DANIEL SULLIVAN
JEFF GREENBERG
She woke to see Ben standing silently there in the half dark, staring at them. The shadows from the garden moved on the ceiling, the spaces of the big room emptied into obscurity, and there stood this goblin child, half visible. The pressure of those inhuman eyes of his had entered her sleep and woken her.
—Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child
Images of deformed or malevolent children have a particular power to disturb us. To understand why this is the case, we must first acknowledge the popular view of children as innocent and good. This conception of children is a social construction that has grown in popularity in recent history. Since the eighteenth century, the rise of Enlightenment philosophies of education, as epitomized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile , along with the blank-slate hypothesis of the British empiricists have generated idyllic images of children as dependent, uncorrupted, and precious in industrialized societies, a trend documented by Chris Jenks and Peter N. Stearns. The prototypic child of “Western” modernity is the opposite of evil.
The contradiction between the evil child and the prototypic innocent child of modernity suggests that aversion to monstrous children can be accounted for partly by theories such as those of Noël Carroll and Julia Kristeva which trace horror to ambiguous stimuli that cannot be placed into clear, natural categories. In the context of the modern cultural understanding of childhood, children who exhibit tendencies towards cruelty or subversive self-assertion represent a category violation that turns conventional knowledge of human behavior on its head. As Eric Ziolkowski has shown, images of evil children have had a place in culture since Antiquity, but they are an extreme departure from the Post-Enlightenment view of the innocent child that is popular in modernity. The contradiction between the evil child and the Post-Enlightenment prototype may help explain the relative explosion of examples of monstrous children in literature and film that has occurred in the past half-century, noted by such diverse thinkers as anthropologist George Boas and author Joyce Carol Oates. Increasingly, the modern view of the child as innocent is accompanied by the sinister archetype of its opposite: the child who is thoroughly evil.
The fact that monstrous children are an affront to a modern understanding of what childhood should be cannot entirely account for their unique power as horrific figures. Many ambiguous creatures and sources of malevolence have the power to frighten. Monstrous children stand out among the rest in the uncanny disturbance they generate, as if they arouse a more primordial terror than that of expectancy violation or anxiety at the subversion of innocence. Sigmund Freud's theory of the uncanny, which argues that we are uniquely disturbed by entities that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, captures something of the feeling but fails to adequately explain the source of the modern aversion to evil children. What is required to explain this aversion is a post-Freudian account of the importance of children in our symbolic lives. We propose that one such account is offered by terror management theory, an empirically supported social psychological theory of human behavior formulated by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (TMT ; see Greenberg, Solomon, and Arndt, 2008). TMT argues that fear of personal mortality is a primary motivating force behind human behavior. From this perspective, children have a special importance for their parents and the preceding generation as guarantors of a form of what Robert Jay Lifton called symbolic immortality : the sense that one will leave behind some kind of legacy after death. Children thus provide psychological equanimity in the face of the potential for paralyzing death anxiety. According to TMT, then, fear of monstrous children is inseparable from fear of mortality and the breakdown of cultural strategies for repressing this fear.
To demonstrate the applicability of TMT to the case of monstrous children in the horror genre, we will use the theory to analyze Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child (1988). We argue that the horror manifested by the novel's evil child, Ben, has two sources, both of which are rendered psychologically explicable by TMT. First, the birth and development of the monstrously ambiguous Ben acts as a potent reminder of human creatureliness. Because animals are mortal, humans prefer not to think of themselves as animals and instead seek refuge in symbolic constructions. A child such as Ben who is animalistic in both appearance and behavior makes it difficult for his parents to deny their animality and therefore their mortality. Second, Ben's status as the fifth child of parents psychologically committed to obtaining symbolic immortality through their offspring makes both his perversity and his dangerousness symbols of the ultimate failure of our strivings to overcome death. By highlighting these two aspects of the horror of monstrous children—the deformed child as symbol of human creatureliness and the corrupt child as a subversion of the use of children to secure symbolic immortality—Lessing's work serves as an apt demonstration of the unique terror engendered by such children, a point made clear by applying TMT to the text.
Before turning to a brief presentation of TMT and our application of the theory to The Fifth Child , we must acknowledge that this theory (like any other) is necessarily limited in its explanatory scope and that there are other post-Freudian accounts which also help illuminate the psychological import of the monstrous child. One such perspective may be found in the writings of Julia Kristeva on abjection , which, in contrast to TMT, is more closely rooted in both traditional Freudian ideas and the aforementioned claim that horror's essence lies in ambiguity. In order to clarify both the limitations and the potential unique contribution of a TMT account, we will foreground our analysis with a short discursion into Kristeva's theory, which offers an interpretation of monstrous children that both diverges from and complements the present TMT analysis. We hope that by comparing these two theories throughout this essay, we will shed light on the complexity of the monstrous child as a symbolic figure as well as the richness of Lessing's novel.
In her essay Powers of Horror , Kristeva argues that many of the figures that terrify (and captivate) us in life and art can best be understood in terms of the process of abjection. 1 Abject things are interstitial entities that do not present themselves as true “objects” for the individual in the psychoanalytic sense of object-relations because they exist in the boundaries and margins between conventional categories (Kristeva 1–4, 15–17). Although these entities are generally repellent to us in our lives as enculturated beings, Kristeva proposes that the process of abjection—positing abject elements outside the self—marks a crucial and primal step in the establishment of one's ego. The infant defines herself over and against the abject before she develops the cognitive ability to grasp true objects through the schemas provided by language and symbolic self-awareness. Thus, echoing Otto Rank's reformulation of Freudian theory in The Trauma of Birth , Kristeva argues that the prototypic site of all abjection is the mother-child dyad, and the mother's body is the first abject thing against which the individual defines herself in the initial act of separation at birth (12–14, 61–63). Importantly, the abjected mother both repels and compels the individual, who learns to define herself in opposition to the mother (and all abjected material) but nevertheless retains a desire to return to the undifferentiated state of “egoless-ness” experienced in the womb (see Sara Beardsworth's informative, extended discussion of this point).
Kristeva argues that concepts of the abject—especially the abjected maternal—have had a marked influence on human cultural history. She asserts with Freud that understanding a culture means understanding those acts and ideas that are most strongly forbidden by it and follows him further by acknowledging that the two taboos present at the origins of human society are those against killing and incest. As Rank has noted in Psychology and the Soul , the taboo against killing posited by Freud can be interpreted as a consequence of, and an attempt to control, the fear of mortality. Kristeva seems to share this interpretation (57–58). While Freud builds his theory of the origins of repressive culture around this taboo and its connection to the murder of the “father of the primal horde,” Kristeva focuses instead on the dread of incest. She contends that extreme dread of mother-son incest, manifested in the form of a taboo, is the cultural analogue of the individual's abjection of the mother (61–64). The incest taboo symbolizes each individual's necessary separation from their mother and the fact that patriarchal culture forbids any return to the “primary narcissism” of a fetal, pre-individuated state. At the same time, the taboo reflects a fear of the “archaic mother”—of the generative power of women, which is both vital to and potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order—and this fear in turn reinforces the motivated abjection of women.
Kristeva's theory of abjection provides a possible explanation of the power of monstrous children as symbolic figures, an explanation rooted in the importance of gender, sexuality, and uncertainty as characteristics of our psychological experience. Not only are monstrous children themselves abject and ambiguous (a point we will explore in more detail later in this paper; see also Barbara Creed's analysis), but they also may be seen as an incarnation of the abjection of the mother, a concretization (in reverse) of the psychological process of separation from the mother. The abject infant lays bare the typical process, operating at both the individual and societal level, of the mother's abjection. In this way, the monstrous child exposes typically hidden aspects of individual repression (the need to psychologically distance from one's mother) and of societal oppression (of the generative power of women). Just as scholars from Antiquity through the Renaissance interpreted deformed children as a direct consequence of their mother's untoward and powerful desires (a body of literature reviewed by Marie Hélène Huet), a Kristevan reading suggests that monstrous children represent fear of the ambiguous power of the archaic mother.
This approach provides a useful framework for understanding novels such as The Fifth Child . Ruth Robbins, for example, has directly applied Kristevan ideas to an analysis of the novel. We do not wish to deny the unique insights offered by such an analysis; indeed, as should become apparent throughout this paper, there are many points of convergence between a Kristevan and a terror management analysis of monstrous children, driven by their mutual roots in Freudian thought. Nevertheless, we hope to show in the remainder of this paper that a full understanding of the power of both stories of monstrous children in general and The Fifth Child in particular requires recognition of the role played by awareness of mortality in human psychology. In other words, while Kristeva develops her cultural theory from a focus on the incest taboo discussed by Freud, we will instead return to the other primary taboo—that against death—to show that a doomed desire to overcome mortal limits motivates the characters in The Fifth Child and fuels the terror of the monstrous child at the novel's center. But before elaborating on this analysis of Lessing's novel, it is necessary to first briefly introduce the theoretical perspective that will serve as its foundation.
TMT is an empirically supported social psychological theory that has roots in the works of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker (such as The Denial of Death ), who in turn took inspiration from the post-Freudian psychoanalysis of Rank. The theory posits that humans share with other animals strong biological predispositions for continued survival but, unlike other animals, are burdened with an understanding of their own inevitable mortality. This awareness of death conflicts with a basic drive towards continued survival. As a result of this basic conflict, humans have a unique capacity to experience terror at the mere thought that their existence will end. Despite this, the majority of humans seem to function without being constantly paralyzed by fear of death. TMT offers an explanation for how this is possible. The theory posits that humans deny the reality of death as an insurmountable problem by imbuing the world with symbolic webs of meaning referred to as cultural worldviews. Worldviews such as the Christian faith, Stoic philosophy, and logical positivism serve many purposes, but from the perspective of TMT, two of their most important functions are to allow us to deny our animal (and therefore mortal) nature and to provide us with routes to symbolic immortality.
Lifton has identified a set of primary modes of what he calls immortality striving , which is the pursuit of symbolic immortality through culturally supported philosophies and life projects. The most basic mode, perhaps, is the literal immortality strategy encoded in the majority of the world's religious faiths: the reassuring metaphysical belief that death is not, in fact, the end of existence. Two other modes are the “creative” or cultural-symbolic mode and the “biological” mode. In the cultural-symbolic mode of immortality striving, individuals shield themselves from the threat of death by accruing culturally validated accomplishments that will (hopefully) be honored after their demise. Authors seek publications, politicians strive to make world-changing decisions during their terms, business executives gain fame and respect by rising up the corporate ladder before immortalizing their names in the form of philanthropic endowments, and so on. Alternatively, in the biological mode, individuals seek a sense of immortality through their offspring. Parents know that, upon death, they will leave behind one or more individuals who will not only carry on their memory and family name but who will also (given the proper socialization) transmit their most cherished beliefs and values to subsequent generations.
Terror management research has demonstrated the appeal of these strategies as symbolic defenses against thoughts of death. In support of the cultural-symbolic mode, over 400 empirical studies conducted in such countries as China, India, Israel, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States have shown that concerns with death partly underlie our adherence to cultural worldviews and our proclivity to behave in ways that will guarantee our symbolic immortality (for recent reviews of this work, see Greenberg, Solomon, and Arndt; see also Greenberg and Arndt). In one line of supportive experiments, participants asked to reflect on their death (as opposed to a variety of other topics, many of them aversive) engage in more rigorous defense of their national culture or exhibit greater effort on tasks relevant to their sense of self-worth. For example, Greenberg, Kosloff, and colleagues demonstrated that writing about thoughts associated with one's death (relative to another aversive topic) leads individuals to report greater desires to be famous. Supporting the biological mode, Immo Fritsche, and colleagues showed that induced thoughts of death increase reported desire to have offspring in both men and women.
In addition, such experimentally-induced reminders of death increase efforts to psychologically distance ourselves from other animals and to deny or sublimate our animal and sexual nature. For example, participants who are asked to contemplate death subsequently show a greater tendency to conceptualize sex in less physical and more romantic terms. Thoughts of death also lead to stronger disgust reactions to animals and animal-like human behaviors (such as excretion; for a review of this research, see Goldenberg, Kosloff, and Greenberg). In addition, as these studies demonstrated, the effects of death reminders operate outside of conscious awareness. In other words, participants are not explicitly aware that thoughts of death are causing them to cling more rigidly to their worldviews or to become more averse to the thought that humans are animals. Finally, several studies, which were recently reviewed by Hayes, Schimel, Arndt, and Faucher, have shown that threatening people's faith in their worldview or their self-worth or reminding them of their animal nature all bring thoughts of death to the fringes of consciousness.
While traditional Freudian psychoanalysis has received mixed empirical support, TMT is an empirically validated theory that stands to enhance our understanding of common existential themes in literature and art, and themes of horror or tragedy in particular. 2 TMT posits that much of human behavior and cultural creation reflects a non-conscious desire to transcend our animal and mortal limitations by imbuing our lives with a broader sense of social connectivity and purpose. From this perspective, children play an important role in the psychological lives of adults as symbols of immortality: they bear our genes, names, memory, and culture into the future. It is little wonder that their corruption elicits reactions of horror, for evil and monstrous children represent both a reminder of our own physical animal nature and a failure in our attempts to overcome death through the next generation. Consequently, they are potent symbols of our mortality. We begin our TMT analysis of The Fifth Child with a discussion of the significance of the monstrous child and particularly the evil fetus or infant as an ambiguously powerful symbol of disturbing human creatureliness.
Doris Lessing is a prolific author whose oeuvre spans a number of themes and genres. She is perhaps best known for her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook , which has been both positively and critically received as a major work of twentieth-century feminism (see, for example, Mona Knapp's discussion of the novel). Louise Yelin has observed that child characters do not figure prominently in some of Lessing's early realist and semi-autobiographic works, such as The Golden Notebook and In Pursuit of the English (1960), despite the works' centering around female protagonists who have children. Yelin interprets Lessing's reluctance to bring children to the fore in these realist works as a kind of resistance to patriarchal expectations.
Interestingly, however, as Roberta Rubenstein has noted, abject children have figured continually in Lessing's more fantastic works. The Four-Gated City (1969) features an island of children who are gifted with unusual psychic powers; The Memoirs of a Survivor (1976) depicts feral, violent children who roam a post-apocalyptic city. Lessing understands the simultaneously compelling and repelling nature of the abject child and weaves this source of ambivalence into the heart of many of her science fiction novels. Because the narrative of The Fifth Child —monstrous children excepted—operates within the boundaries of everyday reality (the novel might well be characterized as magical realist), it stands out among Lessing's depictions of abject children as an attempt to work out the meaning of these figures for our own lives. Indeed, while Rubenstein notes that Lessing's fantastic child characters often call into question conventional understandings of reality for both their fellow protagonists and her readers (72), we will argue that the monstrous Fifth Child , Ben, instead functions to highlight the harsh realities of human animality and mortality.
In the novel, the conservative, family-oriented British couple Harriet and David Lovatt plan to have a bevy of children and an ideal household full of life, despite meager financial resources and their relatives' skepticism. They buy a very large house, have four children in quick succession, and are seemingly well on their way to the life they envisioned. Then Harriet gets pregnant again, this time unintentionally, and eventually gives birth to the monstrous Ben. Ben has a sinister, violent nature that defies conventional modern associations of infants with innocence. Even while he is in her womb, Harriet is overwhelmed with the feeling that Ben is an enemy figure with whom she is locked in a physical struggle (42–47). Not only is Ben a sinister presence, but once he is born, he is also physically abnormal. Ben has an alien, “gnome”-like (71) appearance and enough physical strength to strangle a dog within months of his birth. Almost from the moment of his conception, Ben is described as an ambiguous creature who is not entirely human. While discussing her child with a doctor, Harriet suggests that Ben might be a “throwback” to an earlier stage of human evolution, a member of a more animalistic subspecies whose genes somehow survived hidden in the human pool (106). While pregnant with Ben (a pregnancy that causes her tremendous discomfort), Harriet imagines herself the victim of some botched scientific experiment mixing “the products of a Great Dane or a borzoi with a little spaniel; a lion and a dog; a great cart horse and a little donkey; a tiger and a goat. Sometimes she believed hooves were cutting her tender inside flesh, sometimes claws” (41).
In Kristevan terms, Ben is a perfect example of the abject as he blurs the line between existing natural categories and brings disorder into the highly ordered system of the Lovatt's household. The abject child as a source and symbol of horror has been chronicled in the beliefs of both industrial and pre-industrial peoples by anthropologist Mary Douglas. Douglas observed that in many cultures even normally developing children become symbols of potential power and danger, to be feared and avoided, when they are transitioning to different stages of life. In the frameworks of Douglas and Kristeva, people associate undefined or interstitial others with broader sources of disorder that threaten to undermine their worldviews, which are based on the coherent structuring of reality. For example, the Nyakyusa and Lele peoples of Africa have traditionally associated fetuses with the power to bring about suffering, because of their ambiguous, undetermined state (for instance, their gender is not yet known). Similarly, developing children are often viewed as possessing dangerous powers traceable to their protean condition.
Part of the terror of the monstrous child, then, lies in its existence in transitional life-phases already charged with the anxiety of the abject. The character of Ben blurs and deviates from expected developmental stages. His delivery is induced at eight months, and yet he is already at birth muscled and almost able to stand on his own, like a much older child; in later childhood, he is described as being much older than he appears (113). Though even normal fetuses and children may represent transitional figures about whom we feel a certain ambivalence, the disturbing ambiguity of evil children is reinforced by their deviation from cultural norms of youthful innocence. Thus, Ben's uncanny appearance is made all the more disturbing by the monstrous acts he undertakes, which mimic the dangerous powers associated with transitional figures in the superstitions chronicled by Douglas. The Nyakyusa people do not allow pregnant women to stand near storehouses of grain, for fear that the hungry fetus inside will cause the grain to disappear. Similarly, while inside his mother, Ben forces Harriet to devour food with an untiring voracity (43).
Once out of the womb, Ben continues to eat voraciously, so much so that he bruises Harriet's breasts, prompting her to quickly abandon breast-feeding. Throughout the novel, Ben is portrayed as devouring food with little or no conformity to civilized rules of etiquette. Consider this particularly vivid example:
Harriet had come down one morning … to see Ben squatting on the big table, with an uncooked chicken he had taken from the refrigerator, which stood open, its contents spilled all over the floor. Ben had raided it in some savage fit he could not control. Grunting with satisfaction, he tore the raw chicken apart with teeth and hands, pulsing with barbaric strength. He had looked up over the partly shredded and dismembered carcass at Harriet, at his siblings, and snarled. (97)
In short, to use a popular expression, Ben eats “like an animal.”
From a TMT standpoint, Ben's physical ambiguity and his animalistic nature are inseparable. TMT asserts that reminders of human animality are disturbing because they imply our ultimate sameness with all other mortal creatures on the earth. Douglas gives many examples of feared ambiguous entities that make it difficult to deny our animality. For instance, menstruation is commonly reviled because menstrual blood represents a paradoxical being that is dead without ever having lived. Menstruation also implies our commonality with other fluid-secreting, physically limited beings, a stark contrast to the symbolic beings inhabiting worlds rich with meaning that we imagine ourselves to be. Similarly, Ben's abject nature reinforces the connection between humanity and other forms of organic life. As a “throwback” to an earlier evolutionary phase, Ben is a disturbing reminder that all humans are animals at base, evolved in a world of violence and death. 3
Ben is not the only abject child who serves as a reminder of human creatureliness in The Fifth Child . One of the most impactful and horrifying sequences in the novel occurs when Harriet arrives at an institution for disabled children in which Ben has been placed. She unwittingly enters a ward of the institution, only “to see that every bed or cot held an infant or small child in whom the human template had been wrenched out of pattern, sometimes horribly, sometimes slightly. A baby like a comma, great lolling head on a stalk of a body … then something like a stick insect, enormous bulging eyes among stiff fragilities that were limbs” (81). Fetuses and infants are inherently associated with the animalistic act of procreation. When they develop normally, these transitional beings do not typically arouse death-related anxiety; rather, as symbols of our transcendence of death through the creation of new generations, they can help us cope with mortality concerns. Yet evil or deformed children, and monstrous infants like Ben in particular, seem to pervert this process, corrupting our wish for immortality into a reminder of our doomed nature as procreating animals.
Robbins has interpreted The Fifth Child as a parable exposing the darker side of fertility. Drawing on Douglas and Kristeva, Robbins highlights Lessing's attention to the painful aspects of Harriet's pregnancy with Ben, concluding that the novel serves in many ways as a corrective to culturally sanctioned narratives of the birthing process. In such narratives, human procreation is often cast as a route to immortality, with children providing the salvation of their mortal parents. But such reassuringly symbolic stories are counteracted by the animalistic aspects of pregnancy: blood, milk, the swollen belly, unbearable pain, and the umbilical cord. Harriet's physical pain, as well as her feelings of isolation and animosity during her pregnancy, undermine conventional narratives of the “miracle” of birth and externalize the typically hidden process of the mother's abjection noted by Kristeva. Furthermore, because the physical aspects of pregnancy highlight humanity's condition as a procreative animal species, they can serve as a psychologically problematic reminder of mortality and thereby elicit negative reactions. This contention is supported by the experimental work of Goldenberg and colleagues, which shows that reminding people of the similarity between humans and animals induces more negative attitudes towards pregnant women and bodily fluids and brings death-related concerns to the fore. By making our animality salient, Harriet's brutally physical pregnancy with Ben transforms procreation from a symbolic victory over death to a concrete reminder of mortality.
It is important to note that neither a TMT nor a Kristevan perspective on the potential ambivalence of pregnancy justifies or excuses the abjection of the mother's body. As feminist scholars like Jane M. Ussher have noted, the (pregnant) female body is not inherently abject; rather, it has been positioned as such in different cultures at different times in history. The association of pregnancy with death and animality is largely culturally conditioned and part of a repressive ideological link between death and sexuality that is stronger in certain epochs than others (for more on this association, see, for example, Phillipe Ariés 369–81). Furthermore, TMT suggests that any reminder of human animality has the potential to trigger unconscious death anxiety: this is as true of male ejaculate as it is of female menstruation. Pregnancy is neither uniquely nor inherently associated with fear of death according to the theory, and, as we have mentioned, it often stands as a symbol of victory over death. Indeed (and possibly for this reason), the pregnant female body was the first human form commonly represented in some of humanity's earliest artifacts (or so some scholars have argued; for a review of this work, see Peter Watson 53–73). It is quite possible, as suggested by Ussher (7–8), that the positioning of pregnancy as an abject state in later periods of history has stemmed partly from male envy of female generative power. Regardless, our intention in applying a terror management analysis to Lessing's portrayal of Harriet's pregnancy is not to frame aversive reactions to pregnancy as natural, but rather to illuminate one dimension of the powerful symbolic role played by the birthing process in cultural thought. When pregnancy is problematized as a biological event (as it is in the novel), the unease that results is due in part to the general double-edged potentiality of human sexual nature, which serves as both a route to immortality and a reminder of our mortal biology.
This mixed potential for sexuality to be both a problematic reminder of and (when properly sublimated) a symbolic means of overcoming death is apparent in Harriet's ambivalent attitudes about sex, described early in The Fifth Child . For Harriet, the sexual act has an inherent association with death: when she and David first engage in intercourse, their bedroom becomes “a black cave that had no end” with “a smell of cold rainy earth” (10). Yet she is able to overcome the fear of mortality implied by sex by embracing the notion that her children will become her life's transcendent purpose: she sublimates David's sexual advances by considering them “his taking possession of the future in her” (10). Harriet's sublimation of sex as procreation brings us to the core of the unique contribution offered by a TMT account of the problem of monstrous children. While the Kristevan and TMT perspectives largely converge on the power of the monstrous child as a symbol of animality and the psychological ambivalence generated by pregnancy, a TMT account goes further in its insistence on the importance of the child as a symbol of the parents' immortality. We will now examine the motivation and psychology of the parental figures in The Fifth Child , as well as its numerous references to mortality and its socio-historical context in an attempt to show that the monstrous child is always, among other things, a denied bid for immortality.
Born in Persia, raised in Rhodesia, yet a self-declared “English writer,” Doris Lessing has a multifaceted sense of personal identity and, as Yelin has observed, many of her novels portray characters attempting to fashion a coherent identity out of the conflicting ideologies available in globalized (post-)modernity. The Fifth Child can also be understood as a narrative about conflicting worldviews or, from a TMT perspective, about a conflict of opposing routes to symbolic immortality. As previously mentioned, Lifton distinguishes between, among other modes of immortality striving, the cultural-symbolic mode, through which immortality is secured by accruing culturally sanctioned accomplishments for oneself, and the biological mode, whereby one achieves immortality through one's children. The Fifth Child can be read as the story of two individuals who reject the cultural-symbolic (arguably the favored mode of the modern, largely secular “Western” milieu) in favor of the biological mode and the consequences of doing so. 4
The Lovatts are alienated from the dominant cultural beliefs of their generation (that of the radical 1960s) and are not interested in pursuing the routes to accomplishment and happiness collectively endorsed by that generation, namely, self-expressionistic careers and a sexually liberated, hedonistic lifestyle. Lessing begins the novel with a description of the protagonists' feelings of alienation from the cultural worldview in which they are immersed: “They defended a stubbornly held view of themselves, which was that they were ordinary and in the right of it, should not be criticized for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness” (3). Indeed, Robbins has pointed out that Harriet, who longs for a life of simple domesticity during the height of the second-wave feminist movement, is in many ways as anachronistic as Ben, the evolutionary throwback. Similarly, David also rejects what he perceives to be the normative goals of his radical generation. He actively deviates from the career-oriented life of his wealthy father, choosing an obscure existence marked by financial insecurity over the temptation of culturally validated personal success. Instead of embracing the cultural-symbolic mode of immortality striving through work and achievement, the Lovatts pursue the biological mode, investing their savings and energy in “the dream” of six prospective children.
Throughout the opening pages of the novel, this plan to deviate from the cultural norm and sacrifice career interests for an idyllic family life is perceived by both the Lovatts and those around them as a kind of selfish rebellion. When they purchase a large house beyond their means to accommodate the planned family, Harriet and David are concerned that their parents will disapprove. This pattern is repeated with each of Harriet's pregnancies up until Ben's conception, which follow one another in rapid succession (five children are born in seven years; 25, 31). With each new pregnancy, the Lovatts fear that their friends and relations (who gather at the house annually for holiday parties) will chastise them for expanding their family despite David's inadequate salary and Harriet's struggle to adequately tend to the present children. Such criticism is repeatedly voiced, to the extent that Harriet begins to consider herself “a criminal” on account of her desire for continuous propagation (25).
The Lovatts' transgression lies in their defiance of the normative mode for immortality striving of their epoch, their rejection of the cultural-symbolic in favor of the biological mode. The conflict between these modes is expressed in Lessing's description of a remark made by David's mother in criticism of an exclusive family orientation: “she [David's mother] was standing up for a life where domesticity was kept in its place, a background to what was important” (27). Refusing to give the career life pride of place, the Lovatts pursue biological immortality with defiant zeal. This pursuit is characterized by those around them as thoughtless and arrogant. The negative reaction on the part of their family and friends to Harriet and David's “alternative” lifestyle fits well with many of the TMT studies summarized by Greenberg, Solomon, and Arndt which show that people are threatened by and respond negatively to others who choose paths to immortality discrepant with their own.
There are multiple possible interpretations of Lessing's emphasis on the conflict between career-oriented and family-oriented worldviews in the novel. From a Kristevan perspective, this emphasis can be taken to suggest that the ritualized abjection of the mother is most pronounced in cultural settings where procreation is only minimally necessary and largely discouraged (Kristeva 78). In relatively affluent, established societies where the number of offspring required to sustain the community has been reduced, the abject maternal is less tolerated and monstrous children become a symbol of warning and taboo against female generative power.
Alternatively, one can understand the worldview conflict in The Fifth Child as a commentary by Lessing on the cultural tensions present in Britain at the time of the novel's publication (1988). Yelin and Susan Watkins have noted the significance of the fact that Lessing wrote the novel during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister. The “return to family values,” for which the Lovatts yearn, was also an ideological aspect of Thatcher-era conservatism and the popular reaction of the 1980s against 1960s radicalism. In this reading, Ben (and his family's reactions to him) can be alternately seen as supporting and problematizing a return to conservative politics. For example, through its portrayal of the treatment Ben and Harriet receive at the hands of various social institutions, The Fifth Child highlights issues made prominent by the political initiatives of the Thatcher era. On the one hand, Harriet is horrified by the inadequate (even cruel) treatment Ben receives during his brief stay in the hospital for abnormal children. As John Mohan pointed out in a review of the privatization of health care in 1980s England, Thatcher's administration often relied on such portrayals of mental health and senior care facilities as inferior and inhumane to marshal support for the “Care in the Community” policy, which was designed to cut spending on public care for long-stay patients. At the same time, several passages in the novel that depict Harriet feeling like she is being held personally responsible for Ben's problematic nature by experts (doctors and teachers; Lessing 99–101, 103–104) call to mind the conservative rhetoric of individual culpability in healthcare matters that was part of the Thatcherian agenda. Rather than offering a clear solution to the political debate on care for the elderly and mentally disordered, the novel touches on the conflicts surrounding this issue while also questioning whether either institutional or family-based, private care is sufficient in as extreme a case as Ben's.
TMT offers an additional interpretation of the novel which builds on and moves beyond a historically situated clash of worldviews. In a more universally applicable sense, the monstrous child also symbolizes punishment for (counternormative) biological immortality striving. Several references to mortality in the first section of the novel suggest that the Lovatts are pursuing their procreative dream as a defense against insecurity and death. In response to the news that David will need three decades to pay off the house in which he and Harriet plan to make their dream home, David's father replies, “I'll be dead by then” (14). Later, Harriet's mother accuses the couple of acting rashly by having children so early in their married life, saying, “You two go on as if you believe if you don't grab everything, then you'll lose it” (15). David replies strangely and with conviction: “Everything could very well be taken away” (16), while news of death and chaos in the wider world blares from a radio in the background. The Lovatts' general understanding of the world “outside their fortress, their kingdom, in which … precious children were nurtured” as it is conveyed through news media is of a hostile place full of “wars and riots; killings and hijackings; murders” (107). In this mortal and dangerous world, the Lovatts are pursuing constancy, security, and ultimately immortality through their children. This is made clear when Lessing describes their planned offspring as their “demands on the future” (8), language that parallels Harriet's sublimation of sex as a procreative act.
The symbolism of the child (and the son in particular) overcoming the mortality of the parent is perhaps universal and has had a particular significance in the Christian worldview, as noted by Rank in his discussion of the common theme of the Double. In Psychology and the Soul , Rank amassed several examples from the anthropological literature to demonstrate that, across cultures and time, people have commonly believed in a Double or Doppelgänger , which is essentially a second self that transcends individual mortality by existing beyond the self's physical decay. In the early stages of human cultural evolution, Rank argues, the idea of the Double was primarily conveyed through soul-concepts or in the special reverence given to twins in many cultures. However, with the decline in animism and the rise of sexual awareness that has occurred over the course of cultural history, Rank asserts that increasingly the child has come to serve as the Double of the parent in cultural texts. The story of Jesus Christ is only one of many such allegories connecting the figure of the son with the promise of immortality.
Thus, in the modern era, many people (like the participants in the aforementioned empirical study by Fritsche and colleagues) have dealt with the threat of death by psychologically investing in biological children who serve as Doubles, guaranteeing the Self's immortality. 5 Rank noted that the rise of the biological mode of immortality striving brought about an important change in the power of the child as a symbol. In his cultural studies, Rank observed that a common theme in world literature, perhaps best epitomized in the Greek tragedies, is that striving after personal immortality is doomed. In “animistic” or pre-industrial societies, folk stories often depict personal death as the punishment warranted by hubristic pursuit of immortality. However, with the elevated importance of the child as Double in the modern era, Rank argues that modern literature contains far more numerous examples of the child's destruction or perversion as the penalty incurred by the parent's desire to transcend mortal fate.
In Beyond Psychology , Rank highlights the moralistic use of the Double motif in modern literature to warn against the desire for immortal life—particularly when that desire manifests in a mode of immortality striving that runs counter to that of the mainstream worldview. Thus in the nineteenth-century European cultural milieu, when, according to Ariés, domestic life, romantic relationships, and procreation reached the zenith of their symbolic value as paths to immortality, Gothic characters like Victor Frankenstein and Henry Jekyll reject domesticity and instead strive creatively to overcome death by “birthing” fiendish Doubles characterized to varying degrees as the “children” of their creators. In the following century, in the anti-domestic radical 1960s, Harriet and David's rebellious pursuit of biological immortality is punished through the corruption of their fifth child: the monstrous Double, Ben. Isabel Gamallo has commented on the Gothic style and structure of The Fifth Child , and Watkins also characterized the work as “urban Gothic”; these stylistic elements underscore its kinship with past works in which the Double heralds death for those who transgress against the dominant worldview in pursuit of their own immortality. While the Double initially made its way into culture as a sign of immortality (e.g., the ideology of the soul), the monstrous Double-child of modern literature is an image of inescapable mortality.
As in the ancient stories chronicled by Rank, the Lovatts defy their mortal condition and the cultural norms of their era by investing their lives in the promise of biological immortality. But their efforts are brought to an end by Ben, who emerges as a symbol of the Lovatts' mortality. Ben brings mortality to the fore with his deadly actions, uncontrollable fits, teeth-baring snarls, and fearsome stares. He kills a dog and a cat and becomes such a threat while still a toddler that the Lovatts have their other children, who live in fear of their savage brother, locked safely in their rooms at night. As Ben grows up, the Lovatts age with unnatural celerity, and they begin to look much older than they are physically, suggesting that Ben is a harbinger of their demise.
There are other, subtler ways in which Lessing's writing suggests an inherent association between Ben and mortality. For one, Harriet frequently imagines and even longs for Ben's death (63). Yet she cannot bring herself to kill him or allow her own child, the central biological basis of her immortality striving, to die. So she rescues Ben from the institution where he had been hidden away by her husband and where he certainly would have soon died. She picks up his cold, drugged body and suddenly realizes the meaning of the expression “a dead weight” (84). Each mutant child in the institution stands for the mortality of its parent, patently denied by sequestering the disturbing creatures away in a hospital. In the prison for perverse children, Lessing fashions a metaphor for the modern “institutionalization” of death. As Ariés explains, in modern industrial societies, the experience of death has become increasingly remote and mediated: though we are exposed to plenty of safe media images of death, the deaths of those around us occur primarily in hospitals, removed from the immediate experience of all but a few caretakers and experts. Similarly, the monstrous Double-children that represent the mortality of their parents are locked away from society and never seen again in Lessing's novel.
Ben embodies not only the Lovatts' physical death but, more importantly, the destruction of its symbolic cure: he kills their dream of conquering mortality. The presence of Ben has “dealt the family a mortal wound” (93). After returning with Ben from the institution, Harriet's relationship to her husband and other children is irrevocably altered. When the Lovatts make love, it is now as if “the ghosts of young Harriet and young David entwined and kissed” (112). There is no question of further procreation, despite the fact that they originally planned for six (rather than only five) children. The Lovatts begin using “the Pill,” which was once for them a despicable symbol of the modern attitude toward domesticity they shunned (92). Ben's siblings grow emotionally distant and distrustful of their mother, spending increasingly more time away from home with relatives (when they are at home, Harriet's sense of alienation from them is increased by the fact that they must be locked in their rooms for safety; 95). Ben's destruction of the Lovatts' dream is no better conveyed than in the sequence, contained in the final pages of the novel (128–29), in which an aging Harriet stares into the glossy surface of the large dining room table in her now lifeless home and sees idyllic images of her other children gathered around when they were young, before a dark vision of Ben overshadows the tableau and all other pictures vanish.
It is not only Ben's ambiguous animal nature and violent potential that puts an end to the Lovatts' bid for immortality, but also his attraction and ultimate conversion to a symbolic worldview that is the antithesis of their own. Ben's status as cultural Other—of a foreign worldview connected to both immigration and deviance—becomes a central idea of the novel's third act. As Ben grows older, he ingratiates himself with the local biker gang the Lovatts always associated with the hostile world beyond their cocoon of domesticity. By the time Ben reaches adolescence, with all her other children preferring boarding school to their ruined home, Harriet is often left alone in the house with Ben and his hooligan compatriots, who stay uninvited between raids on local stores and riots at seaside towns. The youths do little to hide the joy they take in violence and commonly speak of the day when they will rise in “revolution” against the Lovatts and the rest of their generation (124).
Though the Lovatts hoped to raise children in whom they could instill their conservative love of domesticity and traditional English values, Ben's rejection of this worldview in favor of its deviant antithesis is clear. It extends even to the gang's preferred cuisine: Ben and his friends litter the Lovatts' suburban English home with exotic take-out of every variety, Chinese, Mexican, Turkish (128). As his life begins to center around the gang, Ben's systematic destruction of his parents' traditional dream reaches its final stage. He has discovered a sense of belonging his parents could never give him among the “outsiders” (the immigrant and criminal groups) they had always feared and from whom they had tried to shelter their family. As scholars such as Gamallo and Yelin have noted, the ultimate identification of Ben with foreign, deviant forces characterizes The Fifth Child as a product of Thatcher-era Britain, when an ideological push towards reviving the old values and virility of the Empire was accompanied by ever-increasing concerns with unemployment, immigration, and crime.
To summarize, Ben symbolizes the mortality of his parents in three ways illuminated by TMT. First, his physical ambiguity, blurring the line between humanity and animality, serves as a reminder of the Lovatts' status as mortal creatures. Second, he destroys the Lovatts' relationship with their other children, their primary basis for symbolic immortality. Third, his conversion to a deviant worldview implies the futility of the Lovatts' bid for symbolic immortality. Parents invest in their children as vehicles for projecting themselves into the future and thus overcoming death. But children, of course, do not always passively assimilate to their parents' cultural beliefs. Even biologically normal children, like the other members of Ben's biker gang, are not guaranteed to become vessels for the transmission of their parents' cherished values. In these ways, the dream of immortality through children, which the Lovatts hubristically pursued in defiance of contemporary cultural conventions, was destroyed by the birth of the monstrous child, a potent instantiation of the mortal Double.
Throughout this paper, we have attempted to demonstrate how a TMT analysis uniquely contributes to an understanding of the symbolic significance of monstrous children by bringing parental desire for immortality into focus. At the same time, we have pointed to some common ground, and some divergences, between TMT and more conventional contemporary approaches to literary analysis—Kristeva's theory of abjection in particular. There are doubtless aspects of The Fifth Child which a Kristevan perspective is better suited than TMT to explain. For example, the concept of the abjected mother is useful in understanding Lessing's relative prioritization of Harriet's point of view over that of any of the other characters. Throughout the novel, we are encouraged to sympathize with Harriet as she is made to feel like a “criminal” by those around her: firstly, for having children at all; secondly, for feeling like something is wrong with Ben when doctors and educators refuse to acknowledge his ambiguous status; and finally for keeping Ben alive at the cost of her family's happiness. Harriet's experience as the mother of an abject child is outside the scope of a TMT analysis but is revealed as a rich literary exploration of the socially conditioned nature of maternity when viewed through Kristeva's lens (an example of this type of approach may be found in Robbins's writing on the novel).
Although TMT does not provide the only framework for understanding monstrous children in modern literature, Lessing's emphasis on Ben's animal nature and the Lovatts' dream of immortality support the importance of incorporating the problem of death into a complete explanation of this phenomenon. By exposing the monstrous child as a symbol of punishment for doomed immortality striving, the present analysis illuminates the persistence in the modern era of the common cultural belief that abnormal children are the outcome of parental sins. This theme is expressed early in The Fifth Child when Harriet tells David she believes her niece's Down Syndrome to be the result of an unhappy marriage: “Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarreling, had probably attracted the mongol child” (22). The fact that the deformed Ben will be the Lovatts' own genetic retribution for their relentless propagation is presaged by an early description of their first four children as four “challenges to destiny” (27). Towards the end of the novel, Harriet even acknowledges her feeling that Ben was their punishment for desiring too much for themselves: “We are being punished, that's all …. For presuming. For thinking we could be happy. Happy because we decided we would be” (117).
Lessing's focus on the counternormativity of the Lovatts' zeal for biological immortality foregrounds a work in which the monstrous Double-child warns against the hubris of death defiance. Simultaneously, her attention to Ben's physical ambiguity highlights the evil child's power to disturb by reminding us of our animal, and thus mortal, nature. An application of TMT to The Fifth Child allows us to combine these important strains in the novel in a coherent framework, which yields the insight that monstrous children are a particularly disturbing source of terror because they transform what is normally a basis of parents' striving for immortality into an incarnate symbol of the mortality of the parents, and by implication, of us all.
The authors wish to thank Guest Editor Karen J. Renner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank Leah L. Kapa and Tara Harney-Mahajan for proofreading the final manuscript.
1. Kristeva's theory of abjection has yielded many different interpretations and has been used in a variety of different ways. We fully acknowledge that ours is only one possible reading of her nuanced writings, which offer alternate interpretations. Our reading has been largely influenced by Sara Beardsworth's Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity .
2. For example, Daniel Sullivan, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark J. Landau have recently used the theory to analyze horror and ultraviolent films.
3. In her article “Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris Lessing,” Clare Hanson discusses Ben as a symbol of the link between humans and animals and explores the possibility that this link is disturbing and typically repressed. However, her account differs from a TMT perspective insofar as it suggests that repression of the connection between humans and other species is a phenomenon unique to modern societies, rather than a longstanding aspect of human culture designed to mitigate the psychological threat of death. It should be noted that Kristeva also suggests that the abject is inherently connected to fear of our animality and distancing from the body (12–13, 77–79).
4. It is interesting that Lessing wrote a novel about a couple rejecting the cultural-symbolic to embrace the biological mode of immortality striving, given that one could interpret Lessing's biography as an example of the opposite: a woman who pursued the cultural-symbolic path of the writer in an era (1950s England) when women were highly encouraged to embrace the biological mode. As noted, a more in-depth discussion of Lessing's relationship as an author to issues of maternity and patriarchy is provided by Yelin.
5. Jenks's sociological work also shows that children increasingly have come to serve as symbols of their parents' “futurity” (immortality), particularly in the last century and in industrialized nations. He writes of the modern era: “The dreams and the promise embedded in our children, was to reach for the stars, to control more and more of the wantonness of the cosmos, and to produce human culture as the triumph of finitude over infinity” (102–03). Jenks traces this tendency to, among other factors, the decline of traditional religious beliefs as guarantors of immortality, the diminished importance of community and the rise of ideological individualism, the accompanying elevated belief in historical progress, and the decline in birth rate in modern societies.
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