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sensitive and comprehending, finding herself about to seduce her friend's
husband, reflects: "What
is
going to happen now will blow Dorothy
and Jack and that baby sky-high; it's the end of my marriage. I'm
going to blow everything
to
bits. There was almost uncontrollable
pleasure in it." And only her "vision of the helpless baby" saves the day.
Thus a woman's energies can lead her to the verge of the destruction of
others, but the real destruction, of course, the one that counts, is her own.
The final stage in this disintegration of woman's potential in a
world of male success and male sexuality is supplied in the last story,
"To Room Nineteen." Here the life of a "happily" married young
woman with an attractive husband, children, brains, friends and fortune
is
unpeeled in the manner of one of Lawrence's married-love onions–
"Two Blue-birds," for instance-until, with remarkable patience and
skill in the transitions, the woman's whole existence is shown to be
utterly a lie; the only reality she can encompass somehow connects with
the time she puts in at a seedy hotel alone, somewhere near Paddington.
Eventually, all else having failed-work, husband, lover, children–
she turns on the gas, "quite content, lying there, listening to the faint
soft hiss of the gas that poured into the room, into her lungs, into her
brain as she drifted off into the dark river."
Here Mrs. Lessing takes us farther than she has yet cared or dared
to go (though Anna's experiences in
The Golden Notebook
certainly
afford a more explicit preliminary initiation) into woman's tragic onto–
geny, the abdication of her liberties, her voluntary servitude, humiliation,
torment and even death after everything else has been endured. The
word "ontogeny" may sound odd-but I believe it is called for. What we
have in any case is a complete spiritual evolution, an ascesis, whose
previous stage we were invited to follow in the earlier sequence of
Martha Quest novels,
Children of Violence.
In this descent into hell,
the appropriate conclusion is the body's destruction.
That is Mrs. Lessing's subject, not her pretext, and here Pauline
Reage holds out her hand to Doris Lessing, whose design is no less
scandalous than that of
Histoire d' O.
As Susan Rawlings lets the gas
pour into her room, I cannot help thinking of 0 , naked in her owl
mask as she asks Sir Stephen for death. Both authors might have sub–
titled their works
A Woman's Progress.
Of course the gaps in this
gradus
ad
infernam
can be filled with
a number of pieces not directly on the descending spiral of what I take
to be Mrs. Lessing's main route. There are a number of standard British
studies in class hysteria, and echoes of a lot of her earlier work (how
