Doris Lessing’s 39th novel, The Fifth Child, portrays one British family from the 1960s to the 1980s. This novel has been analysed from various perspectives, such as conservative family ideology, Victorian family and the country house, maternal postpartum depression, surveillance and control, and drug addiction. In a focal point of the novel, however, there is a couple―David Lovatts and Harriet Lovatts-who are excessively obsessed with a Victorian ‘happy’ family. The ‘happy’ family falls apart after the ominous baby, handicapped Ben, is born. This paper traces how the microcosm of Victorian values, consisting of a family and maternal nature, disintegrates in the face of an unexpected obstacle, and how the “transgressive Other” within a family reproduces an Other through overlapping Ben with the mother, Harriet. Furthermore, this paper reflects on the question of whether a family “now and here” may be based upon real intimacy rather than just family ideas.
