The Fifth Child

The narrative challenges readers to question whether Harriet’s assessment of Ben is real or imagined. From her perspective, he seems to take glee in hurting others and directing hatred toward her. To Harriet, Ben’s increasingly violent behavior is evidence that he is an aberration from human nature, but she cannot confirm this assessment. At times, Harriet observes her enigmatic son and thinks, “[I]n the half dark of the room he really did look like a little troll or a hobgoblin crouching there” (63). Other times, Ben’s threatening demeanor is based solely on her impression of his proclivities. Harriet observes, “What was natural to him, it seemed, in the way of amusement was his hostile-looking teeth-bared grin, that looked hostile” (69). Despite her suspicions, Harriet admits that Ben’s mind is a mystery to her. She “c[an]not read the look in those cold yellow-green eyes. But then she never could!” (66). Harriet can only make assumptions about Ben’s intentions, and as a character with a possibly unreliable perspective, she may be projecting her own resentment and hostility toward the child.

Lessing strategically leaves Ben’s perspective out of the omniscient narration to maintain the ambiguity. Neither Harriet nor the reader knows if Ben thinks of her as his mother, how his isolation and abandonment affect him, or how he feels about his siblings. Harriet continually wonders how he sees the world: “Sometimes it seemed to her that she spent her life trying to understand what Ben was feeling, thinking” (66-67). Harriet’s desire to know and understand her son, while acknowledging her own limitations, distinguishes her from the rest of the family, who are content to simply erase him.

Ben is a figure of otherness, alien and undefinable by the conventions of society, particularly of middle-class values. Dorothy tells Harriet, “He may be normal for what he is. But he is not normal for what we are” (65). David more forcefully asserts that Ben does not belong and gives Harriet the ultimatum, “It’s either him or us” (69). Though no one claims to know what Ben is, they are certain that they know what he is not. Ben functions as the antithesis to suburban middle-class values of conformity, leisure, and respectability, and for that, he must be expelled so that the family can return to “normal.”

With Ben gone, the Lovatts resume the fairy-tale-like perfection of their “good old days” before he existed; the hyperbolic depiction of the family’s idyll suggests a level of performativity key to Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family. The children’s “eyes sh[i]ne, they [a]re full of high spirits, and they ke[ep] coming to Harriet with little gifts of a sweet or a toy, ‘This is for you, Mummy.’ Or they rush[] up to kiss her, or stroke her face, or nuzzle to her like happy calves or foals” (77). In this passage, nature imagery returns not as a threatening, shadowy force but as allusions to pastural bliss, where the calves and foals symbolize innocence, affection, and new beginnings. Harriet is rewarded for banishing Ben, but she refuses to lose herself in the fantasy of the ideal family and can’t stop thinking of the reality that Ben “[i]s a prisoner somewhere. What kind of a prisoner?” (77). The family’s return to a golden past seems all the more disturbing and cruel given their knowledge that they have essentially sent Ben to his death: When Harriet defends bringing Ben home by declaring, “But they were murdering him,” David coldly responds, “I thought that was the idea” (87). Harriet has fantasized about ways to be rid of Ben, and Ben has committed disturbing acts of violence, but the novella’s most understated horrors are the other family members’ callous indifference to Ben’s suffering and the way they condone eliminating him for not fitting their image of a model child.

Harriet’s refusal to abandon Ben and her attempts to integrate him into the family challenge The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness. Ben may be rejected by his father and siblings, but he is neither incorrigible nor as antisocial as they claim. Harriet recognizes opportunities for Ben to fit in; with John and his friends, Ben finds a pseudo-family where he experiences “safety and enjoyment” (95). Their nicknames for him, though derogatory, do not disavow his difference, and the group does not try to assimilate Ben into a “normal” persona, allowing him to find belonging and acceptance. John’s friends are frequently described as unemployed youths, a comment on their own status as social misfits and the set of negative stereotypes attributed to them.