Safety In Room Analysis

In Emma Donoghue’s novel Room, Donoghue tells the story of Jack and Ma both in and out of captivity. For seven years Ma is held by Old Nick in the confinements of Room, an elev-en-by-eleven foot space equipped with only the bare necessities. In Ma’s second year in Room, she gives birth to her son Jack, who at the beginning of the novel does not believe in the world outside of Room. However, due to Ma’s perfectly organized escape plan they are able to escape Room, thrusting themselves into the outside world, a place completely different from inside Room. This drastic change in setting exposes a new side to nearly every aspect of their lives, completely opposite to that of Room. When this text is analyzed using structuralist theory, one

can see how Donoghue uses binary oppositions, an important aspect of structuralism, to describe the world and the binary sets it is composed of (Lye). A binary pair consists of two aspects completely opposite to one another where one is held at a higher value, for example, light and dark, of this pair light is held at a greater value (Klages). In this novel there are two main binary pairs, captivity and freedom, and safety and danger. When Jack and Ma are forced from side of the opposition to another, captivity to freedom, it affects their relationships. This changes them from being loving and beneficial, to being distant and forced. The same negative change is seen in the characters’ emotions, both Jack and Ma change from being comfortable in who they are to being lost and ridiculed in the outside world. Therefore, when structuralism is used to analyze the text it becomes apparent that Donoghue places these oppositions together to show how unexpectedly freedom can be viewed as dangerous and captivity as secure.
When held inside Room, Ma’s relationships with both her son and her captor provide her life with structure, and purpose. Once Jack was born in Room, Ma changed from being Old Nick’s captive, only there to appease his perverted needs, to being a mother whose only focus is to care for her child. At one point Jack startles Old Nick, angering him greatly. To stop Old Nick’s yelling Ma screams as loud as she can, which leads Old Nick to choke her to silence. Af-ter the situation quiets Ma says, “I can be quiet… You know how quiet I can be, so long as you leave him alone. It’s all I’ve ever asked” (Donoghue 74). By having Ma say this, Donoghue clearly shows how while inside Room, Ma’s purpose in life is to protect her son and keep him safe. Ironically Ma’s relationship with Old Nick, although depraved and aggressive, is also one that provides safety and structure to the lives of Ma and Jack. When Old Nick arrives nightly to sexually assault Ma, he also provides for them, bringing groceries and “Sunday treats” which are usually items like batteries or medicine (18). The fact Old Nick comes every day and supplies them with goods is key to their survival, gives them structure that allows Ma to raise Jack in the most normal way she can, given their situation. In a strange way Ma and Old Nick’s relation-ship, although abnormal is mutually beneficial, where food and shelter is exchanged for sex and good behaviour. As a result of the loving and beneficial relationships in Room, Room becomes a safe and secure place, which surprisingly makes what should be a traumatic space, a dependable and safe place.
The safety in Room is unexpectedly contrasted with the dangers outside, as the relation-ships between Ma shares with Jack and her own parents become unstable and negatively impact all involved.

While in Room, the only person that Jack ever interacted with was Ma, he is accus-tomed to her focusing entirely on him and listening to everything he says. However, outside she is preoccupied with multiple things to do and people to see, causing her to ignore Jack. When-ever Ma is interacting with police or doctors and Jack interrupts to talk to her or ask for “some” (breast milk), she will change the subject or say “later Jack” (180). All of this causes Jack and Ma’s relationship to weaken, which results in them not having each other to rely on during times when they need each other the most. When Ma overdoses on pills in a suicide attempt it is when she sends Jack to be with her brother so she can be alone in a catatonic state. It is not until after her recovery, when she is reunited with Jack and they begin living more similarly to how they lived in Room, that their bond restrengthens and they are secure again, in their new home. An-other negative relationship that affects Ma is that with her parents, and her father specifically. When Ma reunites with her father after seven years, he is extremely uncomfortable by Jack, and makes his distain known to Ma. He says that he did not want to meet him (225), and that Ma would be better off without him, as in better off if he was

never born (227). These statements from her father were possibly more detrimental to Ma than anything Old Nick ever said to her. With Ma’s father saying he is disgusted by the only thing that kept Ma happy and sane for the past five years of her life, he completely destroyed their relationship. The only hope that they could reconnect is if “he gets his act together” (227), and sees Jack as a miracle as opposed to a haunting reminder of his daughter’s rape. Although one may think that freedom would be safer than captivity, in the novel it is the complete opposite. This is made apparent by Donoghue giv-ing captivity the higher value in the binary opposition of captivity and freedom, as captivity pro-vided Ma and Jack with stable and safe relationships.
Furthermore, Ma and Jack are much more confident in who they are inside Room, when compared to outside. In Room Jack thinks he is the only boy in the world and Ma is the only woman, he does not even believe that there is a world outside Room. His naïvety is explicitly shown when he says, “Mountains are too big to be real, I saw one in TV that has a woman hang-ing on it by ropes. Women aren’t real like Ma is, and girls and boys not either” (18). Although this state of mind is unhealthy for a five year old child to have, Ma made sure these were his be-liefs so he could grow up as normal as possible. Ma also finds herself and gives herself purpose in Room. Ma controls the situation and provides order and safety. Throughout their time in Room, it is seen that Ma has created a schedule that is followed exactly as planned. They eat meals at the same time everyday, they exercise at the same time, and Jack must go to bed before nine every night. By having this structure in her life Ma gets strength in knowing she is a mother, and she is raising her son in the best way she can, given her situation. It is clear that although the circumstances are poor, the characters have a way to view themselves that is secure.
Jack’s experiences with the outside world are negative starting with when he is first told about it, because he has only ever known inside Room.

The idea of anything besides Room is scary and threatening to his mental state. Upon being told there is a world outside Room, Jack does not react ideally. As a way to cope he tries to refute and ignore what Ma is telling him, “[he says] ’Liar, liar, pants on fire, there’s no Outside.’ She starts explaining more but [he puts his] fingers in [his] ears and [shouts], ‘Blah blah blah blah blah’” (86-87). After this he begins to cry. Jack feels betrayed and lied to by his mother, all this new information that is thrust onto him leads him to be confused and causes him to lose who he thinks he is in the world. Jack has even more negative encounters with the world around him when he leaves Room. One of his first in-teractions with another child is when he is at the park with his grandma and a little girl named Cora arrives. Cora is an inquisitive little girl that says all the wrong things, upsetting Jack who is only just learning about the outside world. From asking if he is a baby girl to asking if he is hav-ing a fit (277), Cora makes Jack feel anything but normal. During that situation all Jack wants is to get away from the ridicule inadvertently being directed at him. The media also confuses him and damages his beliefs in who he is. At one point while staying in the hospital Jack finds an article about himself in the

newspaper calling him “The Bonsai Boy” (215), and speculating the “degree of long-term developmental retardation” (216) he has. The outside world is a very criti-cal place, especially when contrasted with inside Room where he was never judged or criticized. This drastic change in setting leads Jack to feel unsafe, and confused, which greatly holds back his adjustment to the real world, a similar fate to his mother.
Despite how eager Ma was to escape Room, her transition to the outside world is much more difficult than Jack’s, due to the amount of scrutiny she is under regarding everything she did as a parent. As previously stated, Ma never let Old Nick anywhere near Jack, and so he had no opinion in his parenting, and never, to the reader’s knowledge, tried to give one. However once Ma and Jack finally break out of Room, a judgement free zone, mass amounts of people begin to question and find faults in Ma’s parenting. Ma first feels that others are disapprove of her parenting methods when she is stared at by a woman in the police precinct when she nurses Jack. As a reaction, “Ma says ‘Is there a problem?…Why is she staring at us?’ Her arm goes around [Jack] tight. ‘I’m nursing my son, is that OK with you, lady?’” (161). While in Room Ma never stopped breast-feeding Jack, this could have been to keep him close or to provide him with as much food as possible, either way she did it to benefit Jack in an attempt to be the best mother she could be. To be gawked at for doing something that comforts her son, and to be thought of as bad mother leads Ma to question herself and her parenting methods, putting her in a fragile state. This state is only made worse when Ma agrees to be be interviewed regarding her time in Room and her survival. At the end of the interview, the reporter asks Ma why she didn't get Old Nick to bring Jack to a hospital or an orphanage so he could grow up in normal circumstances. Ma tries to counter this woman’s statement by saying that Jack had her, and she made sure he had a childhood, but the women kept trying to contradict Ma’s reasoning (237). By challenging Ma in such a way, the reporter not only offends Ma greatly, but also confuses her sense of herself as a mother. The interview is the final breaking point for Ma, leading her to overdose on pills the next day. Another aspect of structuralism is the construction and destruction of certain systems, typically binary oppositions. When a binary set is constructed one side holds a higher value, however through the destruction of the system, the values are contradicted (Klages). Donoghue’s writing shows the deconstruction of nearly all the binary oppositions present. She shows almost every aspect of outside to be dangerous and hurtful, giving the freedom side of the binary set a much lower value, due to its significant lack of safety when compared to captivity.