The Fifth Child

David is a 30-year-old architect who shares Harriet’s old-fashioned beliefs in family and domesticity, motivated by his upbringing in a divorced household. David envisions himself as the traditional breadwinner, and his job fulfills the archetype of the architect who desires control and seeks to build a world of his own making. The narrator also alludes to the fairy-tale archetype of “Prince Charming” and describes David as “a man [who] would hand [Harriet] the keys of her kingdom, and there she would find everything her nature demand[s], and this as her birthright” (8). David reveals his self-aggrandizement and hypocrisy when he relies on his father’s money to support his lifestyle while also disdaining the rich. The reference to Harriet’s nature and birthright suggests that he adheres to biological determinism and expects Harriet to feel the same. David believes that “[h]is wife must be like him in this: that she kn[ows] where happiness l[ies] and how to keep it” (8). His criteria for a perfect partner are phrased like dictates, and he represents patriarchal authority and the undermining of female agency.

David’s controlling nature is suggested several times in the early chapters. The depiction of the couple having sex in their new home is a moment of coercion. Harriet inwardly says, “No, stop!” in her mind when she realizes that she is not ready to start a family so soon, but “she [i]s overwhelmed by his purpose—yes, that [i]s it, he [i]s making love with a deliberate, concentrated intensity, looking into her eyes, that ma[kes] her accept him, his taking possession of the future in her” (10). David is the one to decide when Harriet gets pregnant, and she is complicit in submitting to his power, or at least rationalizes with “yes, that [i]s it” to convince herself that the act is mutual. After they have sex, David’s “smile include[s] her. But on his terms” (10). David transforms from Harriet’s kindred spirit into a figure who compromises her autonomy.

As the novella progresses, the couple continues to disagree, and their roles reverse. When Harriet defies David’s authority, he responds by making himself scarcer; he is referred to as “invisible David” when Harriet is left alone to imagine a conversation with him (128). Despite being an equal parent to Ben, David skirts his responsibilities and isolates Harriet, becoming a shallow, absent father who prioritizes conformity and convenience over the difficult realities of family life.

Ben is the titular fifth child who disrupts the idealism of family and motherhood. Demonized before he is even born, Ben is called an “enemy” and “savage thing” while still in Harriet’s womb. As a figure of gothic horror, he represents the monstrous and the uncanny, symbolizing Harriet’s repressed feelings of resentment, dissatisfaction, and self-erasure in her role as mother. As a fetus, he is compared to “[p]hantoms and chimeras” and “pathetic botched creatures” (41), a reference to gothic supernatural beings like Frankenstein’s monster who highlight the consequences of hubris and lead to the protagonist’s downfall.

Ben’s exclusion from the family is based on his physical appearance and behavior, both of which the family sees as nonhuman. Ben’s incredible strength, hunching shoulders, green-yellow eyes, and uninterest in affection are regarded as unnatural and menacing. When his actions become more violent, the narrative plays with the interpretation that he may in fact be a “cursed” child, either a folkloric changeling or a scientific anomaly created by an atavistic gene; his portrayal echoes the trope of the “bad seed,” which originates in William March’s 1954 horror novella about a child serial killer and has overtones of eugenics discourse. The charge of portraying eugenics sympathetically has been leveled at Lessing’s novella, though both works use their child character and the concept of inherent evil to analyze the “nature versus nurture” debate.

As an enigmatic figure, Ben challenges The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness, highlighting the ways that society fears, loathes, and abandons what it does not recognize or understand. In the decades since the novella’s publication in 1988, readers have also analyzed his character as a representation of disability, particularly the stigmatization of autism spectrum disorder.

Dorothy is Harriet’s widowed mother and often the voice of reason. She represents a pragmatic version of motherhood that contrasts with Harriet’s idealism and consuming self-sacrifice. Dorothy helps raise her grandchildren, as tradition expects, yet she sets boundaries that the Lovatts refuse to consider. As Harriet’s foil, Dorothy “ha[s] not found it easy to bring up three girls. […] She kn[ows] the cost, in every way, of a family, even a small one” (15). She chides her daughter for dismissing the financial as well as the emotional demands of the children and Harriet’s self-care. Dorothy represents balance; she often takes breaks from the exhausting care she provides “to please herself” (33). Despite her disapproval, Dorothy’s contribution to raising the children can be interpreted as enabling the Lovatts’ false vision of themselves as a perfect family.

Dorothy represents an older generation of women who were expected to fulfill only maternal and domestic roles. Harriet assumes that “[h]er mother [i]s a contented woman who ha[s] everything she could reasonably want; so it appear[s] to her and to her daughters” (7). The aside of “so it appear[s]” suggests that beneath the surface is a woman who desires more than mothering, whether she will admit to it or not. Dorothy resents the couple as “very selfish” and “irresponsible” for assuming that she contently does “the work of a servant” in their house, but “[t]hese words [a]re in the air […] unspoken: they kn[o]w that if she allowed herself to begin she would not stop with this” (33). Though a figure of domestic realism, Dorothy enhances the novella’s undercurrent tone of horror when she tells the couple, “Sometimes you two scare me. I don’t really know why” (16).

Referred to by both Harriet and David as the “real” children, Luke, Helen, Jane, and Paul are the couple’s first four children and are described as easy infants with fair features that conform to Western ideals of beauty, innocence, and vulnerability. Much attention is drawn to their blue eyes, which highlight their resemblance and belonging to the Lovatt parents who share the same eye color. Luke and Helen are cherub-like, with “wispy fair hair and blue eyes and pink cheeks” (20); Jane has “large blue eyes” (76); and Paul has a “comical soft little face, with soft blue eyes—like bluebells” (50). Their shared features are set in sharp contrast to Ben’s anomalous yellow-green eyes and enormous strength, physical markers that accentuate his otherness and exclusion.

The four children initially represent the perfect family, though Harriet acknowledges that the frequent pregnancies and her four children have made her “tired,” “worn out,” “irritable,” “distressed,” and “bad-tempered” (20). Harriet expresses her exhaustion before her unexpected fifth pregnancy, and the narrative suggests that raising four children has not been as ideal as Harriet let on.

The siblings also represent the moral ambiguity of Harriet’s decisions, as her responsibility to Ben, and the lack of her husband’s or society’s help, leaves the siblings feeling unsafe and neglected. At the end of the novella, the four children represent the dissolution of the family, as they flee one by one, leaving Harriet with the fantasy that they might one day return.

Molly and Frederick are David’s mother and stepfather; they represent upper-middle-class complacency and elitism. The narrator describes them as “unambitious academics” who are “kind and remote” but judgmental (12, 7), particularly in their outspoken criticism of the Lovatts’ large family. Frederick jokingly calls the couple “mad” and “wrong-headed,” and Molly, a foil to Harriet and Dorothy, believes that “she [i]s standing up for a life where domesticity [i]s kept in its place, a background to what [i]s important” (27).

Molly and Frederick are also the strongest proponents of having Ben placed in an institution, despite being the two people least affected by Ben and least willing to help financially. They show no hesitation or regret in proposing Ben’s removal, and Molly’s callous solution to find a compliant doctor and facility to help them get rid of Ben prompts David’s sister Deborah to accuse them of “[t]ypical upper-class ruthlessness” (72). The Burkes’ moral turpitude is represented in their descriptions as “large and untidy,” “benevolent haystacks” (12), and “two large haystacky people” (71). Though they are characterized as modest and kind, the Burkes are imposing figures who hold strong opinions but are inert and passive when it comes to contributing real help to the family.

James and Jessica are David’s father and stepmother; they represent cosmopolitanism and the privilege of wealth. James builds luxury yachts around the world and highlights David’s unprepared and arrogant outlook on family life. Like Dorothy, James is critical of his son’s growing family but becomes an essential contributor to and enabler of Harriet and David’s lifestyle. Also, like Dorothy’s, his contributions are taken for granted: David tells Harriet, “James and Jessica have so much money they wouldn’t have missed three times as much. Anyway, they adored doing it” (118). David’s dismissal of his father’s significant financial assistance underscores David’s own failure to live up to his image as the patriarch and family provider.

Jessica appears little in the novella; her worldliness, youth, and distaste for visiting England highlight her lack of interest in following British traditions. She is “a noisy, kind, competent woman, with the cynical good humour of the rich” (7). Although David speaks of his father as the one providing financial assistance, Jessica is the real source of their wealth: When James tells David that he can afford to help him, Jessica “laugh[s], and shrug[s]: it [i]s mostly her money” (14). The scene highlights the empty myth of the male breadwinner that both father and son uphold.

Dr. Brett is Harriet’s obstetrician, Mrs. Graves is Ben’s headmistress at primary school, and Dr. Gilly is the specialist whom Harriet consults after Ben attacks a fellow student. These three figures of medical and educational authority represent society’s dereliction of duty and failure to cope with difference. From Harriet’s perspective, they are individuals who are negligent, undermine her authority, and deflect responsibility for the seriousness of Ben’s condition onto Harriet rather than be accountable in their profession. Conversely, these figures also suggest a potential unreliability of Harriet’s accounts of Ben, as each of them challenges Harriet’s insistence that Ben is not “normal.”

John is a young man who does yard work for the Lovatts and becomes Ben’s friend and caretaker. He is “a big, shaggy, amiable youth, good-natured, patient” (91). He is firm and instructive, and he provides Ben with the support and acceptance that are absent in his home life. John and his friends, being outsiders themselves, neither fear nor loathe Ben but treat him in “a rough-and-ready way, as if Ben were indeed a puppy that needed training” (91). Their comparison of Ben to a puppy contrasts starkly with Harriet’s derogatory description of her son as a monstrous figure from folklore. John demonstrates how Ben’s behavior is influenced by nurture, and his job of clearing the Lovatts’ overgrown garden, of cutting down and pruning what is ailing and dying, symbolizes his positive impact on Ben’s health and growth.