“As she drifted off into the dark river”. Linguaggio, silenzio e pazzia in To Room Nineteen di Doris Lessing

Abstract

The article analyses how Doris Lessing's short story To Room Nineteen (1963) is a particularly relevant case study because it stages the crisis of language and the very possibility of adopting the realist fiction by inscribing them in the crisis of a female character who questions the traditional roles socially attributed to women. The essay opens with an exploration of Lessing's literary background and her complex relationship with the Marxist literary theories of the 1940s and continues with a close-reading of the text to show how the textual strategy of employing madness, the protagonist's silence and her final suicide are used a form of resistance to speak out against the phallus-logic-centric symbolic order by questioning the mimetic quality of language. The article concludes with an analysis of the chronotope of the room to show the intertextual dialogue with the works of Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys that allow Lessing's short story to be placed within a feminist genealogical approach.

Keywords

• doris lessing
• language
• feminist literary criticism
• intertextuality
• female identity