Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen”: Was it Suicide or Murder?

In this short story (1), Susan Rawlings, who has been more or less happily married with a husband and four school-aged children, decides that she needs to be alone, to go where she is not known as Susan Rawlings, where nobody can disturb her as she sits quietly in a “creative trance.” 

So she rents a room—Room Nineteen—under an assumed name in a cheap hotel. She enjoys her regular visits to Room Nineteen until her husband, suspecting that she’s having an affair, employs a detective, who finds out where she has been going. Susan feels that this ruins everything, so she goes to Room Nineteen, turns on the gas, and kills herself (at least that’s the way it looks).

Lessing does not want the reader to explain the apparent suicide either on feminist/sociological grounds—the kind of misinterpretation of The Golden Notebook that so upset Lessing, as noted in a past post—or as simply a psychotic depression, which are the two ways that this story is most commonly interpreted. Susan is disturbed, but rather than building a straightforward case for either of those causes, Lessing emphasizes idiosyncratic identity issues, suggesting an internal war or struggle.

Susan says, “I feel as if there is an enemy…waiting to invade me…” She felt that she was “not myself.” She was “subject to a state of mind she could not own.” “Something inside her howled with impatience, with rage.” “One day she saw him.” “She recognized the man around whom her terrors had crystallized. As she did so, he vanished.” “He wants to…take me over.”

That looks blatantly psychotic, but like Dostoevsky and The Double (see recent posts), Lessing is not writing “To Room Nineteen” because she had nothing better to do than describe a psychotic breakdown.

Susan commits suicide after she is no longer able to go to Room Nineteen and “let go into the dark creative trance…that she had found there…she craved for it, she was as ill as a suddenly deprived addict.”

What is this about “creative trance”? The phrase does not seem to fit in this narrative. Which I think makes it a clue to where the author is really coming from. In an interview (2) (unrelated to this story), Lessing said that “writing is an act of conscious self-hypnosis.” (In regard to self-hypnosis, see past post on the three things that Stephen King and Toni Morrison have in common.) So I think that this is a story about how Lessing would feel suicidal if she weren’t allowed to write.

But since Lessing had multiple personality (see past posts), I think it may be too simple to say that Lessing would have felt suicidal if she couldn’t write, since there would be multiple viewpoints involved. And in regard to this story, it may be that Susan’s writer personality (or at least her artistic personality, since Susan had once worked as a commercial artist) killed the non-artistic Susan identity in the expectation of being able to take over and write (or draw), making it, psychologically speaking, murder, not suicide.

I don’t insist on the details of this interpretation, since I don’t think even Lessing understood the source of her story. But I do think that the phrase “creative trance,” and all the talk in the story of an angry identity trying to take over, are valid clues.

1. Lessing, Doris. The Doris Lessing Reader. London, Jonathan Cape, 1989, pp. 25-55.

2. Rousseau, Francois-Olivier [interviewer]. “The Habit of Observing” [1985] pp.146-154, in Doris Lessing: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton NJ, Ontario Review Press, 1994.