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

A detailed Summary of 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

t nothing mattered, and that her children were not her own?" (p. 668). Her alienation appears to be linked not only to her surroundings but also to her shaping of those surroundings and her view of their importance in defining her own emptiness. 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"(...). (p.672)

All in all, the main character in Lessing's "To Room Nineteen" takes her own life so to free herself from her alienation. 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. Susan´s death is a decision to put an end to the her struggle, and the change of environment provides Rawling's with the capacity to make this choice.

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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 799
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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