Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological Analysis of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Guest Editor Karen J. Renner and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. We also thank Leah L. Kapa and Tara Harney-Mahajan for proofreading the final manuscript. Notes Kristeva's theory of abjection has yielded many different interpretations and has been used in a variety of different ways. We fully acknowledge that ours is only one possible reading of her nuanced writings, which offer alternate interpretations. Our reading has been largely influenced by Sara Beardsworth's Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity. For example, Daniel Sullivan, Jeff Greenberg, and Mark J. Landau have recently used the theory to analyze horror and ultraviolent films. In her article “Reproduction, Genetics, and Eugenics in the Fiction of Doris Lessing,” Clare Hanson discusses Ben as a symbol of the link between humans and animals and explores the possibility that this link is disturbing and typically repressed. However, her account differs from a TMT perspective insofar as it suggests that repression of the connection between humans and other species is a phenomenon unique to modern societies, rather than a longstanding aspect of human culture designed to mitigate the psychological threat of death. It should be noted that Kristeva also suggests that the abject is inherently connected to fear of our animality and distancing from the body (12–13, 77–79). It is interesting that Lessing wrote a novel about a couple rejecting the cultural-symbolic to embrace the biological mode of immortality striving, given that one could interpret Lessing's biography as an example of the opposite: a woman who pursued the cultural-symbolic path of the writer in an era (1950s England) when women were highly encouraged to embrace the biological mode. As noted, a more in-depth discussion of Lessing's relationship as an author to issues of maternity and patriarchy is provided by Yelin. Jenks's sociological work also shows that children increasingly have come to serve as symbols of their parents' “futurity” (immortality), particularly in the last century and in industrialized nations. He writes of the modern era: “The dreams and the promise embedded in our children, was to reach for the stars, to control more and more of the wantonness of the cosmos, and to produce human culture as the triumph of finitude over infinity” (102–03). Jenks traces this tendency to, among other factors, the decline of traditional religious beliefs as guarantors of immortality, the diminished importance of community and the rise of ideological individualism, the accompanying elevated belief in historical progress, and the decline in birth rate in modern societies. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDaniel SullivanDaniel Sullivan received bachelor's degrees in psychology and German studies at the University of Arizona in 2008. He is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Social Psychology program at the University of Kansas.Jeff GreenbergJeff Greenberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1982. He has co-authored two books, including In the Wake of 9/11: The Psychology of Terror, co-edited two books, and published many research articles. He is currently a Professor of Psychology at the University of Arizona.