Ben’s arrival marks the novella’s rising action and introduces the narrative ambiguity of whether Ben is truly a magically cursed child or if Harriet’s exhaustion has affected her mood and mind.

The omniscient third-person narrator primarily focuses on Harriet’s viewpoint, describing her growing frustration that no one validates her experiences, which increasingly focus on her Ambivalence About Motherhood and Female Self-Sacrifice. In her interactions with Dr. Brett, she preempts his condescension by asking, “[W]ould you say I was an unreasonable woman? Hysterical? Difficult? Just a pathetic hysterical woman?” (47). The narrative thus toys with the literary trope of the woman who rebels against patriarchal subjugation at the cost of her mental well-being, as examined in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s landmark work of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Dr. Brett suggests that Harriet’s perspective may be unreliable when he retorts, “You never did find being pregnant easy, did you? Have you forgotten? I’ve had you sitting here through four pregnancies, with all kinds of problems” (47). His words reinforce the myth that motherhood should be second nature: If a woman does not find pregnancy or motherhood “easy,” the problem is not with the child, but the woman. As a result, Harriet finds herself ostracized and blamed for Ben’s difference. Harriet struggles to raise Ben in a society that deems a woman’s inability to fully devote herself to child-rearing as both a flaw and a pathology. Neither Harriet nor Ben fits into societal expectations for women and children, highlighting The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness.

The horror elements in the novella, beyond the ambiguity of whether Ben is a “goblin” child, are in its depiction of the maternal body as a battleground for the prohibition (legal and cultural) of reproductive freedom. Lessing portrays Harriet’s increasing lack of bodily autonomy as resulting in disturbing behavior, such as when she threatens and drugs the fetus and fantasizes about violent ways to be rid of her child. In her darkest moments, Harriet’s repressed wishes and her rejection of motherhood as natural rise to the surface, manifesting as visions of abortion and the taboo of infanticide. External influences, in the form of medical interventions, heighten this conflict. Harriet’s antagonism toward Ben begins before he is even born, when she refers to the fetus as a poisonous enemy. Harriet and David reject the idea of her taking birth control since “[b]oth of course distrust[] the Pill” (10), yet Harriet surreptitiously ingests pills, some prescribed and some begged from friends, to tranquilize the fetus. Lessing sets the novella in the late 1960s and early 1970s to contextualize Harriet’s actions: Abortion was legalized in the UK in 1968, the pill was introduced in 1961 (for married women only), and the 1967 Family Planning Act made contraception available through the National Health Service. Harriet’s children are born both before and after these monumental changes that transform both practices and societal views on female autonomy and sexuality. Harriet’s attitudes change from the beginning of the novella, when she criticized women’s liberation as immoral, to recognizing that reproductive rights are essential to women’s agency.

Ben’s arrival drastically disrupts the Lovatts’ goal of domestic perfection, Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family. David registers failure to live up to his ideals as a betrayal, so he becomes resentful that both mother and child have not kept up their end of the bargain: “[S]he was breaking the rules of some contract between them: tears and misery had not ever been on their agenda!” (35). The couple is unwilling to acknowledge that sex and reproduction are two different things: Instead of taking birth control, they abstain from having sex entirely, which strains the intimacy and support that they once felt were the backbone of their marriage. David once saw Harriet as his collaborator in their vision of a fairy-tale family. Now, in an interpolated tale within the novella, David implicitly criticizes Harriet; he tells his children a story about a girl lost in a forest menaced by her reflection, mirroring Harriet’s travails in her home with the overgrown garden and her own sense of duality in her identity. David regards the “magic girl” in the story as a threat, whereas for Harriet, her doppelganger awakens her to the inequalities of essentialized womanhood. Unlike David, Harriet comes to realize that her dreams of being a mother to many children ignore the realities of hardship. After delivering Ben, “[s]he [i]s bruised—she kn[ows] it; inside she must be one enormous black bruise […] and no one w[ill] ever know” (48). For Harriet, the “horror” of motherhood is not the accompanying disappointment, exhaustion, and exasperation but the insidious assumption that a “good mother” is meant to accept it and not complain.