도리스 레씽의 『다섯째 아이』: ‘행복한 가족’의 몰락

Abstract

Sunryoung ChoiIn the mid-1980s after her protean formal experimentation, Doris Lessing wrote a series of 'family novels' that, centered on the mother-child relationship, probed into the modern family relations with hereditary and social forces working on them. Reading The Fifth Child that shares these issues, this essay aims to clarify how this novel also raises fundamental questions to the modern ideology of 'happy family'. The Fifth Child presents a story of family disaster resulting from the birth of a misfit child to some middle-class parents obsessed with the idea of happiness. The presence of this uncanny child named Ben disturbs, and finally destroys the stability of this family, which proves how fragile and limited their happiness is. It is an irony that this child of unusual physical power and violence should be born to parents cherishing the ideal of secure family full of children. The violence or monstrosity of Ben, however, is not just something definitely doomed to be destructive; to a certain extent, his excessive monstrosity is a construct of his parents' obsessive idea of happiness and inadequate responses that do not allow him to be properly understood or assimilated into family circle. Introducing this gothic-novel figure, The Fifth Child shows with appalling clarity how 'happy family' has the seeds of its own destruction within it, demanding for a radical reappraisal of the bourgeois happiness ideology or will-to-happiness.