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<title> The Brittle Happiness </title>
"Harriet and David met each other at an office party neither had particularly wanted to go to, and both knew at once that this was what they had been waiting for."
This is the first sentence in "The fifth child" by Doris Lessing and introduces the two main characters of this novel. Growing up with divorced parents, had made David aware of what he wanted of the future and for his own children. They should grow up in a family where the parents lived together, and he needed a wife who wanted the same thing and shared the same values. "His wife must be like him in this: that she knew where happiness lay and how to keep it." (p13)
In Harriet, David finds the woman he has been looking for. She shares his conservative and rather old-fashioned ideas, and she comes from a home where it has been natural for the mother to be home looking after the children. 
Together, David and Harriet can fight against time. They can put the clock back and create their own world where their home is their fortress and their family is their happiness. 

They get four children in short time and the family joy is total. Holidays bring relatives to the house, and they all want to feel the happy atmosphere that surrounds the family. But nothing last forever. In this book we learn that we cannot control how our lives are going to be. Harriet and David have had their life together decided from the first moment they met. They would form the perfect family no one else at this time seemed to believe existed. However, all dreams and illusions are crashed when Ben, the fifth child, is born. 

The way I interpret the theme of this book, Lessing is using Ben as a warning sign to us readers. We are living in a world where everything is rolling faster and faster. We have an image fixed of how things should be. We should be successful at work, have a beautiful home and a nice family. If we do not fit into these criterias, we have failed. Harriet and David tries to be this family that everyone secretly desires to be. They have decided upon happiness and that is what makes them so naive. They have been so occupied in their desire to mark their own place in life, that they have been blind for the apparent: That everything is changeable. They thought their lives would move in the same pattern forever, and when Ben is born they get a cruel awakening. Suddenly they are dependent on the world they so carefully closed the door at when they formed their happiness. Letting in the world is creating a gap between Harriet and David, and their family is suddenly an open wound. 

I think the setting for this book is very important for the theme. When television came into our homes, we got the first ideas of how the perfect wife should be. She should look after her husband and children and always wear a smile on her lips. However, in the sixties it grew old-fashioned for women to stay home and run the household. They should earn their own money and have the same rights to a career as the men. Also, the sixties were when sex no longer was something shameful that could not be discussed in the open. Harriet and David have not adjusted to this revolution made by, and for, their generation. For them the sixties represent greed and selfishness and, as written on page 29, they feel great pride over having been able to maintain the stubborn individuality of theirs. They want to play the roles husbands and wives have played for generations, and they also believe that sex, among many other things, should be kept private. Harriet and David are different and they want the world to know about it.

Lastly, I am going to summarise my main points of this essay. I think the theme of the book is that we are not in control over how our lives are going to be. For Harriet and David it was a chock when they got Ben and they were completely powerless. They had decided that it was them against everyone, and now they were all of a sudden dependent on the outside world.

The time setting is important for the theme. Harriet and David are totally estrangers to the new society that is growing up in the sixties. Women are leaving the domestic life to make careers in the men's world, and sex is no longer a forbidden topic. Harriet and David do not want to take part in this development and therefore they get even more eager to create they own fortunate place on earth.
As everyone else, Harriet and David wanted happiness, but for them there were only one way to get it: By forming a family. 
In the book there is a sentence about Harriet's parents that could well fit in on Harriet and David.
"Harriet's parents had taken it for granted that family life was the basis for a happy one."
I think that this very well reflects the way Harriet and David were thinking, and also why they are so powerless when they get Ben and reality catches up with them.
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