《 To Room Nineteen》
ATLALNTIS 29.1 (June2007): 107??122
ISSN 0210-6124
LE55ING’s ‘To ROOM NINETEEN’: SUSAN’S VOYAGE INTO THE
INNER SPACE OF ‘ELSEWHERE’
Rula Quawas
University of Jordan, Amman
For there is never anywhere to go but in.
Doris Lessing, Epigraph to
Briefing for a Descent into
Hell
She must learn again to speak
starting with I
starting with We
starting as the infant does with her own hunger
and pleasure
and rage.
＊＊
Marge Piercy, ‘Unlearniig
to not Speak’
Doris Lessing draws extensively on women’s inner, private experiences and on their departure from the unsatisfactory reality of life in an alienated and alienating society. In ‘To Room Nineteen’ (1978), she depicts a woman who wearies of the role of sustainer and comforter, and having had her fill of everything, resists the culturally stultifying enclosures and constraints, discards the various garments and social roles she has worn and adopted, retreats into 11cr own room and experiences her own ‘elsewhere’, that consciousness that she retreats to for renewal, which bespeaks a world of potential actions and possibilities for human renewal. Her self-willed death is not a defeat. Rather than regressing back to the old self and abdicating self-knowledge and self-rule, she decides to remain true to the authentic self that she has discovered. Her death is a means of resisting the crushing, culturally enforced image of woman, and of positing a new politics of identity, as a first step toward bringing into the culture new formulations, new cultural alternatives, new language, for experiences which patriarchy has forced into repression.