ABSTRACT
This case study focuses on Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, which tells the story of the Lovatts, whose family idyll shatters when their fifth child, Ben, is born. The chapter aims to demonstrate that Lessing develops a more consistent constructivist approach than Ian McEwan in The Child in Time. The novella delineates a mother’s desperate attempt to find a diagnosis for her son’s ‘condition’ from experts of various disciplines. In this way, Lessing confronts her readers with various perspectives of childhood, which are always overtly marked as discursive practices. Without granting any one discourse authority over Ben, and leaving his case unsolved, the novel abandons the principle of an absolute truth of childhood; it insists that the child never exists outside of discourse. Another task of this chapter is to dissect how criticism has approached Ben’s position in the narrative. Contrary to the novella’s radical openness, many scholars have described his ‘deviance’ as a medical or psychological disorder. In doing so, they provide the diagnosis for Ben that the novella itself refuses to give.
