Textual Mothers/Maternal Texts: Motherhood in Contemporary Women’s Literatures

9. Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

157 Maternal Blitz: Harriet Lovatt as Postpartum Sufferer in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child by denys landry 9 This chapter deals with postpartum depression and how the illness manifests itself in the character of Harriet Lovatt, the overwhelmed mother of five in Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988). The story, which takes place in suburban England from the 1960s to the 1980s, focuses on Ben, the titular fifth child, and his negative impact on his parents (mostly his mother) and his four siblings. Unlike most analyses of Lessing’s The Fifth Child, this paper does not attempt to determine what Ben actually is or provide explanations as to why he turns out the way he does. At the end of novel, Ben, now 15 years old, spends most of his time away from home with an “alienated , non-comprehending, hostile tribe” of teenagers (154). In her sequel to TheFifthChild, entitled Ben,intheWorld (2000), Lessing reintroduces her character who, at 15 years of age, has severed all ties with the Lovatts by running away to South America. I will draw attention away from the “poor little chap” and place it instead on “poor Harriet,” though I realize that both are inextricably linked (65). I will argue that Harriet Lovatt is the prototypical postpartum sufferer. Since scant critical attention has been given to examining the topic of depression (let alone postpartum depression) in The Fifth Child, this paper will use recent scientific studies of postpartum depression to explain Harriet’s confounding behaviour. I will provide important scientific evidence in conjunction with a textual analysis of Lessing’s novel to illustrate both the progression of Harriet’s malady and the detrimental 158 denys landry impact each pregnancy has on her mothering and on her physical, mental, and emotional health. The Fifth Child is a modern gothic text that deals explicitly with the perverse ,violent,anduncannyaspectsofdomesticandfamilialrelations(marriage , pregnancy, and motherhood). Since its publication, many scholars have ventured opinions on Lessing’s powerful fable. Some critics have focused their attention on the character of Harriet Lovatt, viewing her positively as an embodiment of the nineteenth-century persona of, to use Virginia Woolf’s expression, “the angel in the house,” who unfortunately gives birth to a genetic throwback (qtd. in Gilbert and Gubar 17). Others have portrayed her rather negatively as a gothic villainess, “a madwoman in the attic” who, by overextending herself physically and emotionally in the pursuit of the perfect family, ends up poisoning her familial relations (Gilbert and Gubar 425). In the same way as women face a double standard in society (they are seen as either madonnas or whores), mothers are held to a higher standard than fathers because of women’s traditional association with, and relegation to, the so-called private sphere and the assumption that women are innately nurturing. Consequently, a woman who does not sufficiently display this innate maternal instinct is seen as an anomaly, a monster. In the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of news stories, books, and movies that deal with the strangest perversity: mothers hating— even killing—their children. Among these sensationalistic accounts of reallife incidents of maternal infanticide one remembers the case of Andrea Yates, who now serves as the new millennium’s gothic villainess. In 2001, the 37-year-old Texas mother drowned her five children (Noah, 7; John, 5; Paul, 3; Luke, 2; Mary, 6 months) in quick succession in the family bathroom . During the trial, defence attorneys and medical experts insisted that Yates had committed maternal infanticide because of postpartum psychosis , an extremely rare form of the more commonly diagnosed illness known as postpartum depression.1 Yates was initially sentenced to life in prison for 40 years without the possibility of parole. However, because of some erroneous testimony in the 2002 trial, the verdict was overturned. Yates was later retried on the same counts, and on 26 July 2006, she was found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity. Partly because of the intense media scrutiny of the Yates murder trials in the last seven years, there has been much public discourse on the misunderstood malady that is postpartum depression, its various symptoms, possible causes, and potential treatments . Before I develop the argument that Harriet Lovatt exhibits the classic signs of postpartum depression, it is important to note that the illness is not 159 maternal blitz a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. While there has...