Kevin Fleischmann, Period 7IRE 4: The Fifth Child
When people get to the end of a novel, they can't remember everything they read, considering most of them don't have photographic memories. Instead, there tend to be certain moments or parts of a novel that jump out at them and remain very clear in their minds even after reading the entire novel. In Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child, the moment when Harriet visits the institution[KF1] where Ben is being held stands out as a memorable moment. This moment is significant because of how it brings Harriet to accept Ben as her own child[KF2], while demonstrating on a minimalized level the monster that Ben is and how he cannot fit into society as a normal person[KF3].
Throughout the story, Harriet keeps Ben as a child because she feels that she must, be she does not treat him at all as she treats her other children. She keeps him locked in his room and separates herself and the rest of her family from him as much as possible, since she sees him as a threat. However, once he is sent off to the institution, she feels like a criminal for what she has done and must pay him a visit. While at the institution, she finds out what a horrible place it is and that the institution slowly kills the children who are sent there, a quite shocking point in the novel, making it stand out. Seeing the horror, she brings her son home so he is safe, which others regard as crazy, but she explains, “... they were murdering him. ... I couldn’t stand it”[KF4] (87). From then on, she disciplines him as she would her own child and organizes a kind of “day care” suitable for him. Thus, Harriet is brought to accept Ben as one of her children. Although his situation continues to improve, he still causes the conflict that exists in the story, which would not occur if Harriet had never visited the institution.
In addition, Harriet’s visit to the institution exemplifies the fact that Ben is a monster[KF5] and that he is not suited to live in normal society. The first hint of this is the ward full of monsters that Harriet experiences while at the institution. It is not specified whether they were all still alive or what the exact situation was, but they were all children lying on beds, presenting the idea of a home for monsters. Ben is then presented on a bed in a similar way[KF6], as if he belongs at the institution, and the employees act horrified toward him. This horror that is expressed demonstrates on a smaller scale the horror toward Ben that is felt by those in the outside world, and that people will tend to separate themselves from him (in the institution’s case, through the use of drugs[KF7]) before they try to interact with him.
Harriet’s visit to the institution, made memorable by the horror and detail of the passage, thus highlights Ben’s monstrous nature, while allowing Harriet to accept him as a child of hers.
[KF1]This moment stood out to me because of the horror that existed within the scene and the details that were used in describing it. Lessing uses diction like, “In the cots were—monsters. … every bed or cot held an infant or child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometime horribly… A child seemed at first glance normal, but then Harriet saw there was no back to its head; it was all face, which seemed to scream at her” (81). In addition, these explanations occur as Harriet is running through a ward, but the time taken for the descriptions seems much longer than it would take to run through the ward, giving the impression that these pictures were haunting Harriet in her head even after she left, and making it stick with me as the reader, too.
[KF2]Although Harriet never wants to get rid of Ben in the first place, her reasoning is mostly that it isn’t right; she does not want to deal with him either. However, visiting the institution makes her realize that even if he is a monster, he is her son, and she begins to have a relationship with him. There is evidence of this in how she disciplines him and threatens him with being sent back to the institution.
[KF3]This is one of the main ideas of the novel and the cause of the overall conflict, which is why it’s significant, and why many of the memorable moments in this book have to do with this idea. I also say “…on a minimalized level…” because the employees (the man and the girl) represent people in society when they show expression toward Ben, and the institution itself is a kind of corrupt society that doesn’t deal with “monsters” like Ben in an appropriate way.
[KF4]It really stand out to me that Harriet says this in this way because we also get her comments at some points in the story that she hopes Ben will fall out of a window, get hit by a car in traffic, etc. However, when it actually comes to the fact and she has to experience it first hand, she would not let it happen.
[KF5]I like how, at the end of this book, it is still ambiguous as to what Ben actually is. Since it’s just a book, too, we have a little bit of freedom in how we imagine Ben: how human, how frightening, etc.
[KF6]I read this part a couple of times, and it still confused me as to why Ben was in the empty room on his own bed. Was he being held separate from the others because he was dangerous, like they said he was stronger than most? Or was he undergoing some operation or something at the time which is why he was pulled aside?
[KF7]I found this point stood out as well because it is evidence of a corrupt society. The institution, for example, does not want to directly murder the children, so they use sedative drugs that slowly and eventually kill the children as an excuse for the children’s death.