Use of Setting and Color in Doris Lessing’s short story T

Use of Setting and Color in Doris Lessing’s short story To Room Nineteen

Susan Rawling, main character in Doris Lessing’s short story “To Room Nineteen”, fights against her inner emptiness and the choices she ought to make. This painful battle ends up determining an alienated attitude towards her life. In order to express this psychological process, Lessing discreetly describes how the character differently views her surroundings along the story, making use of elements in Susan´s surroundings, including the starkness of her white house to represent her troublesome emotional status, and later using color and interior descriptions to appear to draw Susan away from her internal alienation through what seems to be her only choice: suicide.

At the onset of the story, Susan Rawling lives in a large, white, seemingly empty house. Scarcely can the reader find any detailed description of both the house and the furniture this house is bound to have in it. Her surroundings symbolize her internal emptiness, her sense of separation from other people, and even her separation from herself: “ In that case why did Susan feel as if life had become a desert , and tha

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When Rawling enters Room 19 of Fred’s Hotel – a place no one is aware of - the surroundings are paramount to a representation of her freedom, and the colors represent the garden that she attempted to use for her release as well as the colors that were not present in her earlier life: “The room was hideous . Besides, the distinct contrast between her surroundings during her struggles and alienation, and the surroundings at the time of death demonstrates the transformation on her way of perceiving the world : (…) “ and ascended the grimy stairs slowly, letting floor after floor fall away below her. This way it can be perceived that not even the garden is a safe place: “Well, one day she saw him. However, Rawling’s decision to kill herself in this room is her means of escape after her husbands finding out about the existence of this refuge of hers. There, in room 19, Susan can at last have a setting of her own where she can have her own thoughts. Susan, incapable of drawing any kind of attention to neither herself nor her surroundings , can only perceive her life - fours kids, a husband and house - as a demanding structure she must manage: “For she knew tha tthis structure – big white house, on which the mortgage still cost four hundred a year, a husband, so good and kind and insightful; four children, all doing so nicely; all this depended on her”(…).

All in all, the main character in Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” takes her own life so to free herself from her alienation. Susan, incapable of getting rid of the demon - her painful struggle against inner emptiness -ends up once seeing the demon sitting on a bench. She waited for the demon to appear and claim her, but did not”.

It is not until Susan searches and finds a means of her escape from her personal battle that she is able to demonstrate the resolution to her struggle. It had a single window, with green brocade curtains, a three-quarter bed that had a cheap green satin bedspread on it, a fireplace with a gas fire and a shilling meter by it, a chest of drawers, a green wicker and an armchair. Her strained quest as well as the changes in her environment, represented by the author through the use of color and the presence of distinguishable physical characteristics, represent the character´s different pattern of choice.

Approximate Word count = 799
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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