도리스 레싱의 「19호실로」

Abstract

This essay examines that social institutions, cultural patterns, and social relations have contributed to restricting women's lives and pushing women to unequal status in Doris Lessing's “To Room Nineteen.” Modern ethics and political theories emphasized the impartial point of view of reason that rational subjects should have, and excluded women from citizenship on the grounds that they did not fit the model of the rational citizen capable of transcending body and sentiment. In addition, according to the concept of the ideal citizen in modern political ideas, individual citizens were rational, self-sufficient and independent rather than relational and interdependent. Therefore, vulnerability, dependency, interdependency, or caring were not considered ideal civic attributes. As the concept of citizenship rested on independence and political culture intensified gender difference, new and gendered senses of dependency appeared. And dependency was constructed gradually in a feminine sense and was stigmatized, and furthermore, deepened contempt for caring and caring laborers. Women appeared to personify dependency and were denigrated as subordinate status. Thus, modern ethics and political theories denigrating women as dependents have performed ideological functions of obscuring more emancipatory social relations and reproducing women's oppression. “To Room Nineteen” begins with the narrator's remark, “a story about a failure in intelligence.” In “To Room Nineteen,” intelligence is related to modern ethical and political theories based on reason and rationality that justify women's subordinate status, and these theories can be considered to have failed in that they led to injustice to women. The narrator refers to this failure as “a failure in intelligence.” This essay argues that the institutions, cultural patterns and social relations based on the ideals of modern civil society have caused the structural and institutionalized oppression and inequality of women, and they have leaded to injustice that have deprived women of the means and opportunities to exercise and develop their capabilities. In addition, this essay also argues that a political responsibility is needed to overcome this injustice and to practice organizational action for change, and citizens as participants in social processes should share this responsibility.