Initially, there seems little to suggest that either Susan or Matthew are prepared to challenge society's norms in any way. Why should they? On the surface, they appear to have it all: a happy marriage, four lovely children, and a nice house in the suburbs. They enjoy the privilege of leading a truly blissful life, a generous reward conferred upon them by middle-class society for their outward conformity to its mores.
The Rawlings epitomise the stifling social conventions of middle-class English suburban life in the early 1960s. Matthew has a respectable job and is the sole breadwinner; Susan is a homemaker whose whole life revolves around domestic chores and taking care of the children. Nothing could be more conventional.
Yet, neither Susan nor Matthew see themselves as being in any way subject to a mindless, stultifying conformity. On the contrary, in living out their socially allotted roles, both of them genuinely believe themselves to be behaving in a perfectly rational manner. They have always prided themselves on making the right decisions in life. On a number of occasions in the story, Lessing uses the word "sensible" to describe them. We have no reason to doubt that they are, for that is precisely what they appear to be.
All that changes when the little ones are finally packed off to school. It is instructive that the seeds of tragedy are sown at this precise moment in time. As she sits there at home all alone, Susan realizes that her role as a mother has been severely circumscribed, depriving her life of whatever meaning it may once have had. This forces her to reflect upon her life to date, to question whether she and her husband have indeed made the right choices in life. Susan unconsciously seems to be reconnecting with her instinct, a feminine instinct stifled and suppressed by both her husband and society, one seemingly lost forever, cast into outer darkness on her wedding day.
She cannot truly connect. Therein lies her tragedy. Susan has been living in a bubble all these years, her perfect suburban existence untainted by pain. When pain finally does intrude unceremoniously into her little world, the pain of separation and the pain of adultery, she simply does not know how to cope effectively. Her inherited social world has been rendered utterly meaningless, yet she patently lacks the wherewithal to construct a world of her own. This way madness lies.
She cannot and will not consciously challenge society's norms; she is by no means a strident feminist yearning to throw off the yoke of patriarchal repression. However, Susan does nonetheless act as a symbol for a nascent feminist consciousness, one that would achieve full flower within a few short years after To Room Nineteen was published. For Lessing, it is a telling indictment of British society in the early 1960s that a woman can only truly achieve a sense of liberation by retreating into a world of insanity and suicide.
By doing so, Susan finally breaks down the instinct/reason dichotomy which she was forced to confront as her whole world began to collapse around her. As a "mad woman," she has rejected the constricting roles bourgeois English society has imposed upon her. She is deemed to have failed in performing her role as mother and wife. Despite this, there is still method to Susan's madness. Ironically, she has achieved a higher degree of rationality than either she or the society she has now abandoned ever previously possessed. Matthew, who as a bourgeois male has no real need to challenge society's norms, still remains trapped in a world of constructed rationality in which the old certainties retain their irresistible hold upon his limited imagination.
Between the ostensibly rational, yet ultimately meaningless realm of bourgeois respectability and the ostensibly irrational, yet ultimately hyper-rational, creative world of madness, there can be no meaningful communication. That is why Susan is forced to construct the phantom figure of a wholly fictitious lover to account to Matthew for her descent into madness. It is the only language he can understand; the sensible discourse of the society that continues even now to mould him as his wife heads towards her sad, lonely demise.
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