Deluded Perfection and the Realities of Motherhood: Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

Abstract

In Doris Lessing‘s The Fifth Child, a woman gives birth to a violent boy who strangles the family pet and tries to kill his siblings. But as Mikaela Kyle argues in “Deluded Perfection and the Realities of Motherhood,” Ben is more than a monster. He awakens his parents from their dream, which is to raise a large and happy family while someone else does the housework and pays the bills. Ben disrupts this selfish and unsustainable fantasy by embodying everything that it excludes: violence, madness, anger, hunger, greed, scarcity, and fear. As Kyle argues, it is Ben‘s mother, Harriet, who has to bear the brunt of this disruption. Everyone else in the novel is able to distance him or herself from the monster, but Harriet cannot. Does she deserve praise or blame? Neither, argues Kyle. The lonely reality of motherhood is that Harriet cannot ignore the threat that her child embodies.

—Dr. Alice Brittan