Dynamics of Spatial Topos in the Narration by Doris Lessing “To Room Nineteen”
Abstract
Marina S. Berezhnaya (Rostov-on-Don, Russian Federation)
The article deals with the poetics of spatial images in the story “To Room 19” (1963) by the famous British writer Doris Lessing. Complementing the psychoanalytic approaches traditionally taken by critics to the interpretation of the story, this study offers a “close reading” of the text with an emphasis on the semantics of marginal and “transit” spatial localizations devoid of social markers (the attic of the house, the hotel room, the rented room, the rented room at the railway station). The stages of the existential crisis of the heroine are presented in the dynamics of spatial topos: from the crisis of the patriarchal “idyllic space” of house (M. Bakhtin) through marginal and transit “non-places” (M. Auge) to final nothingness. The painful search for authentic “Self”, free from the roles prescribed by society, is associated with the search for the “room of one’s own” (V. Woolf). However, the space corresponding to the protagonist’s self-fulfillment is found in a rented room of the Paddington railway station hotel, in which she chooses to die.
Key words: Doris Lessing, “To Room Nineteen”, female identity, poetics of space, idyllic space, non-places, room of one’s own.
DOI 10.23683/1995-0640-2019-3-185-194
References
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References
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Binder C. From Innocence to Experience. (Re-)Constructions of Childhood in Victorian Women’s Autobiography. Trier, WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014. 402 p.
Gilbert S. and Gubar S. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979. New Haven and London, Yale UP, 1984.
Halisky L. Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room Nineteen’. Studies in Short Fiction, 1990, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 45-54.
Hunter E. Madness in Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen. English Studies in Africa, 1987, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 91-104.
Lessing D. “To Room Nineteen” Modern British Short Stories / ed. by Malcolm Bradbury, 1988. Pp. 150-180.
Majoul B. Doris Lessing: Poetics of Being and Time. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. Available at: cambridgescholars.com (accessed 22.02.2018).
Parrinder P. Descents into Hell: The Later Novels of Doris Lessing. Critical Quaterly, 1980, vol. 22, no. 4, p. 5.
Quawas R. Lessing’s ‘To Room Nineteen’: Susan’s Voyage into the Inner Space of ‘elsewhere’. Atlantis, 2007, vol. 29, no. 1, p.117.
Raschke D., Perrakis P., Singer S. (eds.) Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times. Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press, 2010.
Ridout, A., Watkins S. (eds) Doris Lessing: Border Crossings. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009. 192 p.
Showalter E. A Literature of Their Own: British Woman Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. London: Virago, 1978. pp.263-265, 282-297. (reprint in Eagleton M. (ed.). Feminist Literary Criticism. Routledge, 2013. 241 p.).
Watkins S. Doris Lessing. Contemporary World Writers Series. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2010. 256 p.
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