Final Part of the Theoretical Background of "Evil is Who Evil Does: An Interpretation of Doris Lessing′s The Fifth Child"

In the novel, the tension between instincts and a desire for “civilization” is seen, for instance, in the intense disgust Ben′s relatives seem to feel due to his “uncivilized” behavior of eating raw chicken (a desire for “civilization”) and in their equally strong willingness to have him die in an Institution for unwanted children (an instinct of aggression towards their own flesh and blood). This heightens the moral and ethical ambiguities of the story and should be taken into account for its analysis.

Such a tendency towards destruction, particularly of life, is termed the instinct of death. The instinct of death is the counterpart of Eros, that which drives humans to protect “living substance" and to multiply it in number (for e.g., through procreation or grouping). All characters in the novel may be said to act according to both principles, oscillating between love and hate and between pity and loath.

Part of the death instinct is directed towards the outside world in the form of aggression and destruction. If the aggression is not at least partly let out, the self will become its target. Therefore, attacking others is a means of self-preservation, of Eros directed towards the self. In this process, the death instinct and Eros are intrinsically connected (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents” 27-28). For this reason, “the satisfaction of the instinct [of death] is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment, owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence” (29). In The Fifth Child, this may be seen in the period of bliss Ben’s family experiences following his institutionalization. The Lovatts are effectively made happy by making Ben miserable. 

But there are times when aggressiveness is turned to the inside. Then, it becomes a part of the ego in the form of super-ego or conscience, which castigates the ego, ironically giving vent to the ego’s aggressiveness. That is why, whenever people do something they consider bad or even think about doing it, they feel guilt, namely the super-ego’s instrument for torturing the ego (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents” 30-32).

Technically, however, this sense of wrongness is termed differently according to whether an individual has actually committed a misdeed or merely thinks about committing it. The latter kind is known as guilt, the former is termed remorse (35), what Harriet feels after sending Ben to the Institution and what drives her to rescue him from it.

In view of all this, it would seem that the word “civilization” encompasses the repression of instinctual impulses such as aggression, the struggle of those impulses to reach the surface, the presence of guilty individuals who have succeeded in recognizing those impulses as socially undesirable and have controlled them, as well as the existence of remorseful individuals, who have lost the battle with their impulses and acknowledge that they have.

Yet is this all “civilization” implies? Certainly not. Another characteristic of the “civilized” world appears to be the existence of “beauty, cleanliness and order,” seemingly a must for civilized societies and individuals (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents” 16). Indeed, Ben is rejected and even punished in the novel due to his supposed ugliness, dirtiness and lack of order, as will be later illustrated in the analysis. Thus, the notions of beauty, cleanliness and order are of importance for this work and merit discussion.

Even when beauty has no practical function, it is reverenced by “civilized man [sic] […] wherever he sees it in nature;” in fact, the human species often "[creates] it in the objects of [its] handiwork so far as [it] is able" (15).

Cleanliness, on its part, does have practical functions connected to hygiene (16): preventing and curing diseases. But this is not the only reason why people perceive it as sign of “civilization.” Seemingly, cleanliness has become a desirable quality after man assumed an upright position in prehistory (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents" footnote on page 18).

 Then, males relied on smell to determine, for example, when females where menstruating. The new upright position meant the genitalia were now exposed and vision replaced smell as a means of detection. At that time, olfactory stimuli became disagreeable, since they represented a previous stage of development to which humans did not wish to return (Ibid).

Human being’s attachment to cleanliness, however, is not innate:

The excreta arouse no disgust in children. They seem valuable to them as being a part of their own body which has come away from it. Here upbringing insists with special energy on hastening the course of development which lies ahead, and which should make the excreta worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable. Such a reversal of values would scarcely be possible if the substances that are expelled from the body were not doomed by their strong smells to share the fate which overtook olfactory stimuli after man adopted the erect posture. (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents” footnote on page 18)

Accordingly, it would appear cleanliness is both a requirement and a result of “civilization,” as is beauty. So what is there to say about order? Why is this also necessary for a society or person to be “civilized”?

Order, defined as the development of procedures “[that decide] when, where and how a thing shall be done, so that in every similar circumstance one is spared hesitation and indecision" (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents” 15) is fundamental to “civilization” because it enables a more efficient use of time and space, allowing human beings to maintain their physical energies (Ibid).

Thus, order seems to be yet another requirement of “civilization,” together with cleanliness and beauty. According to his family, the fifth child lacks these three qualities. Moreover, he is portrayed by the narrator as an instinctual being. These traits, which will be later illustrated in the Thesis, may explain why Ben’s family relates him to the “uncivilized" predecessors of the human species, to aliens, or to monsters without the ability to function successfully in a human society.

An alien, a protohuman, a monster. Ben is all this and more to his family. He is the embodiment of horror, "the horror that [is] Ben" (100). Horror is closely associated to Ben in the novel, classified as “a classic horror story" by its author in "The Painful Nurturing of Doris Lessing’s Fifth Child," a 1988 New York Times interview by Mervyn Rothstein. That is why it will be necessary to determine the main characteristics of the genre, so as to assess Mrs. Lessing’s own opinion of her novel and the construction of the figure of Ben as a subject of horror.

This is so because the turn of the screw to Mrs. Lessing's interpretation, a turn which makes this Thesis somewhat of a response to her own assessment of her novel, is that, in this study's interpretation, Ben is not only a subject that causes horror on others (his family), but a subject upon whom horror (horrific actions and a horrific identity) is inflicted.

Therefore, The Fifth Child would not be just a “classic horror story” in which “a monster in almost-human form” is born to human parents, as Mrs. Lessing states in her interview with Mervyn Rothstein, but one in which the "monster" itself suffers evil deeds at the hands of monsters in human form.

Given that all of these considerations relate to the genre of horror, a definition of the genre becomes imperative. Horror fiction may be defined as “any text which has extreme or supernatural elements, induces (as its primary intention and / or effect) strong feelings of terror, horror or revulsion in the reader, and generates a significant degree of unresolved disease with society” (Holland-Toll qtd. in Wisker 5-6).

This type of fiction ranges from the realistic to the fantastic[1] (Wisker 5-6) and is considered a branch of the Gothic (8). Both Gothic writing and horror fiction may be read as entertainment and / or as a critique of a period’s society, as a means of exposing oppositions and contradictions in a seemingly "normal” world, in "the safety of routine,” and offering alternatives to that “normalcy.” The Fifth Child makes use of both functions of horror, since it is simultaneously entertaining and thought-provoking, in particular about hypocrisy and violence in the family, as well as other moral concerns.

These alternatives to "the normal" are, in effect, subversions of "the norm" and are metaphorically represented in the remote locations of Gothic stories, many of which appear also in horror writing (Wisker 7): attics, cellars, dungeons and castles, symbolizing the “safe, distant [mental spaces]” (26) into which human beings “push [subversive] elements of [their] lives” (Ibid). Gothic and horror fictions tell of the attack of those hidden, subversive elements. Thus, the status quo is revealed as a construction (7). In a similar manner, Doris Lessing’s novel questions the wholesomeness of the family unit and the idea of identity as a person’s “natural” way of being.

Revealing the underside of “normalcy” is, however, somewhat ineffectual in Gothic writing, where "order" is typically restored at the end the story (9) with the banishing of the abnormal or the discovery of a rational explanation for a supposedly supernatural event. But radical horror fictions deny such a resolution, thereby reaffirming the oppositions and contradictions found in everyday experience (10).

 Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child is precisely one of those fictions that refuse to put to rest the disruptive force of horror. Open-ended, the story does not reveal Ben’s or the family’s future. What he is, whether he is something else than human, are matters left unresolved, since radical horror “does not provide answers” (Wisker 251-52).

Another important difference between Gothic and horror is that, while both explore paradoxes and hypocrisies in real life, the latter portrays a higher degree of “violence, terror and bodily harm” (8), focusing on the “connections between violence and sexuality” (Punter qtd. in Wisker 8) “and on punishing the fatally attractive” (Wisker 8).

Seemingly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, horror makes greater use of the uncanny or (un)familiar than Gothic fiction. Therefore, the subjects of horror are in reality “a projection of something repressed, embodied in a demon spirit, ghost, monster, or disruptive energies […]” (Wisker 8).

Ben, the monster come to ruin Harriet’s life (so she says), is, literally and metaphorically, a part of her she rejects: literally, because he is her son; metaphorically, because he embodies the instincts she tries to repress as a “civilized” member of society.

As the incarnation of wild energies, as an example of the "demon child" figure common to the horror genre (Wisker 132), Ben must be controlled. Violence in the form of incarceration in the family’s home, transformed into another house of confinement (please see definition above in relation to the Institution), and an attempted murder is used for this purpose.

The story of Ben and his murderous relatives exemplifies several types of horror: supernatural, Gothic, domestic, carnivalesque, body invasion and body horror. Of these subgenres, supernatural horror may be the one the novel represents the least. H. P. Lovecraft believed supernatural horror, which relies on superstition, honed in on people’s primal fears and the presence of “the imaginary” in everyday experience (Wisker 147). The idea that Ben is a changeling (the evil son of a fairy), put forward by the character of Alice (a cousin of Ben’s “step-grandfather”), would fit in with this type of horror.

As well as supernatural horror, some of the characteristics of Gothic horror, already explained above, may also be appreciated in The Fifth Child. For instance, the novel portrays Gothic settings, such as the Lovatts’ attic and the Institution for unwanted children, located amidst the moors in the North of England.

Also present in the story is domestic horror, which attacks the family, domesticity and romantic relationships and is quite visible in the novel, where “the safety, security, and familiarity” (Wisker 150) of the domestic environment, particularly of the house, as well as family relations are disturbed by Ben’s birth. The fifth child is, moreover, paradigmatic of "the parasitic" child praying on his parents, draining their vital forces, a subversion of the indirect immortality human beings supposedly achieve by having children and a theme typical of domestic horror (152).

Now, regarding the concept of the carnivalesque—originally proposed by Bakhtin in 1941 and implying the overturning of hierarchies and of social rules of behavior (Wisker 161)—it will be useful to analyze several aspects of the novel, such as the idea that a child, Ben, is able to terrorize his adult relatives (if one is to believe the narrator) and that, with the exception of Harriet, the fifth child’s family finds no fault with sacrificing him in order to protect the rest of the children.

Like carnivalesque horror, body invasion and body horror are also relevant to the analysis of The Fifth Child. Body invasion relates to the fear of losing control of oneself due to an alien force (from outer space or otherwise). It furthermore involves a questioning of identity and of the status quo, both of which are disrupted by such events as extraterrestrial invasions of the body and planet (Wisker 167-68).

 This type of horror is pertinent to this analysis because, in Doris Lessing’s novel, Harriet’s body is “invaded” by the monstrous fifth child, whom she considers her enemy. What is more, David, the child’s father, joins his wife in believing that the unwanted offspring has "invaded their ordinariness" (52).

In turn, body horror involves a feeling of disgust for the body and its functions that may stem from a post-Enlightment praising of the mind over the body, of rationality over uncontrolled emotions, due to a “sense of the human ability to create order [being] threatened by the messiness of the body” (Wisker 178).

However, the loathing of bodily functions characteristic of body horror, and exemplified by the disgust felt at the release of smelly secretions such as urine, may also be explained by the fear of a return to an early stage of our species′ development, when an upright posture had not been yet adopted and olfactory stimuli were essential to establish, for example, whether a female was menstruating (Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents" footnote on page 18). The narrator’s descriptions of Ben’s uncontrolled urinating and defecating in inappropriate places evinces parts of the novel dwell on this subgenre of horror.

From all that has been said, it is apparent that Ben is treated in the story as an evil-doer and a source of horror: a monster, an alien, a retrograde, the stuff of nightmares and eugenic disdain. This is made evident by the text itself, to which this Thesis will frequently refer in order to examine how the different discourses in the story help construct Ben Lovatt’s identity as that of an evil creature or, alternatively, a human child “within the range of normality” (96).

The fragments extracted from the novel will be examined with the aid of all the previously-mentioned theoretical tools. The concepts and examples used will, hopefully, ultimately serve to expose the cruelties suffered by Ben Lovatt at the hands of his relatives, to be contrasted with his own alleged evilness. For this reason, it is advisable to keep all the preceding notions in mind, whether they be from the field of anthropology, psychoanalysis, literature, or otherwise, when reading the analysis that is to follow.

[1] Following Jameson, the fantastic or fantasy is a literary mode, i.e. a form of discourse peculiar to literature (Jackson 7), and one which involves the presence of the same structural characteristics in works belonging to different periods of history (Ibid). This literary mode encompasses such manifestations as “?the marvelous? (including fairy tales and science fiction), ?fantastic? literature […] and related tales of abnormal psychic states, delusion, hallucination, etc." (Ibid). For further reference, please see The Fantastic, by Tzvetan Todorov, and Fantasy, by Rosemary Jackson.