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Article: Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen.'.(short story by Doris Lessing)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- March 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In her illuminating discussion of Doris Lessing's debt to T. S. Eliot, Claire Sprague traces allusions to The Waste Land and other poems in four of Lessing's novels.(1) In addition to those instances, The Waste Land is also an important subtext in Lessing's short story "To Room Nineteen." Charting the failure of communication and subsequent decline of love in a mid-twentieth-century marriage, Lessing both pursues one of Eliot's most central themes in The Waste Land and writes back from the woman's point of view.
"To Room Nineteen" addresses Eliot's tableau in part 2 of The Waste Land that features a woman sitting before a mirror, brushing her hair:
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