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<title> 'A Perfect Life </title>
Reading Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child was to me an overwhelming experience. It kept me in a firm grip from the first page until the last one and I am very happy with my choice of reading material for this essay. What struck me as the most important theme in the book is the dream about the perfect love, the perfect family, the perfect life that both Harriet and David want so badly to come true. However, I doubt that something like a perfect life can ever come true and this will be the focus of my essay.
Lessing's book is geografically set in a small English town where the young couple David and Harriet settles down in a big house to start a life together and try to make a dream come true: the dream of the perfect, loving family. It is important to the two of them to create a secure place where they themselves, their children and other family members can feel safe and happy. They both want to have many children and four healthy children are indead born to them in the beginning of the seventies.
However, while David and Harriet are busy creating a happy family, the world surrounding them changes. Burglery and violence are becoming common parts of life even in their small town. There was an ugly edge of events: more and more it seemed that two peoples lived in England, not one - enemies, hating each other, who could not hear what the other said. (page 30) This is the world into which David's and Harriet's fifth child is born. In a time of incertainty and increasing violence a child is born who is different from everything David or Harriet could ever imagine.
From the start, Harriet knows that there is something different with her fifth child. Inside her womb the child is kicking her to the extent she feels that she is being abused from iside and this makes Harriet wonder if the child she is bearing is perhaps not a friend but an enemy. Only three years old Ben is sent away from his family to stay at an institution for disturbed children, in order for the rest of the family to create a life together. Harriet, however, can not live with the knowledge that she has rejected one of her own children. Therefore she takes him back home, even though she knows that he does not fit in her and David's ideal world of love and perfect happiness. On their return home, Harriet starts to rule Ben's behavior by threatening him to obedience. She does not want to act this way but sees no other option and by doing so she helps letting the outside world of violence and threats into her very own house
Inside the house, every child has a room of his or her own and this is of great importance to David. Growing up with divorced parents, David created his own secure world in his room in his mother's house. The idea of a room of one's own is to him an important part of the idea of the perfect, happy family. it is also part of the sociological setting of the novel. David grew up in a social class higher than Harriet's and is used to higer standards than she is. The idea of a room of one's own is David's idea, not Harriet's, although she does support him in it. When Harriet brings Ben back to the house, David even tries to escape from reality by moving into a room of his own. Eventually, as time passes and their ideal world falls apart, he moves back into his and Harriet's bedroom. This is his ultimate surrender to the fact that the dream has withered. He was now the sort of man he had once decided never to be (p 135.)
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