SOURCE: "'Taking Hands and Dancing in (Dis)Unity': Story to Storied in Doris Lessing's 'To Room Nineteen' and 'A Room,'" in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Autumn, 1990, pp. 421-33.

Tiger is a Canadian critic and educator. In the following essay, she focuses on Lessing's short stories "To Room Nineteen" and "A Room" in her discussion of the author's use of narrative voice and realistic literary techniques. Tiger also examines the ways in which these two stories relate to the novels Lessing constructed from them, The Summer Before the Dark and The Memoirs of a Survivor, respectively.

"To see" is the dominant verb in the realist text "à la gastronomie de l'oeil" as Balzac expressed it—and realist fiction is preeminently concerned with seeing, with a seeing in detail.

  —Mark Seltzer ["The Princess Casamassima: Realism and the Fantasy of Surveillance," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (1981)]

To view Doris Lessing's short fiction in...