Harriet's behavior as a mother drags me beyond what both private and public state of a Mother means. I experience it as Doris Lessing in her drama of the nature of a Mother in ”The fifth child” is looking for the roots of a Motherhood's grammar.
She passes all stages of conventions about how society characterizes women to become Mothers: a Home with life and activity; she is getting Married and gives birth to several Children; the family struggles for financial Freedom and Gatherings, her large Family reaches the peak of it's spirited life, but the mother in Harriet's not quite at ease to the ideal image that society has provided her. The private Mother Harriet restives a little. It's at this point Lessing uses public life as a cleansing process.
It is as if the fifth child is going to give her an answer on what motherhood means; tempting her and letting her become a human being and, Mother.
When she is at the institution for bringing Ben home she emphatically highlights that she is the Mother. Harriet shouts out, if it is now, for the first time, she gives birth to her Motherhood: "'I'm the child's mother. I'm Ben Lovatt's mother. Do you understand that? '" (p. 97)
The decision to go and bring him home comes on suddenly and instinctively after a difficult night with poor sleep and unpleasant dreams. She just says, as from the depths of her soul, almost mechanically: ”'I'm going to see what they are doing to Ben.' "(p. 94)
The incredible, superhuman dedication and effort Harriet is showing while crossing the mythological river of death, the Styx, to find Ben and bringing him home from the institution, the Hell, describes what a Motherhood entails.
It is as if she is a being with just instincts. She acts completely alone. The family's persistent attempts to conceal the child's hiding place can not control the love of a Motherhood. Love as a refined and inherited mechanism, crystallized.
There is nothing that can stop Harriet's mission: it is carved in her heart, neither rain nor wind nor thirst nor hunger nor human hand can make her even stop for an instant. She enters Charon's boat without paying the tribute; when the Creation in her calling from time immemorial to rescue a Mother's child the gears of the World start to turn.
”Ben had been taken to a place in the North of England; it would be four or five hours' drive – perhaps more //. There was bad traffic, and she drove through grey wintry rain.” (p. 95)
When then the gates of Hades opens up and she stands among the living dead, and the nurses themselves, the dogs of Cerberus, succumb and let her face the Underworld, it is Motherhood, once and for all proven, the engine of life. It obliges and demands taking care of and nurturing a child, no matter what it is.
”On the floor, on a green foam-rubber mattress, lay Ben. He was unconscious. He was naked, inside a strait-jacket. His pale yellow tongue protruded from his mouth. His flesh was dead white, greenish. Everything - walls, the floor, and Ben - was smeared with excrement. A pool of dark yellow urine oozed from the pallet which was soaked.” (p. 99)
WORKS CITED
Lessing, Doris (2003). The fifth child. London: Collins Educational
PS
I wonder how it is possible for a father to reject his own child, so completely. This husband may not realize that this approach will disrupt the relation with both his wife (the mother/Harriet) and the rest of the family. How is it possible not to recognize one's own child, no matter what it is, as if it not were one's own? This father doesn't even demonstrate human sympathies. Is it perhaps a post-traumatic reaction he is suffering of, a psychosis of some kind? How could one otherwise understand David's almost total denial of his fatherhood versus Ben, in the heart of the family. Or is it that nature is revolting in a father if he, in his biological being perceives his offspring as a bad seed for the survival of the species; hence his behavior?
"Motherhood" is of course a lifelong process which starts early during one's living and then progresses and develops throughout a person's various phases of life, quite regardless of whether one wants to be responsible for a child or not; a woman (man) always has an attitude to her (his) role as a biological being: to feed, educate and push a child out in the world, whether she is a literally mother or a potential one; one has always an idea of being a mother.
Of course, it is not at a specific moment humans perceive their being, but there are situations in a person's life that sharpens it, moments of chaos from which humans either succumb or are born again. I regard it as Doris Lessings' “The fifth child” describes man's constant struggle against the dissolution, as a mother, as a father and as a child.
Man is a complex being, and he needs his lifetime to refine and compromise with this existence, and emotions. He is both good and evil; he can both love and hate the very same person. There is no definitive with him, there is no either-or here, just both-and. Man is set to live, give birth and let go, and die; and his mission is to manage this absurdity, without a raison d'être
Yes, Harriet wakes up out of her preconceived dream world about how family happiness is designed, she gets to experience, into her bare skin, the most complicated aspects of human existence, thanks to Ben. It's not a question of love or hate, there is both love and hate; it is thanks to Ben, she will be able to grow as a person, it is as if God has put her on a test; Lessings “The fifth child” is in my opinion a variant of “The Book of Job”.
Well, I just tried to boil down Harriet and the issue of Motherhood in a mythological black / white analysis in the context of the biological of human being in the Universe, how it is that Man strives, carries on in the space of God's silence, in spite of the emptiness of being...
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