The Fifth Child Response Paper

Response Paper – The fifth Child by Sophia Söderström
The fifth child, a book written by Doris Lessing, describes the life-changing events in a happy couples life. Harriet and David Lovatt an upper-middle-class couple meet each other at an office party. The relationship goes quickly forward and they bought an enormous house outside of London with the idea to raise a lot of children there, maybe six or even eight. Nine months after they bought the house the first baby came, Luke. Everything went on well and they were very happy. They became the centrepiece of the family and a lot of relatives and friends came to visit for the holidays. However, no one was really supporting the fact that they wanted to have a big family. Everyone was thinking, how will they be able to support this house with eight children?
David and Harriet couldn’t manage without help. It started already when they bought the house and David’s father James took care of the mortgage. Harriet’s mother was probably the person who helped out the most and she was also the person who seemed to be against, David and Harriet’s life plan, the most. However, This was something I was stunned by already in the beginning of the
book. How Harriet and David wanted to find happiness and achieve something, but they didn’t seem to care if they did it on others expenses. I see this as one of Doris Lessing’s key points in the book.
We will read about the family’s six happy years for forty-eight pages of the book and then the change will come trough the birth of their fifth child, Ben. Harriet use to have difficulties during her pregnancy but this one is far more worse. This baby seems too active and she is struggling a lot until he finally is born in the eight month. Ben is not like their other children. In the book he is described like this by Harriet thoughts, “He was not a pretty baby He did not look like a baby at all”(p.48).
No one likes Ben and less people are coming to the house for the holidays. His family looks at him as an alien and he is locked in his room. The parents and the children are trying in the beginning, but the hatred towards Ben grew stronger and stronger. Harriet is spending a lot of her time with Ben and she is forgetting the other children. She tells David, “After a day with Ben I feel as if nothing exists but him. As if nothing has ever existed. I suddenly realise I haven’t remembered the others for hours. I forgot their supper yesterday. Dorothy went to the pictures, and I came down and found Helen cooking their supper”(p.65). Ben has taken over more and more of Harriet’s time and after he killed a dog and then a cat, the other children are frightened of him. The Christmas when Ben became three the family thought it had gone to far and they wanted Ben to go to an institution. David said he agreed and so did Harriet, after some persuading. The family was happy again, but Harriet couldn’t banish Ben from her mind. She went to see Ben and brought him back home to the rest of the family’s devastation. No one was coming to the house anymore, the family was drifting apart and Dorothy’s is not helping with the household anymore.
Harriet thinks that everyone blames her for, firstly, being the mother of this child and secondly, took him home from the institution and made the family unhappy again.
Harriet always doubts herself and she always thinks that everyone think of her as a criminal. This is something recurrent in the book and the first time she says it is in the beginning when she says to her mum, “Perhaps we ought to have been born into another country. Do you realise that having six children, in another par of the world, it would be normal, nothing shocking about it- they aren’t made to feel criminals”(p.16). I think she may have does feeling because she feels guilty, maybe somewhere she believe she is a criminal.
The book goes quickly forward and the 133 pages stretches over twenty years. The book describes the family’s life trough Harriet’s eyes and thoughts, which makes it unreliable. When I read the book it struck me that, maybe there is nothing wrong with Ben, maybe there’s something wrong with Harriet? Why do David and the children hate Ben more than Harriet? Maybe they hate Ben because he took their mother and wife from them?
When I read this book about a couple’s misfortune, I don’t sympathize for any of them.
Usually, when I read about someone’s misery I sympathize with the person in question but Lessing makes no to. David and Harriet found each other and want a big family, a big house, lovely children and a perfect life. That is not abnormal, the problem is that they will take advantage of everyone to get there. They don’t even think before they buy the house and they don’t think that if we can’t take care of six children on our own, maybe we should not have that many. Many questions occur but I think that Lessing wants to discuss this utilisation. He describes the mothers bond with their child and she will always feel responsibility and guilty, although she also feels some kind of hate towards the
child.
Ben is hated from the moment he starts to grow in his mother’s tummy. He will never experience love and he will always be shut out from the rest of the family. They see him as an alien, someone from another planet. Harriet takes him to a few different doctors and no one will say that there are something wrong with him, despite a hyperactive behaviour. One of them says, “The problem is not with Ben, but with you. You don’t like him very much”(p.103), to Harriet. Harriet thinks that everyone is against her and they all think that she is a criminal. Ironically, her son became one and probably, partial, because of her.