Doris Lessing
 
 
Persian born to British parents, wrote much on racism, communism, feminism and other social and political issues.

The theme of self-destruction occurs in several of Lessing's works which relate the deterioration of the individual or of society more generally.  The pattern of self-destruction typically proceeds through three phases: 1) attempts to preserve self-control, 2) a growing preference for isolation or detachment on the part of the individual, and 3) a commitment to asceticism, living life on its simplest, barest terms.

"To Room Nineteen" is the last in a cycle of stories about the "mindless task of motherhood."  In the preceding story the heroine was an artist, but and when she becomes a mother, the "baby's killed everything creative" within her.

There is some debate over whether or not "To Room Nineteen" is a pointedly feminist story.  Asked this question, Lessing says that she does write "from inside a woman's viewpoint," but she maintains that she is "essentially writing about 'the rights of the individual.'"  Elsewhere Lessing says that she has "assumed that that filter which is a woman's way of looking at life has the same validity as the filter which is a man's way."

Lessing herself claims that the story is more about "woman's vulnerability than man's culpability"—which is not to say that men are blameless in this story. . . .  She says also, "I like Room Nineteen, the depressing piece about people who have everything, who are intelligent and educated, who have a home and two or three or four beautiful children, and have few worries, and yet ask themselves 'What for?'  This is all to typical of so many Europeans—and, I gather, so many Americans."

Which side of this debate you side with may depend on whether you see the primary conflict in the story as being the plight of the typical upper-middle class housewife who has to sacrifice herself for her family, or whether you see the conflict as the opposition of "intelligence" and emotion.  There are, of course, other possible interpretations.

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