The Fifth Child

“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. He finds the “right” kind of girl in old-fashioned Harriet, who represents a compliant return to traditional gender roles.

“He laughed. A loud, reckless, unscrupulous laugh, quite unlike modest, humorous, judicious David. Now the room was quite dark, it looked vast, like a black cave that had no end.”

The novella emphasizes the contrast between Harriet’s and David’s perspectives. After they have sex, Harriet is frightened and represses her fear of starting a family before planned. Rather than comforting and reassuring her that they will manage, David laughs in a sinister manner, heightening the novella’s tone of horror and demonstrating his callous indifference to her feelings. As the room darkens, the simile comparing it to an endless black cave foreshadows Harriet’s journey of motherhood as a lonely abyss, introducing Ambivalence About Motherhood and Female Self-Sacrifice.

“David seemed to wince and suffer, but he had to face it: what mattered was the house and the life that would be lived in it. A life that—both parents knew because of his look of determined intention, which they judged full of the smugness of youth—was going to annul, absolve, cancel out all the deficiencies of their life, Molly’s and Frederick’s; and of James’s and Jessica’s life, too.”

David’s reliance on his father’s money constitutes what he perceives as an emasculation that undermines his vision of himself as a self-sufficient, traditional provider. His motivation for wanting a perfect family is also revealed to be rooted in his ongoing resentment of his parents’ divorce. Yet David is not depicted sympathetically as someone who was traumatized as a youth by his parents’ separation; rather, he is portrayed as a smug and antagonistic adult who seeks to prove that he is superior to his parents despite needing their money to prove them wrong.

“The kitchen was already near what it ought to be: the great table, with heavy wooden chairs around it—only four now, but more stood in a row along the wall, waiting for guests and still unborn people.”

The oversized family table, which seats up to 20 people, is like the Lovatts’ enormous bed—an imposing, hyperbolic piece of furniture that represents the Lovatts’ excessive dream of building a “kingdom” of domestic bliss. In the beginning, large holiday gatherings fulfil the couple’s vision of collectivity and belonging as their friends, relatives, and neighbors visit and enjoy their hospitality. By the end of the novella, Harriet is left alone at the scarred table, staring at the unwanted guests who are Ben’s friends, and ready to desert the house. The table symbolizes the impracticality of her goals and the heavy burden of clinging to her fading dreams, Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family.

“But the curtains were drawn, warm thick flowered curtains.”

The couple’s insularity from the outside world cannot protect them from conflict and may in fact be the cause of their strife. The curtains are decorated with flowers, symbolizing fertility and femininity, yet the garden’s real branches bat against the windows, forcing the Lovatts to hide all the more behind their cloistered views. Ben’s arrival symbolizes the futility of the couple’s seclusion from conflict, as he originates from within the home and within the womb.

“At the beginning of the last war, people were saying it was irresponsible to have children, but we had them, didn’t we? […] And we kept them.”

Dorothy often guides Harriet and David to think through their decisions, yet the couple continues to ignore her warnings about raising so many children. Her own story of having children during the war demonstrates her empathy for the couple’s desire for a bigger family and her awareness of her own contradictory advice. Her facetious comment that she kept her children emphasizes her responsibility and commitment to her decision. Ironically, Dorothy is the first person to suggest removing Ben from the home and placing him in an institution, not for his sake but for the sake of everyone else.

“When he bent to kiss her goodbye, and stroked Luke’s head, it was with a fierce possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for it was not herself being possessed, or the baby, but happiness. Hers and his.”

While Harriet nurses Luke, she interprets David’s possessiveness as a positive commitment to an idea, rather than to the actual people who make up the family. As Ben’s difficulties strain their domestic bliss, her assessment of David’s priorities will prove accurate: He values his concept of the ideal family more than Harriet’s and Ben’s welfare.

“Connoisseurs of the English scene will by now have realised that on that powerful, if nowhere registered, yardstick, the English class system, Harriet scaled rather lower than David.”

During the first family gathering, the narrator makes a brief reference to Harriet’s lower-class status as an unspoken but significant difference in the marriage. The description suggests that David’s family are elitists who judge Harriet as an inferior, which may also explain why they blame her and not David for the family’s misfortunes. Though it is an understated theme, the novella addresses how class bias influences the othering of Ben and other figures who do not fit into a middle-class standard of the norm.

“Luke was evicted from the baby’s room into the next one down the corridor, and Helen took his place.”

Luke’s “eviction” from his room is a harsh term that connotes the displacement of one child for another, foreshadowing Ben’s own temporary expulsion from the family. The narrator provides scant descriptions of the parents’ relationship with Luke and Helen and few details about each child. Instead, Luke is “carried around like a doll” by his cousins (19), suggesting that he is seen as an object—a symbol of family success that proves Harriet and David’s critics wrong. The “normal” children are props for their parents’ ego rather than individuals with unique personalities.

“‘It’s important,’ David said, fierce; ‘everybody should have a room.’”

David’s insistence on each child having an individual room is rooted in his childhood memories of his own room being his sanctuary and a means to cope with his parents’ divorce. His intentions are well-meaning, yet he ignores the fact that his own children prefer sharing a room to play together. David’s role as a father is mostly performative, as he prioritizes appearing like a “good father” over what might be in the best interest of the children.

“This was a house—and this defined it for everyone, admiring what they could not achieve themselves—where television was not often watched.”

The Lovatt household is styled to be seen as the locus of enviable closeness. The absence of television in the house suggests a return to an uncorrupt past and a credit to the parents who don’t require technology to distract their children. Yet, in this insular home, the absence of televised news is also protection from an outlet to the realities of the world. Ironically, later, Paul and Ben’s friends enjoy watching violent programming, a stark contrast to the family’s earlier innocence. At the end, Harriet grows so estranged from Ben that she can only imagine seeing him again on the television.

“‘Well, naturally you are welcome, Bridget,’ said David. He sent a glance to Harriet, who said at once, ‘But of course.’ She meant, That goes without saying; and the weight of a thousand marital discussions was behind it.”

Harriet’s automatic agreement with David suggests a relationship where she is expected to reinforce her husband’s opinions, especially in the company of others. His glance serves as either an unspoken reminder or a warning, and the reference to “the weight of a thousand marital discussions” implies that Harriet likely disagrees with him but has been worn down to fall in line with generations of women who were expected to obey their husbands.

“It was too much…excessive…Surely they should be saying to her, ‘Look here, Bridget, don’t expect much. Life isn’t like that!’ But life is like that, if you choose right: so why should they feel she couldn’t have what they had so plentifully?”

Harriet and David believe that they are entitled to their happiness because they have lived righteously and earned it. Their view reinforces a conservative idea that good things only happen to good people, implying that individuals are to blame for their misfortune rather than institutions that reinforce and perpetuate inequalities—a conviction undergirding The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness. Their doubt that Bridget, David’s impressionable young cousin, can achieve the same level of happiness reveals that they regard themselves as exceptional.

“She spoke in a new way to her, as if listening to what she said and afraid of what she might say. Harriet recognized it, for this was how she felt saying anything at all. So do people speak whose thoughts are running along secretly in channels they would rather other people did not know about.”

Harriet recognizes Dorothy’s self-censoring manner when she talks about Ben, highlighting the tension between what is spoken and left unsaid. For Harriet, her fear of speaking her mind is connected to both the pressure to conform to societal expectations and her repressed shame at her own maternal ambivalence.

“This afflicted Harriet with remorse: poor Ben, whom no one could love. She certainly could not! And David, the good father, hardly touched him.”

When Ben is four months old, Harriet admits that she does not love her child but pities him. He is not the docile, cooing baby that they expected, and their early rejection of him challenges the notions of unconditional love and maternal instinct. Additionally, Ben does not fit their standards of a perfect, undemanding child with delicate features; he threatens their image as a harmonious family. For that, the Lovatts and their relatives behave as though Ben does not deserve their love and affection.

“This baby was not six months old yet…he was going to destroy their family life. He was already destroying it. They would have to make sure that he was in his room at mealtimes and when the children were downstairs with the adults. Family times, in short.”

The novella’s emphasis on Ben’s young age suggests that many of the characters’ impressions of him are projections of their own biases and anxieties. Ben is increasingly isolated from the rest of the family even before he is physically sent away to the institution, demonstrating the social construction of normality and otherness. The irony is that while David insisted that a child should have their own room to feel safe and secure, Ben’s room becomes his prison and a means for the Lovatts to cast him out of the family.

“So he came out of his little prison and joined them downstairs. He seemed to know that he ought to be like them.”

Ben’s confinement to his barred room upstairs resembles the trope of the “madwoman in the attic” that Harriet will come to occupy (See: Pages 31-60 Analysis). He is othered by the family, expected to conform, and punished when he doesn’t. As an infant, Ben is blamed for not seeking affection, crying incessantly, being unusually strong, and attempting to stand on his own at an atypically early age. All his actions are metaphors for autonomy, anger, power, and independence—characteristics that are deemed “unnatural” for a conventional baby and a traditional woman.

“‘You mean, we have to find one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of?’

‘Rich families,’ said Angela, with a defiant little sniff.”

The novella’s critique of class bias is most evident in Angela’s commentary on the ruthlessness of the family’s decision to place Ben in an institution. Molly, David’s other sister, assures the couple that if they cannot procure a diagnosis from Dr. Brett that Ben is “abnormal,” then she can find another doctor since “[t]hese things can be arranged” (71). The implication is that not only are wealthy individuals deciding who has the right to exist, but they are also supported by institutions and an infrastructure to validate their judgment of who does and doesn’t belong.

“For the moment it was the meeting of two alien forms of life: the children had been part of some old savagery, and their blood still pounded with it; but now they had to let their wild selves go away while they joined their family. Harriet and David shared this with them, were with them in imagination and in memory, from their own childhoods: they could see themselves clearly, two adults, sitting there, tame, domestic, even pitiable in their distance from wildness and freedom.”

Harriet and David watch Helen and Luke play in the garden and admire their youthful exuberance and wild energy. As the narrator describes the children as “alien” and “savage,” the scene emphasizes the social construction of normality and otherness: The Lovatts have acceptable and unacceptable definitions of “savagery.” When applied to Luke and Helen, the term represents nostalgic adventure and youth as free and pure. When applied to Ben, the term takes on its darker connotation, labeling him as unsanctioned, transgressive, and dangerous. How the Lovatts draw the boundaries of the term’s definition reveals their biases against Ben.

“Harriet heard herself explode with ‘I’m sick of being told I don’t understand this and that. I’m the child’s mother. I’m Ben Lovatt’s mother. Do you understand that?’”

For the first time, Harriet invokes her identity as “Ben Lovatt’s mother” as an assertive right rather than something to be ashamed of. Prior to this scene, she tells the staff three times that she’s come to see “[her] son.” Harriet reinforces her relationship with Ben as mother and son, and in doing so, she challenges his expulsion from the home and sees him not as an “other” but as a member of the Lovatt family.

“Her heart was hurting as it would for one of her own, real children, for Ben looked more ordinary than she had ever seen him, with those hard cold alien eyes of his closed. Pathetic: she had never seen him as pathetic before.”

At the institution, Harriet sees Ben as vulnerable for the first time and is moved to bring him home. Yet her motivations are ambiguous, as her compassion for him is based on wishful thinking. Ben, with his eyes closed, looks almost like her “real children”; she can see his potential humanity when she contrasts him with children who have physical differences whom she calls “rows of freaks” (81). To her, Ben’s otherness is relative; she saves him because at this moment, he is not as abject as the others.

“The girl was looking curiously at Harriet, as if she were part of the phenomenon that was Ben, of the same nature.”

A third motivation for Harriet to bring Ben home, in addition to maternal duty and seeing Ben’s humanity, is Harriet’s own identification with his otherness. The young ward attendant looks at Harriet as “part of the phenomenon” that created Ben, a reference to Harriet’s own ambivalence about motherhood and female self-sacrifice. Like Ben, Harriet is ostracized for not conforming to societal expectations; she ends up abandoned in her Victorian house, a confining institution of domesticity, for prioritizing Ben over her “real” children.