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<title> No sure way to happiness - A presentation of the theme of the Fifth Child </title>
How do you achieve happiness? David and Harriet in Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child, believe that happiness is something you can gain by hard work and planning ahead. The main theme of the novel is that it's not possible to plan a happy life, because there are always circumstances you can't control.

"Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family" (28). That's the prime objective of David and Harriet Lovatt: to get a large and happy family. David wants what he himself never had as a child, Harriet just knows that a happy family like the one she had as a child is the model. They believe in planning their way to happiness, something they actually never succeed in. They decide to wait a few years before having their first child; Harriet is almost pregnant immediately after marriage. The same thing happens with their next three children; they are never made on schedule. This is what Lessing wants to tell us in her novel, you can't plan a happy life. After they have recieved four children David and Harriet is still happy. They have almost no money, living on the good-will of David's father, but they have what they always wanted a big and happy family. Ben, the fifth child is the unexpected circumstance which ruins the planned happiness. Ben's birth is an impossibility acording to Harriet, she believes that happy people never gets "freaks": "Harriet said to David, privately, that she did not believe it was bad luck: Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarelling, had probably attracted the mongol child" (29). The family eventually puts Ben asway in an institution but Harriet can't let him sit there; she feelst guilty for sending him away:
	 She could not banish Ben from her mind. It was not with love, or even affection, that she
	 thought of him and she disliked herself for not being able to find one little spark of
	 normal feeling: it was guilt and horror that kept her awake through the nights (93).
When she goes and gts him back the family pushes her away regarding her as the criminal who utterly destroyed their happiness. Harriet really hasn't got a choice it's against her fundamental nature to leave Ben behind, to leave any child behind. But even if Harriet would have let Ben stay at the institution, she would never truly be really happy again; she and David are too different: he's not above sending children away too achieve his happiness, something she could never feel really happy doing.
The physical setting consists of the house the Lovatts buy, the little town they live in and the institution. The physical setting in itself is not important for the theme but the transformation the physical setting undergoes is. When the town get more dangerous and unfriendly it's a change that the Lovatts can't affect: "The little town they lived in had changed in the five years they had been here. Brutal incidents and crimes, once shocking everyone, were now commonplace" (29). The Lovatts then locks themself up in their safe little haven, the house which soon will loose its feeling of safety and security, when Ben is born: "But the last thing before they slept, the other children locked their doors quietly from inside" (115). Ben makes the world outside the house and the family seem like a better place and the children who can leave the family as fast as possible. 
The story's sociological setting is the middle-class family, a setting which I don't think have any real connection with the theme of the story. Not only middle-class persons pursuit happiness, but I would say that it's highly unusal that a working-class person for an example would pursuit happiness in the same way as Harriet and David, aiming to get a big happy family. Members of the working-class don't usually have rich parents as David has and wouldn't consider to get five children which they most likely couldn't afford. To place Harriet and David into the working-class would only give the story credebility problems and would ruin the story as a whole.
The Fifth Child is a horror story, where the well-planned happiness of a family is destroyed by an unforseen event: the birth of the fifth child. Lessing wants to show us that you can't control happiness, you can't know what tomorrow has in store for you. You can't control every aspect of life, you don't know how the world is going to change and you can't lock the world out because your'e a part of it even if you don't want to admit it.
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