A 5 page paper looking at this compelling story by Doris Lessing. The paper discusses the protagonist's difficulty in separating her emotional needs from her culture's expectations of women's roles. No additional sources. A 12 page paper on Doris Lessing's 1973 novel, using it as a point of departure to discuss women's cultural roles in contemporary Western society. A Reader as well as five other critical sources are used to help explain the protagonist's complex behavior.
Bibliography lists nine sources.
Doris Lessing's story 'To Room Nineteen' is a story about the repression of the human spirit and seeming unending emptiness and personal alienation that come as a result of social, cultural and even ethnic divisions. Susan Rawling, Lessing's main character, vacillates between sanity and insanity, and her struggle to escape the accompanying alienation comes through a view of her surroundings. This 2 page considers this argument by considering the action in Lessing's work. No additional sources cited. To say that women have had to fight for their existence within the literary world would be a gross understatement.