To Room Nineteen

To Room Nineteen is a story about Susan Rawling, a well-off, happily married woman who gradually loses her sanity
and
ends up killing herself in the room of a seedy motel for no apparent reason. Why does she do this, and what could
Lessings character tell us about women in general?

Susan Rawling can be seen as a woman trying to break away from the social demands of her gender. Susan Rawling,
mother of four, wife of Mathew, employer of Mrs. Parkes is nothing else than the description of the so called 'Angel in
the House' -- the collective attributes of her social role and the responsibilities society demanded of a woman ever since
Victorian times. As she grows disenchanted with her role as a mother and starts to resent her own family, Susan
wonders whether something is wrong with her, the term wrong pointing to how hard she is on herself and how little
she is able to accept her emotions.

While Susans madness can be explained as the result of the clash between her impulsive, messy, complex personality
and the orderliness of the Victorian Angel, it can also be seen as resulting from the conflict between her private wishes
and the public expectations that were placed on her, and on women in general.

As some critics show, the conflict between the private and the public is pervasive in Lessings work - or, as Lessing
herself puts it, what pervades is a study of the individual conscience in its relations with the collective (Lessing, 1959
cited in Sukenick, 1973: 518). Many of Lessings characters are haunted by impulses that are later checked and
countered by an intelligence which ensures the division between thinking and feeling (Sukenick, 1973: 521). This
rationality is seen as completely overlapping with the personality of these female characters.

A pioneer in the field of psychiatric treatment of schizophrenia who has coined the so-called antipsychiatric movement,
R.D. Laing was, just like Lessing, preoccupied with the division between the private self and the public self. As Marion
Vlastos shows in a particularly insightful article (1976), Lessing views madness as an alternative to political reform and is
not alone in doing so. Laing believes that madness offers a reflection of society in two ways: firstly, the schizophrenics
dissociated self epitomizes the division of the society itself (between the private and the public consciousness) and
secondly, the mentally ill have access to those realms of existence that conventional man has either denied or never
known (Vlastos, 1976: 246).

While I cannot ascertain whether Lessing indeed views madness per se as societys salvation, I feel that at least in To
Room Nineteen what she does is use Susans madness as an excuse for presenting and acquainting the reader with a
different ethical view and a different possible world; in this sense, we could say the story is utopian. Laing suggests,
through the voice of one of his patients, that schizophrenics in a way sacrifice themselves for the good of the society
that, paradoxically, has driven them mad in the first place. Although it is important to remember that schizophrenia
remains a serious mental illness, its use as a literary device can suggest that those who have attempted to re-create
themselves according to a different set of values - are being chastised and marginalised. These cases of unjust
confinement owe a lot to the invasion of the public, all-pervasive reason into the private lives of these characters.

To conclude with another of Vlastos remarks, those () able to achieve schizophrenic insight without losing their
sanity, are in both Laings and Lessings terms most capable of furthering the development of humanity(1976: 253).
What better way is there to achieve such an insight if not by having an emotional, artistic experience as readers, an
experience that expands our imagination and increases our ability to empathise? To empathise with a woman who
doesnt quite feel like fulfilling the roles expected of her. A woman who wants to be a woman in a different way than
what society has prepared for her.

To Room Nineteen

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To Room Nineteen is a story about Susan Rawling, a well-off, happily married woman who gradually loses her sanity

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