Collected Stories to Room Nineteen Paperback – January 1, 2002

So, I am still reading through the rest of the stories but I bought the book specifically for “To Room Nineteen”. I’ve been obsessed ever since

The book contained the selection I needed for a literature class; it arrived promptly and I was ready to complete my readings! What a relief!!!

It's a great book but had to wait 2 week to be delivered.

A Man and Two Women is another great one. I wanted to add, about To Room 19, that in room 19 in the British Museum is kept the statue of a Greek caryatid, one of the "Elgin Marbles" stolen by Lord Elgin from Greece. This statue of a young woman was heard to weep in her crate as she was shipped to England. Quite possibly, Lessing meant to refer to this in her story of a woman who feels so trapped in life that death is her only escape. The caryatid is also trapped in death. Eerie.

Doris Lessing's excellent short-story "To Room Nineteen" is doubtless an extraordinary piece of literature. It is a story about a failure in intelligence, about depression, suffering, disintegration, alienatation and finally - about suicide. There are many approaches to this text: For example, one can read it as a psychological case study especially by using Freud's ideas about the "id" and the "super-ego". The super-ego is obviously the ethically aware element, restricted by morality principles, whereas the id, which stands in direct contradiction, represents the source of all our psychic energies. It is the source of our aggressions and desires. The protagonist, Susan Rawlings, is kind of torn between these psychic zones: her entire life is marked by doing things intelligent and sensible, but later on, when she is in her early forties, she gets to understand that she is ruined by the very achievement of her goals - goals that are determined by society. Therefore, the message of the text is that it is irreperably wrong to do everything right by society standards and means. Susan has everything she wanted: a good-looking husband, lovely children and a house in the suburbs, but some day, when her husbands confesses an affair, her orderly planned world collapsed. Slowly but surely she comprehens that her rational world was only a fake and not much more than a big misconception. Henceforth she tries to develop different strategies to cope with that new insight. All she needs is a space, or a state of affairs where it would not be necessary to keep reminding herself on all the boring bits that life demanded from her. Since she can't find solitude in her own house she looks for a hotel room, in which she sits, thinks and stares into empty space. Here she finds complete isolation that helps her regenerating. Unfortunately, one day the room loses its revitalising effect, because her husband suspected that she is having an affair and engages a detective to keep a watch on her. Susan goes a last time to the hotel, turns the gas on and drifts off into the dark river.