The Fifth Child

The novella begins with a fairy-tale-like quality that heightens the idealism of the traditional family and foreshadows the gothic horror of the titular fifth child who will disrupt the fantasy. Harriet and David’s “love at first sight” encounter across a crowded room represents an unrealistic union, both in the likelihood of finding one’s soul mate at the perfect moment and in the couple’s attitude that they can casually raise as many as 10 children without foresight or struggle.

The Lovatts are introduced as old-fashioned misfits among their peers, family members, and the rebellious climate of the 1960s, when sexual liberation, political protest, and youth culture challenged the conservatism and austerity of previous postwar decades. Rather than engage with society, Harriet and David bond over their shared, defensive rejection of the times. Their home away from the city center becomes a “fortress” where they block out the unpleasantries of the outside world from their own vision of happiness. The couple are enchanted by “a large Victorian house in an overgrown garden” (8)—a setting that reinforces the fantasy of a long-forgotten, magical, and pure time and place. The home is repeatedly referred to as their “kingdom,” where instead of a throne, Harriet and David reign from the hyperbolically oversized bed where they ritually conceive and deliver their offspring.

The home’s fairy-tale atmosphere also introduces an element of gothic eeriness that foreshadows how the Lovatts’ dream of domesticity will transform into a nightmare and the house into a prison. Lessing juxtaposes imagery of nature to emphasize Ambivalence About Motherhood and Female Self-Sacrifice. The garden in springtime represents joy and fertility, but not without a measure of uncanny and ominous threat. The Lovatts enjoy the “birds singing all around them in the garden,” yet the “boughs [a]re still black and glistening with the chilly rain of early spring” (9). The lilac tree holds “vigorous buds, soon to burst into flower,” but “flying leaves […] sometimes hit the windowpanes with small thuds and bangs, and in the sound of a rising wind” (15).

Lessing describes the couple’s sexual intimacy as an almost supernatural seduction and trap when the tree’s shadows make their way into the bedroom, “enticingly sketching on the expanses of the ceiling the years they would live in this house” (10). The image implies that Harriet is under a magical illusion or that she is being controlled by fate. The postcoital scene also contains an element of more quotidian horror. Certain that she is pregnant, Harriet is “frightened” and tries “to break the spell” by talking to David (10-11). In response, David’s “strong [and] insistent” grip on Harriet’s arm to silence her insinuates that marriage and motherhood may not be as harmonious as Harriet imagined. The suggestion that Harriet is under a type of trance (supernatural or ideological) and James’s offhand remark that people are “brainwashed into believing family life is the best” reference the “consciousness raising” of second-wave feminism and introduce the theme of Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family (28).

The Lovatts are revealed to be naïve, stubborn, and self-righteous. As cultural misfits, they may seem like sympathetic and misunderstood underdogs. They feel they are unfairly called “freaks and oddballs” by their peers (4), evoking the theme of The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness. Yet the narrative portrays them as insensitive, hypocritical, and selfish, particularly in how they discuss disability. Harriet believes that their healthy children are a product of their happy life and proof to their doubters that they have succeeded in achieving the perfect family. By that logic, she deems Amy’s disability a symptom of her sister’s dysfunctional marriage and privately denigrates her niece with racist and ableist language that she knows is offensive. The couple is equally hypocritical when David accepts his father’s money to support his lifestyle despite despising the wealthy and heralding his role as a breadwinner. The Lovatts are also out of touch when they compare their decision to have many children with those of families in countries in the Global South, as they are ignorant of the intersections of class dynamics, colonial histories, cultural differences, and access to birth control that contextualize the prevalence of large families. Finally, their selfishness is evident in their project to have 10 children without considering the quality of life for their offspring and the means to support them. In a novella about a potentially monstrous child, Harriet and David are introduced as irresponsible parents. Harriet and David think they are rejecting the “greedy and selfish sixties” by devoting themselves to a large family (21). Ironically, they are blinkered by the selfishness of their desire to prove their naysayers wrong. As Dorothy chastises, they “want things both ways” (16). The couple’s flaws hint that the real monster of the novella may not be the unruly child at all.