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 In this essay I am going to describe what I see as the main theme of Doris Lessing's "The Fifth Child" and then discuss the importance of the setting of that theme. 
I believe that the main theme of the book is that you cannot possess happiness. Harriet and David, the main characters in this book, have a very clear picture in their minds of what happiness is. They want to buy a big house and fill it with lots of children and friends. They decide to create happiness no matter what. But if you have a given pattern for exactly what you think it is to be happy, and then something does not turn out the way you planned it, you can never be happy. This is what happens to Harriet and David. When Ben is born, their world falls apart, because since he is so very different, they can never be happy exactly the way they have planned.
Harriet and David's view of happiness is clearly described in page 28 - "Happiness. A happy family. The Lovatts were a happy family. It was what they had chosen and what they deserved." Harriet and David have decided to be a happy family - but can you really "deserve" happiness? Harriet thinks you can. Her sister, Sarah, has given birth to a child with Down's syndrome. Harriet actually believes that Sarah and her husband had this child as a kind of punishment because they have quarrelled a lot, and have had problems in their marriage. She believes that unhappiness attracts bad things in your life. "Sarah and William's unhappiness, their quarrelling, had probably attracted the mongol child - yes, yes, of course she knew she shouldn't call them mongol. But the little girl did look a bit like Genghis Khan, didn't she?" To me, this sentence also shows in a quite scary way how Harriet looks down on a family with a mentally retarded child and feels secure knowing that she is happy and that she will not attract anything bad. 
Harriet will not allow herself to feel sad and unhappy about almost anything - it seems like she wants to shield herself away of such feelings. Everything has to be perfect. She cannot even allow herself to show her husband sad feelings. She is obsessed with the need to possess happiness, and totally in love with the "picture" of happiness. This is showed in page 24 - "When he (David) bent to kiss her goodbye, and stroked Luke's head, it was with a fierce possessiveness that Harriet liked and understood, for it was not herself being possessed, but happiness. Hers and his."
The setting for this theme of this book is very important. The house that Harriet and David buy in the beginning of the text symbolises their view of what happiness is. It is described in the book as their fortress, their kingdom. They want to fill the house with a lot of children, be happy and protect themselves from the outside world and all the bad things that are going on "out there". I think this shows that Harriet and David seem to live in a dream world - they want happiness for themselves, but they do not want to see that real life and reality can be something completely different from what they want in life. You cannot shield yourself away from the life and the outside world.
Harriet and David have four children in very short time and even though Harriet gets more and more tired after each child they have, they still carry on having them. It is like they do not care about facing up to reality. They ignore the facts of what life is like. When the fifth child, Ben, is born, the world falls apart. Harriet believes that he is evil even before he is born. And he is certainly very different from them.
Another aspect of the main theme in this story, is that Harriet and David have decided to be happy exactly their own way, but the only way they can actually be happy that way is depending on other people helping them. They are relying on other people keeping up their happiness. They bought the big Victorian house knowing that "...the mortgage would be beyond them. But they would manage somehow." (p.14) They are not taking responsibility for their own lives, for their own actions. They are relying on people who are not at all as happy as they are about the amount of children. That is very selfish, because their view of happiness might not be another person's view of happiness.
In conclusion, I want to point out that Harriet and David became the kind of people they did not want to become. When they had to deal with real life it made David hard and Harriet disappointed and unhappy. The main theme of "The Fifth Child" is therefore that you cannot create happiness and decide for yourself exactly what your life is going to be like, because then you are bound to be disappointed with life, focusing on the things that are bad in your life and not on good things you actually have. The setting, the big Victorian house, symbolises David and Harriet's happiness.
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