A Lovely, Creepy Read: Book Review of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

 

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, Harriet and David bond and marry over their mutual desire for a traditional marriage and large family. They are righteously against the British counterculture of the 1960s, with its sexual freedom and distaste for marriage.

Their families become suspicious when Harriet and David purchase a large home outside of the city, wondering how many children the couple intends to have. Between Harriet and David, they can’t agree on an exact number, but it grows larger and larger. When the couple has four children in short order, much quicker than even they had planned, their families think them irresponsible. Truly, they cannot provide for themselves without financial assistance, and with Harriet so often pregnant, they also depend on help with the children. However, the boisterous atmosphere created in their home makes it the ideal place for the extended family to gather during holidays, and all begin to appreciate and enjoy what Harriet and David created.

Then comes Ben, the eponymous character of the book. And the fifth child is a doozy. In utero, Ben begins tormenting his mother, growing quickly and painfully, kicking and doing harm to her already exhausted body. One of his first actions after birth is to painfully chomp her breast when she tries to feed him. He is not cuddly and does not seem to want to be cuddled. His appearance, too, is monstrous, being described as looking like a goblin or a troll.

Ben is a murderous and terrifying child who frightens his siblings away. He seems not to understand human kindness and civility. Quickly, the extended family is not so interested in visiting and the question becomes what to do about Ben.

The Fifth Child reminded me a good deal of We Need to Talk About Kevin, a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver, told from the point of view of a mother of a teenage boy who committed a mass killing at his high school. It is an epistolary story, written from the mother, Eva, to her husband, considering how their son has gotten to this point. Eva explains how she never bonded with her son and suspected him of maliciousness starting when he was a baby. She details her resentment at the expectation that she should push her career aside to take care of Kevin. At times Eva blames herself for Kevin’s bad behavior, pointing to her inability to build affection between herself and her son. At other times, she notes how she tried to love and accept him and still he sought to stomp on the joy of others, committing malicious acts when he saw someone else showing passion about something, as when he doused a room with red ink, after Eva laboriously decorated it with souvenirs and memorabilia from her travels. She believes that the young child knew what the decorations meant to her and that he delighted in the pain he caused. She cannot be sure, but suspicions about what motivates his behavior linger.

Similarly, Harriet feels guilty for not being able to connect with Ben. She knows that something is wrong with him, but the medical professionals will not confirm it. She feels blamed for his inhuman qualities, and sometimes she is blamed for the nature of her son. She tries to love him and struggles between her duty to Ben who needs so much more attention and her typical children, who seem better able to cope with less attention.

A Google search proved that I was not the only one to make the connection between The Fifth Child and We Need to Talk About Kevin. In Lynda Woodroffe’s review of The Fifth Child in Contemporary Psychotherapy, Woodroffe highlights that as the finger points at Harriet, no one blames David. Eva has a similar realization—in the eyes of others, it is always the mother’s fault.

An important difference between Eva’s relationship with Kevin versus Harriet’s relationship with Ben is that Eva becomes obsessed trying to figure out if Kevin is acting cruelly, whereas Harriet does not assume cruelty, exactly, nor does she develop a cat and mouse game with Ben--her suspicions being that he is not quite human.

Other sources suggest that Ben represents the burdens of motherhood—the stress, anxiety, and physical and mental tolls of raising children. Under such maternal labor, Harriet becomes less available to her husband and less easy going in general. She is not the pleasant, happy person people want her to be. With how quickly she has her children, her body is as worn as her nerves. A truism of motherhood: it changes a woman’s body, mental state, and emotions.

In an interview featured on Web of Stories, Doris Lessing explains that the idea of Ben originated in a contemplation of changeling stories. Fairy tales tell of fairies swapping out their own babies for human babies, leaving the human parents with a child that is not theirs. Lessing pondered what would happen if someone did end up with a child who was not theirs. She also explained that she sees Ben more as a pre-homo sapiens, who, in our times is out of place, but would have fit in during his time period. He is not a monster, he is just in the wrong context.

Regardless of the author’s original intentions, Ben strikes a nerve with the reader. Because of his differences, he requires more care than the other children, and at the same time does not give affection or any other satisfaction to his mother. Perhaps this is another fear that plays out in The Fifth Child--that mothers will receive no reward, not affection or gratitude from their child, not even pride in their accomplishments, that instead, children will ghoulishly demand all and leave their mothers with nothing.

Would I teach this novel? Yes. It is short, strange, and haunting, while at the same time being ripe for multiple interpretations. In the parlance of my literature courses, it offers many literary puzzles for some potentially interesting essays.

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