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<title> The main theme of Lessing's The fifth child and the importance of the setting for it. </title>
As described in the title this essay is about the theme and significance of the setting for the theme in the book. I will also use certain pages in that book to refer to in the discussion of the theme and setting. The pages are in my version (flamingo/paladin) 28-31. I will start with introducing the beginning of The fifth child and the importance of that for the rest of the essay writing.

The old-fashioned couple Harriet and David met during the wild and changing 60s. They thought they were made for each other and wanted the same things. They wanted a permanent home with many children and much love and a good family life out of line with the fashions of the 60s. So they got married and bought a nice big Victorian house.

"The Lovatts were a happy family". At first they found themselves making love in their favourite room in their big happy house. They thought their fidelity would increase if they did it there. They had four happy births with nice cute babies and there were lots of people by the bed too. Every Easter and Christmas lots of people came to visit and their happiness were just the way they thought it should be, even though David's father James had to pay for all the births. But outside their safe house the world became more brutal and their relatives and some other people found a shelter inside the big house walls. One of the couples, Sarah and William, among their relatives had a child with a Down's syndrome. Then their problems started.

 "A baby Genghis Khan with her squashed little face and her slitty eyes?" This was a question Harriet asked David according to William's and Sarah's bad luck because of their child with Down's syndrome. Harriet's intolerance frightened David. They never would have thought that it would happened to their happy world.

When the fifth child was on its way, Harriet became more and more angry with the kicking baby inside of her that was to big and she ate tranquillizers. This maybe could have effected the birth. All their married life the Lovatts had had very few problems to deal with. They almost had it to well, and they hadn't changed so much during this time period. This birth was different because the child wasn't born in the house like all the other babies had been, but on the hospital. When the baby was born Harriet and David tried to love this ugly, unloving baby. Because of the hard birth and the strange looks of the baby, Harriet found it hard to love him. She even sometimes thought that he came from an other planet. David wouldn't even touch him and the brothers and sisters disliked him very much. They hadn't had any experience how to deal with such a problem and didn't no what to do. One thought that occurred to me is that he maybe was autistic and should have had some help from the authorities.

Their lives changed rapidly with this child in the family. Kindness, warmth and comfort changed to restraint, wariness and anxiety. Their innocent world were falling apart. By society standards this wasn't a normal child. Harriet was torn by the love for her own child and for her family to hold together. Their friends and relatives didn't feel safe in the house no more, especially when Ben, the child, killed some animals. Therefore they left together with three of the four other children. David worked even harder now than earlier. He didn't want to take part in the problem or he didn't know how to do it. Their relatives wanted to take Ben to a hospital for mentally retarded and the Lovatts did so. But when Harriet went to the hospital and saw that they were killing her own flesh and blood, she took Ben home. But she couldn't still love him. Ben met some people like himself that were outcasts of the society and went away with them in the 80s.

 This story is a vivid reflection of society's unwillingness to confront this kind of problem. The house that was so full of life in the beginning changed in a way they never thought it could. Harriet found herself faced with a dark sub-conscious side of human nature that she's unable to cope with. David is not much for help an the relatives just want to take the "problem" away. Ben took so much time that she couldn't be with her other children. She felt that they were falling more and more apart from her. This is except all the unnatural things about Ben maybe a more chilling story than an usual one because this could have happened in reality.
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