan, on the other hand, has internalized her prison. Her husband is good to her, her children are just what everyone hopes for, and she herself is recognized as a rational advice-giver. This lack of external tension leads Susan to embrace her life and the trappings that come with it. When she realizes she wants to change, she has no external symbol to rally herself against. The "devil" is something that only she can see. While Susan's overall situation in life is arguably more agreeable than Nora's, it also proves to be far more insidious.
A question I was left with is this: Was there something about the feminine nature of Susan's midlife identities, apart from the fact that as a mother she belonged entirely to other people, that left her empty when they evaporated? (For example, in the video clip Nora references the fact that she has denigrated herself in an attempt to protect her husband.) Or was it simply that Susan's individuality had been so deeply submerged by motherhood that she couldn't find it when she looked?