Both “To Room Nineteen” and “The Midnight Zone” play with cultural fears and issues women have surrounding patriarchal expectations of motherhood, and by extension womanhood. The main women in the stories use two opposite approaches to address these issues, one by embracing the social role and one by rejecting it. Ultimately, the women’s struggles and perceived failures overtake them at the end of their stories and they fall victim to the fears that plague them. Their endings make an argument that the societal and cultural idea of motherhood is ultimately unfulfilling, as it forces women to either give up their personal identity or feel guilty for not, which leads women to an impossible identity crisis they cannot escape.
Susan in “To Room Nineteen” deals with societies expectations of motherhood by embracing them and dropping her personal identity in favor of her family and children. She becomes the perfect idea of a mother, “Susan became pregnant, she gave up her job and they bought a house in Richmond… Everything right, appropriate, and what everyone would wish for” (Lessing, 1). However, she feels a disconnect about her new identity as a mother and begins to question her role in society and feel trapped by her inability to escape the all-encompassing and lonely reality of motherhood, “wife and mother, smiling and responsible, feeling as if the pressure of these people—four lively children and her husband—were a painful pressure on the surface of her skin…it was like living out a prison sentence” (Lessing, 6). We see society’s idea of what makes a good mother begin to crush Susan when she no longer sees herself as an individual or as a mother. Eventually Susan feels replaced in her own home, useless as a human, and completely alone which drives her to commit suicide at the story, which to her is the only way to fully escape the never-ending pressures and expectations of motherhood.
The unnamed narrator in “The Midnight Zone” rejects the ideals of motherhood and instead embraces her personal, individual identity over the identity of mother. She takes a much less involved role in her children’s lives, being more involved with herself and refusing to give in to gendered behavior:
And all that seemed assigned by default of gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes, I would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, I would not make playdates, never ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on monthlong adventures to Europe, teach them to blast off rockets, to swim for glory. I taught them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human (Groff).
However, while she maintains her individuality, she still feels a great sense of guilt and incompetence over her perceived failures as a woman, “My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in debt that increases every day but you have no intention of repaying” (Groff). While our narrator has escaped the aspects of motherhood that end up destroying Susan, we see that even she is not free from the guilt and feelings of being a subpar mother due to the importance she has put on her identity. These women have two polar opposite approaches, and yet are still unfulfilled by their mothering due to the cultural expectations surrounding them.
Both women are stalked throughout their stories by a symbolic representation of their fears specifically, but also symbolic representations of the general oppressive and all-consuming nature of social expectations that follow these women everywhere. Susan sees a devil in her garden who wants to “get into [her] and take [her] over” (Lessing, 8). Her devil is a “youngish man, or perhaps a middle-aged man pretending to be young. Or a man young-looking from immaturity” (Lessing, 8). She fears his masculinity as something that will take over her, much in the way that her own marriage and patriarchal norms have taken over her identity. Susan is a victim of patriarchy in different ways that the unnamed narrator because she is more complicit in the system, as she has in a way bought into it by becoming the motherhood ideal. This is illustrated in her discomfort over her title. She frequently fears that she cannot be herself if she is Mrs. Rawlings, “there have been times I thought that nothing existed of me except the roles that went with being Mrs. Matthew Rawlings” (Lessing, 12). The aspects of her life that are tied to Mrs. Rawlings end up being the first to suffocate her, like her house, her housekeeper, and even her children.
As for the youth of her devil, another notable physical trait, she feels like her life was put on pause when she had children. Her fear of the youth of this man echoes her own fears that she has wasted her time since her youth, and this devil is an alarming realization and personification of that time. This devil character stalks her and traps her further as she is unable to escape the feeling of being watched even when seeking refuge in her garden.
In “The Midnight Zone” our narrator is stalked by a Florida panther. While we never see the panther, its presence is a constant looming element in the story. The stereotypical gendering of cats is feminine, so unlike Susan who is haunted by masculine demons (a representation of the individuality she has lost to men/male power structures in marriage), the unnamed narrator is stalked and threatened by her own inadequacies as a woman. It is fitting that a feminine force haunts her as she is simultaneously worried about her own legitimacy as a woman and a mother. She is aware that she lacks as a woman and this fear is shown to the reader very early in the story when the husband leaves for a few days and seems to question her ability to be on her own with the kids, “I asked if he thought he’d married an incompetent woman, which cut to the bone, because the source of our problems was that, in fact, he had” (Groff).
Her fear of inadequacy that stalks her in throughout the story ends up coming true, when she ends up, through no real fault of her own, falling off a chair and receiving a serious blow to the head. When the husband comes back and finds her, he is afraid of her, “In his face was a thing that made me go quiet inside…the thing I read in his face was the worst, it was fear, and it was vast” (Groff). In the end, her own fears are echoed back to her in her husband’s face, and she has transformed into the panther, which represented her fears of incompetency, “I was everything we had fretted about” (Groff). While it is unclear what actually happens to the narrator, if she dies of her injuries or is hallucinating, her symbolic transformation into the panther serves as her final succumbing to her ultimate fear, that she is incompetent.
It is interesting that both characters are punished for exhibiting typically male patterns of behavior, which suggests that the motherhood ideal is in actuality, just a way to further divide genders and keep women away from the masculine freedoms and power men hold in patriarchy. The unnamed narrator’s parenting style in “The Midnight Zone” feel socially masculine, “I was usually a preoccupied mother, short with them, busy, working, until I burst into fun” (Groff). It is shown that while these behaviors are acceptable for a male parent, it causes her a sense of guilt to not be more of a mother for them, and we are made to feel sorry for her husband for having to stoop so low as to do the typically feminine work, something a mother would never be praised for. It is also notable that she falls when trying to change a lightbulb, which is typically more masculine work, something she is instantly punished for with her traumatic head injury.
Susan’s want and need for alone time is something that is lightly alluded to as normal for husbands in the beginning of the story when she talks about the weekend husband/father. Essentially, at the end of the novel she is a weekend mother since she spends all her weekdays at Fred’s hotel, but that is seen as completely out of the ordinary and unacceptable for her to do. She feels a sort of resentment from her husband’s ability to still be free in a way she cannot, as she says after her husband’s admitted affair, “It was in the nature of things that the adventures and delights could no longer be hers, because of the four children and the big house that needed so much attention” (Lessing, 3). When she tries to have her own sort of adventure and delight of going to the hotel, this is not allowed for her to have, whereas her husband has two affairs throughout the story that are not punished in the way Susan is.
Before their true endings both characters display desires for escapism as a relief from their fears and the weight of expectations they feel, suggesting that social ideals of motherhood are trapping and suffocating. Susan needs to go to a hotel room just to be by herself throughout the week. She craves time to herself which ends up being the only time she has in her day to be herself:
She was no longer Susan Rawlings, mother of four, wife of Matthew, employer of Mrs. Parkes and of Sophie Traub; with these and those relations with friends, school-teachers, tradesmen. She no longer was mistress. of the big white house and garden, owning clothes suitable for this and that activity or occasion…and she was alone, and she had no past and no future (Lessing, 12).
She enjoys this time and after it is taken from her, when her husband finds out where she goes, she feels so entirely trapped in her life as a mother that she decides to end her life.
The unnamed narrator on the other hand, has more of a mental escapism when she disassociates and floats around the campground she is staying at, “I felt the dissociation, a physical shifting, as if the best of me were detaching from my body and sitting down a few feet distant. It was a great relief” (Groff). Similar to Susan, she has become trapped however she is trapped because of the panther. This moment of disassociation feels dangerous, as the reader wonders if the panther will get to her or if her head injury is causing some kind of hallucination. However, she never fears or mentions the panther, so we can infer that this moment of freedom also acts as her stepping away from her fears of inadequacy and just living a few moments without the pressure of her womanhood to trap her.
The social and cultural expectations of motherhood and what it means to be a socially acceptable woman are explored through these character and ultimately revealed to be a trap. While they both approach these issues in two opposite ways, they end up feeling unfulfilled and fearful of the social controls that run their lives and dictate their inherent worth. While they try different ways to escape and have some level of freedom and agency, ultimately, they are overcome by patriarchal power structures that punish and condemn them for straying from their gendered role and end up being taken over by their fears.
Works Cited
Groff, Lauren. “‘The Midnight Zone.’” The New Yorker, 16 May 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/23/the-midnight-zone-by-lauren-groff.
“To Room Nineteen.” A Man and Two Women, by Doris Lessing, Flamingo, 1994.
Rachel Loring 