Reading A Story about Abjection in The Fifth Child: Monstrous Child and Monstrous Mother

Abstract

This paper aims to explore how the process of abjection affects an individual’s psychological reality by reading Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child from a Kristevan perspective. At the individual level, Ben, a retarded child born with deformity, is deprived of opportunities to enjoy the experience of semiotic chora, which will help him accept the law of language in the Symbolic. As an abjected monster, he reveals the process of the mother’s abjection operating in both inter-subjective and intra-subjective relationships. At the level of the social unconscious, Harriet, who gave birth to this monstrous child, is an embodiment of the archaic mother, who is essential to but potentially disruptive of the patriarchal order with its uncontrollable generative power. Despite societal suppression she suffer, Harriet shows the ethics of a mature subject based on maternal love by reinstating Ben into their home in spite of family’s disapproval, and by admitting that the monstrous child’s foreign otherness exists not outside but within ourselves.