The Handling of the Alienation of Identity Theme in Short Stories Flowering Judas and To Room Nineteen

Alienation can be defined as emotional or physical isolation from other individuals. It is a loss of self and identity by dissasociation. Alienation derives from the unavoidable predicament of existence. When a person is faced with the reality of their lives and the way they live it, they start to examine their existence and their place in the world relative to the society they live in, therefore sometimes realising that the place they hold in the world and the society is not the place they want to be in, alienating themselves from it, and their self-identity. If an individual is truly isolated from others, they may exhibit psychological distress as a result, due to the vital human necessity to belong somewhere, coexist with the population all through their lives. Alienation is fitting to existence as natural solipsism covers the psyche even while the brain is intentionally seeking to connect with other individuals to make life significant. With this essay, we are going to compare two stories, “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter and “To Room Nineteen” by Doris Lessing in their approach to the theme of alienation and isolation.

The first short story, “Flowering Judas” by Katherine Anne Porter, follows Laura, a young American woman who came to Mexica to help with the Socialist cause. The first hint of alienation we see is that Laura, an American woman is in a foreign country, with a revolutionary belief about reuniting Mexico’s population and restoring pride in the community has nothing to do with her life or her community, she often misinterprets cues from the locals and doesn’t speak the language very well. With all this combined with her inner turmoil, painrs Laura as an alienated person. Not understanding the locals very well and being othered by them confines her into a very specific group as she doesn’t belong with the locals and can only seek comfort in her peers with the same cause in mind. This proves to be difficult as Laura is not strict in her beliefs like her peers, she hides the fact that she goes to church and carries her secret with a great caution so as not to be ridiculed by her comrades.

The we meet Braggioni, a power-hungry mysogynist infatuated with Laura. He tries to seduce her with his songs every night, to Laura’s dismay. She rejects these advances multiple times but to Braggioni, Laura saying “no” is not credible as he doesn’t see her as a match to himself, because she is a woman. Therefore Laura’s isolation doesn’t just end with her being a foreigner in a fogreign country. The men she comes across, see her as an object, a woman before seeing her as a human being, Braggioni constantly belittling her and not taking her “no” as a valid answers shows us that Laura is isolated by her gender as well, and she is seen as a weak individual as a result. Braggioni also tells her that she “owes her comfortable situation and her salary to him.” implying that she is financially dependent on him and economically isolated from the people who make their own earning not depending on others.

In “To Room Nineteen” we meet Suzan, a housewife with the perfect home and the perfect family. Her situation unravels as her children leave for school. Suzan who gave up her well-paid job for her family, realises that she now has nothing to live for as she is now not a woman, but a mother and a wife. Suzan lost her identity when she resigned from her job to marry and have a family and now, the things she gave up her life for is slowly falling apart, she finds no place for herself in the world she lives in. Leaving her job meant she now had no money and the economic freedom it gives people, she now had to depend on her husband.

By taking the traditional role given to women at the time, she alienates her identity and reassumes a new one, and after losing that too, she feels as if she has no purpose in life. She devoted a large portion of her life serving her husband and children as “She cooked and sewed and worked as before, day after day”1 and as a consequence of this, she was isolated from the rest of the world and lost herself amongst the chores, duties and rules she has to follow. By renting a room in a hotel, isolating herself from her resposibilies she found a way to escape the monotony her traditional life brought her. many years of domestic seclusion and isolation from the outside contributed to her falling behind and absence of the information about the genuine importance of life.

Since both “To Room Nineteen” and “Flowering Judas” a time when society still objectified women,we see two characters in two different places on the spectrum of the life of a woman. In “Flowering Judas”, we see that Laura chooses to alienate herself from family ties, marriage and love as she looks upon these as threats to her autonomous life. Her excessive self-protection makes her retreat in a stoic manner into her surroundings, in conformity with her patriarchal upbringing. In “To Room Nineteen” we see Suzan, conforming to the societal role brought upon women to get married, reproduce and raise the perfect family. But as the story progresses we also see Suzan wanting to cut ties with everything she has become, namely, a housewife. Both women feel trapped in a box that they desperately try to get out of while challenging societal norms of the time, but doing it in secret. Laura feels as if she “is not at home in the world” and tries to find a place for herself in this foreing world while Suzan,, plagued with the alienating loss of her identity, looks for meaning in her life, and unlike Laura she finds a place that at least feels like home at room nineteen as “This room had become more her own than the house she lived in.”2