Replaceable Women in Patriarchy: A Reason for Susan’s Suicide in Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen

Abstract

As an outstanding short story demonstrating female plights, To Room Nineteen of Doris Lessing discloses the oppression patriarchy exerts on women by describing the tragedy of a middle-aged female Susan restricted by patriarchal norms, owing to which the story is valuable for research. To have a deeper insight into the reasons for Susan’s suicide and more comprehensive understanding of the oppressive mechanism that male-dominant culture exercises on females, based on the focus of previous studies on Susan’s identity crisis, this paper attempts to supplement them by delving into four peripheral female characters who are short of attention yet: Mrs Parkes, Sophie Traub, Myra Jenkins and Phil Hunt, and through the analysis of their words and actions, this paper argues that they replace the patriarchy-constructed identities of Susan (a homemaker, a mother, a mistress and a sexual partner), which is an important contributor to Susan’s identity problems and subsequently her tragic ending. Regarding this phenomenon, this paper proposes a concept called replaceability, which means that the patriarchy-manufactured identities of females are replaceable, and finds that replaceability is an oppressive manoeuvre that patriarchy utilizes to govern women and guarantee the supremacy of males. Finally, this paper draws a conclusion that replaceability is a crucial factor resulting in Susan’s suicide.