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Doris LessingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator describes Susan in almost completely conventional terms—and almost completely as others see her. Susan and Matthew are well-matched, their friends believe, “[B]y virtue of their moderation, their humour, and their abstinence from painful experience, people to whom others come for advice” (2544). She has an appropriate education and a well-paying job at an advertising firm, which she willingly relinquishes in order to raise their children. She is a dutiful wife—even when Matthew engages in extramarital dalliances, she does not, and she attempts to forgive him for his transgressions—and a sensible, caring mother.
However, the story also depicts Susan, from the beginning, as a protagonist on a quest for meaning: She wonders what the point of her very existence is, and especially whether she has meaning beyond her roles as mother, wife, and member of a particular social class. She yearns for solitude, for creative retreat, and for access to privacy and her own space; these desires conflict with her prescribed domestic roles and cause irreconcilable tension in her marriage. She is haunted by a feeling of emptiness and an indefinable restlessness that she personifies as demons, lacking other language to articulate her dissatisfaction with female gender roles.
By Doris Lessing
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