“As she drifted off into the dark river”. Linguaggio, silenzio e pazzia in To Room Nineteen di Doris Lessing "

The article analyses how Doris Lessing's short story To Room Nineteen (1963) is a particularly relevant case study because it stages the crisis of language and the very possibility of adopting the realist fiction by inscribing them in the crisis of a female character who questions the traditional roles socially attributed to women. The essay opens with an explorationof Lessing's literary background and her complex relationship with the Marxist literary theories of the 1940s and continues with a close-reading of the text to show how thetextual strategy of employingmadness, the protagonist's silence and her final suicide are used a formof resistance to speak out against the phallus-logic-centric symbolic order by questioning the mimetic quality of language. The article concludes with an analysis of the chronotope of the room to show the intertextual dialogue with theworks of Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys that allow Lessing'sshort story to be placed within a feminist genealogical approach