The Fifth Child

“The focussing eye then saw dark curly hair, which was unfashionable…blue eyes, soft but thoughtful…lips rather too firmly closed. In fact, all her features were strong and good, and she was solidly built. A healthy young woman, but perhaps more at home in a garden?”

This initial description of Harriet hints at her transformation from a docile housewife into a defiant mother. The pursed lips can refer to either her judgmental view of the swinging 1960s or the cultural expectation that women remain silent and obedient. The rhetorical question of where Harriet belongs suggests how maintaining the myth that a woman’s place is in the home may not suit her. The reference to the garden as a more suitable place is also ambiguous, as the garden can symbolize fertility and domesticity or, when described as “overgrown” and “mysterious and hidden” (8, 11), a place of wildness and freedom from social dictates.

“To Harriet, he did not have the look of someone solidly planted: he seemed almost to hover, balancing on the balls of his feet.”

Despite Harriet’s and David’s opinions that they were made for each other, the narrator highlights a difference in their fortitude, contrasting Harriet’s solidity with David’s lack of stability. The description foreshadows David’s lack of commitment to the family when things get difficult, as he estranges himself when he cannot accept Ben as his child.

“She joked that he thought of reforming her: ‘I do believe you imagine you are going to put the clock back, starting with me!’”

David’s previous girlfriend was a woman who did not share his conservative views and thus exemplified “what he did not want in a girl” (5). Her joke that he expected her to behave as women did in the past illustrates his resistance to progress and change, particularly feminist articulations of female autonomy, sexual and reproductive freedom, and challenges to patriarchal authority.