The Fifth Child

Harriet is the 24-year-old protagonist who is first introduced as a figure of romantic idealism, traditional femininity, and conformity. Wearing a flowery dress, she is described as “a pastel blur. As in an Impressionist picture, or a trick photograph, she seem[s] a girl merged with her surroundings” (4). The description connotes a person who is expected to blend into the background and be beautifully decorative. Disdaining the “forced hecticity” and “Look at me!” atmosphere of the office party specifically and of 1960s London counterculture more generally (4), Harriet represents outdated attitudes of female modesty, restraint, and purity more aligned with the 19th-century “cult of true womanhood.”

Harriet takes pride in being out of date in this way, a trait that ironically foreshadows her later belief that her son Ben is also an anachronistic creature from the past. She and David, her match made in heaven, are “conservative, old-fashioned, not to say obsolescent; timid, [and] hard to please” (4). With self-righteous superiority and idealism, they stubbornly insist on having many children despite their limited resources. To Harriet, “family life [i]s the basis for a happy one” (7), so she naively believes that she can attain even more fulfillment with ever more offspring.