I came to Doris Lessing’s story ‘To Room Nineteen’ several years after reading her complex and multi-layered novel The Golden Notebook. Originally published in Lessing’s short story collection A Man and Two Women in 1963, the story takes place in 1960’s London.
In her short story ‘To Room Nineteen,’ Lessing develops some of the same themes of The Golden Notebook, though the female protagonist is not a writer. She is one of hundreds of thousands of women who stopped work to raise a family in the 1960’s, only to find themselves lost and invisible amidst the detritus of family life.
Lessing clearly had a nuanced understanding of the conflict arising between work and motherhood to have covered it so often and succinctly, and reportedly stated that she felt she had no choice but to leave her first two children behind with her ex-husband in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) when she moved to the UK, in order to focus on her writing.
‘For a long time I felt I had done a very brave thing. There is nothing more boring for an intelligent woman than to spend endless amounts of time with small children. I felt I wasn't the best person to bring them up. I would have ended up an alcoholic or a frustrated intellectual like my mother.’
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, only the eleventh woman and oldest person to do so at that time, the awarding Swedish Academy described her as: “that epicist of the female experience”.
In ‘To Room Nineteen’ Lessing shows us a representation of a generic couple of the era, Martin and Susan, who meet and marry a little later than their circle of friends. This feels important, as both have decent careers and are portrayed as equals. They have four healthy children and that epitome of middle-class solidity: the large suburban house.
So far, Lessing has portrayed a somewhat ‘golden couple’, and the reader can sense that it is only a matter of time before this ideal will come crashing down. In fact, their perfection feels overstated a little as she explains that many may feel that this woman has nothing much to complain about.
‘It was typical of this couple that they had a son first, then a daughter, then twins, son and daughter. Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for, if they could choose’.
The narrator tells us that the pattern followed by this couple is still what is the accepted norm of an ideal marriage in the early 1960’s. She does allow, however, that there is a certain ‘flatness’, and that the whole success of the marriage and perfect family life depends upon Matthew’s job and Susan’s ‘practical intelligence’ not allowing the whole to collapse. The reason for this flatness for Susan appears to be the all-consuming role of mother, after giving up work to stay at home.
‘But children can’t be a centre of life and a reason for being’.
This appears to be the crux of the conflict as Lessing also makes remarks such as children not being a ‘wellspring to live from’, issuing a thinly veiled warning to women not to allow themselves to fall into this trap.
‘And she told him about her day (not as interesting, but that was not her fault)…’
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