The ‘Rooms’ in Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor
The use of the “room” is a Doris Lessing motif that often represents worlds or states of being that mirror the “real” world in which her protagonists exist. In The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), the physical condition and material content of Lessing’s rooms gradually reveal to the protagonist the state of her life in the present and signal changes or discoveries she must make in order to reach the new and better world represented by other rooms.
On the initial visit behind the wall of her living room, Lessing’s protagonist finds herself “transported” into an unknown chamber while experiencing a sense of belonging and familiarity: “I knew this place, recognised [sic] it . . . this place held what I needed, knew was there, had been waiting for . . . all my life” (13). She even sees a “face, or the shadow of one . . . . This was the rightful inhabitant of the rooms behind the wall . . . . The exiled inhabitant; for surely she could not live . . . in that chill empty shell full of dirty and stale air?” (14). Unknowingly, the protagonist views herself; she is the exiled inhabitant removed from a world no longer fit to live in, the real world she currently finds herself a part of. The significance of feeling as though belonging behind the wall has not yet been made clear to her.
Later, when again behind the wall and exploring the many rooms, the protagonist once more feels comfort and even recognizes the furniture in one room: “I knew these sofas, these chairs. But why? From what time in my life did they date? . . . . It seemed they had been mine, or an intimate friend’s” (24). Through this sense of familiarity, Lessing continues to signal her protagonist that this is the place in which she belongs, the place she must strive to reach. The protagonist does take notice of the dilapidated condition of the room and its furnishings; she even contemplates the work required to put things in order: “Everything I looked at would have to be replaced or mended or cleaned, for nothing was whole or fresh . . . . There was no end to . . . the work I had to do” (24–25). But still she does not relate these rooms behind the wall to herself or her life. She does not see that the work required by the rooms represents the work she must do within her real life in order to reach a place of improved quality: “Two worlds lay side by side and closely connected. But then, one life excluded the other, and I did not expect the two worlds ever to link up” (25).
However, upon her next visit to the rooms, the protagonist, for the first time, sees that what goes on behind the wall might relate to her real life. After cleaning a long, tall, deep-ceilinged room also familiar, thus restoring it to its original beauty, memories from her real life conflict with the feelings and emotions of the room:
“One [memory] was . . . nagging and tugging at me that the pavements where the fires had burned and the trees had scorched were part of the stuff and the substance of this room. But there was the tug of nostalgia for the room itself, the life that had been lived there, that would continue . . . . It was about then I understood that the events on the pavements and what went on between me and Emily might have a connection with what I saw on my visits behind the wall.” (40–41, 40)
This room represents the collapsed world she and Emily live in, a world that will continue to exist but one that will require work and repair to realize its potential for renewal.
On subsequent visits behind the wall, Lessing’s protagonist finds rooms she once cleaned now dirty and destroyed; still, “it was always a liberation to step away from my ‘real’ life into this other place, so full of possibilities, of alternatives” (64). She now begins to see that the work found here will always continue, but that this work entitles her entry into another world full of possibilities and alternatives. A portion of this continuing work involves repainting several of the rooms white. One completed room was as “white as new snow or fire china. It was like standing inside a cleaned-out eggshell” (65). When later trying to locate this same room, expecting it destroyed like the others, she cannot find it: “I never saw that room again. And it was not that I looked for it and failed to find it . . . . Would it be accurate to say that I forgot it?” (65). The act of repainting the dirty rooms represents a cleansing or purification. She has resolved certain conflicts in her real life that in the past prevented her from moving fully into the rooms behind the wall; she is now free to move on to other areas that may also require work or purification in order for her to live properly. But these “discoveries” or “changes” are not tasks completed or forgotten, they simply mark the infinite number of small steps that reach toward a new and better world.
Knowing now that these experiences behind the wall have changed her, the protagonist ponders the other secrets the rooms must surely hold:
“A restlessness, a hunger that had been with me all my life, that had always been accompanied by a rage of protest . . . was being assuaged. I found that I was more often simply waiting. I watched to see what would happen next. I observed. I looked at every new event quietly, to see if I could understand it.” (100)
At one point, in her impatience for further discovery, she tries to deliberately get behind the wall: “I stood there a long time looking and waiting . . . . I went up and pressed my palms against it . . . trying everything to make the heavy solidity of the thing go down under the pressure of my will. It was nonsense, I knew that” (148). Not yet having reached the required level of understanding, the protagonist is not ready to enter the rooms or world behind the wall; more work and learning must still take place.
“As that summer ended,” observes the protagonist, “there was as bad a state of affairs in the space behind the wall as on this side, with us . . . . The disorder there had never been so great . . . . I cannot begin to give an idea of the mess in those rooms . . . . Already there was a corpse, with dried blood staining the carpet around it” (155–56). Again, the rooms represent the collapsed state of the real world and remind that work toward renewal, while never complete, must always continue. If ignored or taken for granted, deterioration takes place rapidly. The bleeding corpse warns of and exemplifies the severe decay of the real world.
“And yet,” the protagonist continues, “with all these evidences of destructiveness . . . . I found this: I was in a garden between four walls . . . and there was a fresh delightful sky above me that I knew was the sky of another world, not ours” (156–57). For Lessing, hope runs eternal. If one and all work toward renewal of the self, all as a group or society can move together to an improved state of existence, to a new and better world. But one must always keep in mind that self-improvement is never truly realized; self-improvement continues always for everyone. Knowing and practicing this self-improvement finally allows Lessing’s protagonist and her “tribe” access to the four-walled garden, the room behind the wall that embodies a renewed world sustained by individuals working together to live correctly as a whole.
