A Stylistic Analysis of To Room Nineteen

Abstract

Doris Lessing was a British woman writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2007. To Room Nineteen is the representative short novel that features her writing style. In this short novel, Doris Lessing narrates with exquisite style and literary languages an inexplicable tragic story of a female character Susan Rowling, a middle-aged full-time housewife from an affluent middle-class family. Many critics claim that Susan's suicide is a reflection of women's struggle in a patriarchal society, and Susan herself is the victim in the male-dominated society and culture. The purpose of this paper is to have a stylistic analysis of To Room Nineteen, and therefore to substantiate the above-mentioned literature critics' opinions on it. Through careful reading, studying and analyzing of this short novel's lexical features, we have drawn two conclusions: 1. a careful stylistic analysis on lexical features could help readers understand and evaluate a literary works' theme; here, in this short novel, the stylistic analysis has provided evidences to illustrate why the culprit of Susan's suicide is the patriarchal society, rather than the so-called failure in intelligence; 2. our stylistic analysis suggests that the influence of male-dominated society and culture is universal, broad, and deep, no matter whether the impacted subjects (especially females) are well-educated or not, intelligent or not, affluent or not. Susan in To Room Nineteen, a well-educated intelligent woman from an affluent family, could be considered as an epitome of millions of other women who, like Susan, suffer from the patriarchal control and who struggle to fight against it with their lives.