Survival between Being and Doing: An Existential Reading of Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child

Abstract

The study aims at exploring the existential approach that Doris Lessing has adopted in portraying the character of Harriet Lovat in The Fifth Child. The work presents a conflict between society and the individual that the protagonist, Harriet Lovatt has to undergo and overcome in the process of personal choice. She is given the freedom to choose between what she wants and what society wants her to do. In doing so, she demonstrates full responsibility for such choices. In this novel, the choices and the decisions that the protagonist makes follow from an existential way of thinking. Thus, the approach of the author in portraying the character of the protagonist is examined from an existential standpoint. Lessing skillfully weaved the prevailing cultural and social circumstances of Harriet’s community with the question of being and survival in her quest for a meaningful existence. She refuses to be controlled by the traditional codes of sexual liberation before marriage and to have a traditional family after it. Having become a mother of an abnormal child, Harriet also goes on to make decisions that reinforce her existential status. This study presents Harriet as capable of revealing personal awareness and choice by rejecting the prevailing norms in her community as a young woman before marriage and as a wife and a mother afterward.