The Fifth Child

British novelist, Doris Lessing, in her gruesome novel, The Fifth Child, raises questions about human variation and its societal treatment; the tyranny of visuals in the establishment of normalcy and social power; the edifice of the normal and the deviant, defective, or abnormal; and the gap between professional diagnoses and family realities. The Fifth Child was deemed "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse," by The New York Times Book Review in turns however rating it four stars. Lessing wrote the tale encircling a monstrous child (repulsive appearance, unsatisfying hunger, aberrantly robust clout, and demanding personality) who smashes down the "perfect" family due to his unexpected emergence. Mrs. Lessing grew up "damn[ed] [by the] First World War" and in the time period of World War II (1939-1945); consequently, the culture and aroma during WWII was immensely violent, emergently aggressive and industrially vicious and this must have been the backdrop to where Doris Lessing could have surfaced with such an ingenious plot.
The Fifth Child is a novel written with elegance and poise, but somehow manages to be terrifying all at once. In this story, David and Harriet Lovatt (both 1960s conservatives) marries one another hoping to prosper on the "perfect American dream" together by choosing marriage and a copious family over successful careers and the sexual liberation which became a distinctive feature of that time. But their ideal "American dream" is destroyed when Harriet becomes pregnant with their fifth child unexpectedly, Ben. Harriet first deems that something is erroneous with the baby she is carrying, where she goes through a stressful pregnancy with many feelings of resentment and ang...

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...hildren. Whereas, during WWII people of different cultures, ethnic backgrounds, and family lifestyles would never wed one another; contrasting, that Harriet and David were so different yet the complied with one another. To this is where, Doris Lessing did not channel the 1940s actual marriage arrangements into The Fifth Child.
The Fifth Child, I believe is based on the culture and time period of Doris Lessing's infancy centered on her yearnings to have wanted the "perfect family" and desiring to live upon the American Dream. But once her dreams were estranged by WWI stories and events of WWII, she felt the need to seek a plot amongst the mist of this terrible misfortune. And to this because of her cultural development, The Fifth Child became an enticingly warm and deviously comfortable, yet dreadfully horrifying and appallingly luring novel to the public eye.