48 pages • 1-hour read
The Fifth Child
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse and ableism.
Ambivalence About Motherhood and Female Self-Sacrifice
The Fifth Child critiques the social expectation, both imposed and internalized, that “good” women are inherently maternal, wholly fulfilled by motherhood, and content to selflessly sacrifice and erase their personal autonomy for the sake of raising a family.
Harriet begins the novella embracing domesticity and motherhood as a “natural” part of her identity and feels like she has struck gold when she finds a partner who shares her desire to have “[s]ix children at least” (9). Her husband, David, reinforces her role by asserting to his own divorced mother, with a measure of criticism, “You are not maternal […] It’s not your nature. But Harriet is” (13). Harriet’s wide-eyed belief in motherhood leads her to assume that with a larger family, she could “do better” than four children and maximize her happiness by having more. Her mother, Dorothy, warns, “The trouble with Harriet is that her eyes have always been bigger than her stomach” (26). The idiom appropriately connotes the error (and subsequent horror) of Harriet’s vision of domestic bliss and the limitations of her stomach/womb, suggesting a critique of biological determinism.
Even before Ben’s birth, Harriet suppresses her doubt, exhaustion, and discomfort and accepts that complaints about maternity and parenting are best left unspoken. She substitutes her silent “No” on their conjugal bed with a “yes, that was it” to rationalize her misgivings and fulfill society’s and David’s expectations of her role as a mother (10). Harriet’s repression of her personal desires and welfare continues throughout the novella. Her first pregnancy is “not […] an easy pregnancy. Nothing seriously wrong, but she [is] sick a lot, sle[eps] badly from indigestion, and [i]s disappointed with herself” (17). Rather than acknowledging the mixed emotions of motherhood, Harriet feels shame for not living up to an impossible and sexist standard that assumes that motherhood is the pinnacle of female fulfillment.
With Ben’s birth, Harriet’s ambivalence about motherhood is brought to the forefront, as she feels neither maternal instinct nor love for this child and shifts from fear and resentment to pity and back again. Ben represents the return of the repressed, and he amplifies all of Harriet’s anxieties and grievances about being a mother. She finds him uncontrollable as he bruises and bites her and believes that he rejects both giving and receiving affection. Harriet succumbs to the burden of self-sacrifice and takes on his upbringing without help or acknowledgment, which furthers her isolation and self-erasure and her antipathy toward her son. She admits, “The trouble is, you get used to hell. […] After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him” (65). To Harriet’s exasperation, her efforts to raise Ben are met with accusations of irresponsibility and selfishness for neglecting her husband and other children. Thus, even when Harriet believes that she is doing right, society punishes her for failing to do everything.
The ending is ambiguous: Harriet’s efforts to raise Ben are either delusional and in vain or a feat of defiant determination. Either way, she is left exhausted, alone, and without recognition even from Ben. She asks herself, “Did he know that because she had brought him home, this house had emptied itself, and everyone had gone away, leaving her alone?” (131). Harriet becomes a tragic figure whose downfall illustrates the myth of the “good mother.”
Exposing the Myth of the Ideal Family
The Fifth Child is often considered a modern gothic fairy tale in its depiction of a couple’s dream of a perfect family turned nightmare. The Lovatts represent the fallacy of the ideal family myth, and the novella exposes their misguided attempts to build happiness on a foundation not of acceptance and mutual support but of hubris and rigid gender norms.
The novella uses fairy-tale imagery to depict Harriet and David’s first encounter as destined. They fall in love at first sight and “set off from their respective corners towards each other at the same moment: this [i]s to be important to them as the famous office party bec[omes] part of their story” (6). The “story” of their union highlights the role of mythmaking, where the couple presents a romanticized version of themselves as “made for each other” (6), highlighting their exceptionalism. After the birth of two children, the Lovatts confirm that they have achieved “[h]appiness. A happy family. The Lovatts [a]re a happy family. It [i]s what they had chosen and what they deserve[]” (21). To the Lovatts, their perfect home is a reward for the righteousness of their traditional, conservative values.
Beneath their idyllic story is the reality of shallow motivations and the contrived illusion of effortless bliss. Having been teased and discouraged by their peers and family for their old-fashioned views, the couple feels vindicated and smugly asserts that “they had been right to insist on guarding that stubborn individuality of theirs” (21). Harriet and David hypocritically extol the virtues of “emotional fastidiousness [and] abstemiousness” (4), yet when it comes to family, their oversized house and intention to have as many as 10 children are careless and excessive. They recognize that they are “meagre and inadequate” yet cling to their unrealistic image of domestic bliss (11). When they have four children in the span of six years, their ostensible success is externally buttressed: David’s father supports them financially, Harriet’s mother devotes all her time to raising the children, and Harriet is irritable and exhausted, but the couple takes credit for appearing as if they have created a “miracle of a family” with ease (31).
With the birth of their fifth child, the family’s weak foundations are amplified, as they lack a shared sense of support and belonging to address Ben’s serious needs. Purportedly a “family man,” David retreats and abandons Harriet to cope with the family’s conflicts when they prove too difficult, “for what he fe[els] there [i]s beyond what he c[an] manage with” (39). The only time he takes decisive action in Ben’s life is when he expels the child to return to his idealized “normal” family. Ben confirms the inequity of the family’s gendered division of labor: Harriet internalizes the rightness of being left “[a]lone in her ordeal—and she ha[s] to be, she kn[ows] that, and d[oes] not blame her family for not accepting what she [i]s being slowly forced to accept” (40). Rather than expelling Ben, Harriet tries to include him in the home and is punished for this transgression of the family’s ideals.
The irony of the Lovatts’ vision of an ideal family is that their children find greater happiness outside of it. Even Ben is better off with a found family made up of John and his friends, where he feels safe, enjoys himself, and is accepted. The dissolution of the Lovatt household illustrates the destructive consequences of maintaining the myth of the ideal family at the cost of genuine compassion and support.
The Social Construction of Normality and Otherness
Lessing explores the social construction of normality and otherness through the Lovatts’ treatment of their enigmatic son, Ben. Ben’s physical and behavioral differences threaten the Lovatt’s identity as a “normal” family, and by marking him as an outcast, they reinforce an “us versus them” mentality that legitimizes neglect, marginalization, and expulsion by dehumanizing him as “other.”
Ben challenges the Lovatts’ expectations of what a “normal” child is. Before he is born, Harriet insists to Dr. Brett that this pregnancy is “not the same thing, it is absolutely different” (47). She sets herself in opposition to the fetus by calling it her “enemy,” demarcating the boundaries between what she sees as acceptable, familiar, and controllable and her sense of the foreign, unfamiliar, and therefore threatening. Ben is further dehumanized by descriptions of him as a creature, an alien, a goblin, or a genetic throwback. The novella does not identify the cause or nature of Ben’s difference, and this unknown element relegates Ben, from Harriet’s perspective, from a human being to a thing: To her, Ben is the opposite of a “real baby” like Paul, and Harriet asks herself, “But did he know himself afflicted? Was he, in fact? What was he?” (67). The “what” emphasizes the objectification and subsequent rejection of Ben’s existence from the scope of humanity.
To Harriet, Ben needs to be assimilated, and to David and the siblings, he must be expelled from their lives entirely so that they can resume their “normal” identities. Ben’s experiences of being othered resemble Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” from her 1980 feminist psychoanalytic work, The Powers of Horror. Kristeva argues that the abject inspires disgust and horror for transgressing the boundaries between self and other. To his family and relatives, Ben inspires “puzzled, even anxious [stares]; but then c[omes] fear, […] there [i]s horror, too” (57). Luke and Helen are so repulsed by Ben eating raw chicken that they move out of the house soon after. By contrast, Harriet, who once shared her family’s disgust for the child, refuses to reject Ben: “‘He’s a little child,’ she said. ‘He’s our child’” (74). Having witnessed the extreme abuse of the children who are in the institution alongside him, Harriet finally sees the cruelty of shunning those who are different. She recognizes, “By everything they—the society she belonged to—stood for, believed in, she had had no alternative but to bring Ben back from that place” (117). Though she initially tries to purge herself of her child, she realizes that to do so would deny Ben his humanity and her own.
Ben is deemed a “monster” in the same way that Harriet is made to feel like a “criminal”; both are treated as deviating from the norm. Yet, as the novella progresses, Ben is shown to be not as irredeemable as the Lovatts think, and he establishes relationships with John and later his own “gang” of schoolmates, who are all outcasts and misfits from society; this illustrates the moral failure that underpins the marginalization and abandonment of those who are different.
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