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Analysis of your novel
The fifth child by Doris Lessing

An overall analysis

The plot
This book by the Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing is about Harriet and David, who both felt like oddballs because they had an old fashion view of sex and family values while living in the sixties where everyone else were sleeping around. They meet and immediately know they are right for one another, they both believe that family life is the basis for happiness, and so they begin to make their dreams come true by having children. Their happiness was complete with four children and close relatives. But with the fifth pregnancy their idyllic family happiness begins to fall apart. The new infant, Ben, is not like other children; he develops much faster and grows much larger than normal babies, strong and violent and he intimidates everybody. Harriet begins, while struggling to love him but disliking him, to wonder what she has brought into the world.

The setting
The book is set in the later part of the 20th century, in a small town outside London. But it might just as well been set today, Harriet and David would have been a bit of oddballs in today’s society too. We have a more open view of sex than they do and today it is more common to put career before family, although almost nothing can be seen as odd today because I believe we are more individualized than ever before. The story could have been set in any country.

The characters
The main characters are Harriet, David and Ben. It is Harriet’s thoughts the reader gets to follow and it is mostly her point of view that is presented in the book. Harriet is the oldest of three daughters and grew up in a stabile, happy family. Her parents had thought happiness lay in family life and she had always known that she wanted the same for her life.
David has a different background but also desires family life. His parents were divorced since he was seven, both his parents remarried. His father was a rich boat builder who moved around the world with his wife living the lifestyle of the rich. His mother lived in Oxford in a shabby house, where David lived. He did not want his children to grow up the way he did with two homes without really feeling at home in any of them, therefore he aimed for happy family life.

Their dream is as mentioned to have a large loving family, but are their plans realistic? They depend on other people to help them fulfil their dream; they needed Harriet’s mother to help them raise all their children and they could not have afforded their big house without economic help from David’s father, and that is both selfish and irresponsible. Their dream is also naive; they expect to have perfectly healthy children and when Harriet’s sister gives birth to a child with Downs’s syndrome Harriet believes that it is a punishment for the matrimonial problems her sister was having. She also thinks Ben is a punishment for her and David thinking they could go against the crowd and be happy in their way.

Harriet’s other pregnancies were uncomplicated but the fifth baby moves inside her earlier than normal and moves like he is trying to claw his way out. She is in pain during the complete pregnancy and takes a lot of painkillers. Then Ben arrives after 8 months. He is described as an ugly, large and surprisingly strong child with cold eyes. Harriet immediately dislikes him and thinks of him as a troll or a goblin. Ben is a strange child, and his siblings instinctively fear him. He is violent, he once killed a cat only as a toddler. He is not the cleverest, as a student he wasn’t very successful. He doesn’t act like other children, he doesn’t seem to know how to act in situations, and he is always observing his siblings and copying their action. For example if the other children were watching TV he would also sit there, copying there reactions to what was going on on the screen.

The question is – what is he? Is he a troll like his mother think? She takes him to doctors who classify him as a hyperactive child, completely normal, only hyperactive. He might be an autistic child, since he can not show any feelings. Does he symbolise the evil that lies in every human? Or is he just the result of bad upbringing with an unloving mother? Maybe he symbolise everything and every characteristic that doesn’t fit into Harriet and David’s perfect idyllic dream. While reading I thought of him as non-human, but I am not so sure anymore. An autistic child with bad upbringing seems pretty realistic to me, maybe disturbed by all the drugs she took during the pregnancy. One mustn’t forget that the family’s problems did not begin with Ben. Harriet was on the edge of being burnout before she got pregnant with him, he might have been the trigger.

Harriet tries to love her non-amiable child, but she can not, although she still has a strong bond to him. It is she who saves him when everyone else wants him dead. With this decision she destroys her family. She only has time for Ben and his needs and the other children suffer for his sake.

Some subsidiary characters in the book are Harriet and David’s other children, Luke, Helen, Jane and Paul. Harriet and David’s parents must also be mentioned, Harriet’s mother Dorothy, who helps them a lot with children although she is not pleased with being used in that way. David’s mother Molly and her husband Frederick, who detests Ben, and wants them to send him away to an institution. David’s father James and his wife Jessica, who contribute a lot economically, without them Harriet and David’s life wouldn’t have been possible.

There is a change in every character in the book, except for Ben who continues to be as he is.
Harriet and David’s lives don’t turn out the way they intend them to, this damages their relation, and their relation to their children and other relatives.

Their relatives who loved coming to their house for the holidays come more and more seldom. Molly and Frederick haven’t forgotten that Harriet saved Ben from the institution and their relation hasn’t been the same ever since. Dorothy gets tired of being used as a nursemaid and goes to help her other daughter with the child with Downs syndrome.

The children stops trusting their parents, and one after another they move away to private schools or to their grandparents. Only Paul and Ben stay in the house, but Paul is not home much, he spends a lot of time at his psychiatrist’s home. Paul, who was a very social and happy child, changes abruptly because of Ben. He also needs his mother’s attention, he is in a vulnerable age when Harriet “abandons” him for Ben because she thinks he needs her more. He becomes insecure, introvert and disturbed.

One could say that all this is Ben’s fault; it’s his presence that makes people feel uncomfortable and unwilling to visit Harriet and David. Or you could blame the society for being so unacceptable of what is “abnormal” and unusual, and also Harriet and David for not showing people that he is just a normal autistic or disturbed child.

The characterisation is utterly credible, I could see Ben before me and it was really unpleasant. He is the character Lessing succeeded the best with, he frightened me a lot in the beginning as a child. When he grew up he wasn’t as intimidating as earlier, I think children, dolls, toys and other things that are supposed to be sweet and innocent are the scariest. The other characters also seem realistic, and have not only one but several dimensions.

A closer analysis
The themes
The main theme in the book is according to me human relations, the relation between parents and their children. Also social problems are a theme, how we relate to something to us unknown and frightful, to something abnormal. The book questions nature, is Ben a goblin or a troll? Are there such genes in humanity that sometimes break out? The message to be read could be

The form
The story is presented indirectly in the following forms: dialogue, narrative, natural and personal description. The sentence structure is relatively simple, it’s nothing like the language in Jane Austen’s books, and the reading flows easily. The vocabulary is colloquial and quite simple. There are figures of speech, similes are used to describe Ben, he is compared to a troll or a goblin.

“A snapshot”
A scene that really caught my mind is when Harriet comes to get Ben back home from the institution. The people at the institution are surprised by her arrival, people usually leave their weird or uncontrollable children there to die and do not come to get them. But Harriet does. They are quite unwilling to let her in, and tell her to wait in the reception while they go fetch him. Though against their will she follows them and sees the most bizarre children on her way. Finally they reach the room where Ben is being held. They open the door, and there he lies, in a straitjacket, drugged to unconsciousness, smeared in excrement. They lift him up and take him to a bath and clean him, still unconscious. In this scene Ben seems more human than in the rest of the book, he is helpless, abandoned by his parents to die. Harriet finally takes some responsibility here, she brought the child into this world, and it is her and David’s responsibility to take care of it. They should not have had that many children if they can not care for them all. They don’t have the money to afford five children’s needs, but still they are selfish enough to have them and depend on financial help. But here Harriet understands that he still is her child and she can not abandon him just like that. It is a fateful decision, but she could not have lived with herself if she wouldn’t have acted.

Interaction
The obvious question I would like to ask Doris Lessing is what Ben is, what was going through her head while creating his character? Was there any personal experience that made her write the book? Are any of the characters based on somebody in her acquaintance? What inspired her? What did she want with this book, what did she want people to think? What is the message? This is simply because I want to increase my understanding of the novel and out of curiosity.

I might have wanted the book to end differently, there isn’t really any explanation to what Ben is, and we do not learn what happens with his life. There is a sequel, which I haven’t read, which follows Ben’s life so I guess I’d better read it if I want to know. But what happens with Harriet and David and the rest of the family? Are their relations damaged forever or can they become a happy family again?

I think I’ve developed my ability to analyse texts, this book really has several levels of understanding. You can read it and just think that Ben is a freak, a goblin or some monster, or you could look deeper and read between the lines. I also increased my knowledge of how our upbringing affects our personality, we just learned about that in the psychology class and that was really helpful in understanding the novel. Reading this book will therefore help me to succeed in my psychology test hopefully. This kind of knowledge will also help me to understand myself, why I have become who I am and if I ever have children it will help to know what psychological effects my acting may have on them.