Madness Under Power

Doris Lessing is a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.Her works mainly focus on the realistic and spiritual life of human beings.The Fifth Child is an important novel of hers.Most researchers in China and foreign countries are interested in the genre of the novel,the symbolic meanings of characters,the philosophical ideas of the author and the feminist reading of the Harriet.This thesis,based on the middle-class family relationship,attempts to present the madness of the marginal characters in the family and explore the significant meanings behind the representation of madness.The thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction includes a brief understanding of Doris Lessing and her thoughts,a literature review on The Fifth Child,the theoretical frameworks of power and madness applied to support main arguments.Chapter one,through close attention to the representation of female madness and children’s madness respectively mirrored in Harriet and Ben,clarifies that the definition of Harriet’s and Ben’s madness are determined by the moral standards of middle-class in the mid-20^th century according to the cultural and social requirement of women and children.The madness is free from psychiatry in the context of literature.Chapter two unfolds how power implements the exclusion of madness in three aspects:the distribution of space,the control of activities and the deprivation of discourse.These are the disciplinary techniques imposed on women and children for docile individuals that can be used to satisfy the middle-class delusion for a happy family.Chapter three is about the wakening awareness and responding strategies that the madness adopts to confront with the disciplinary power.Both Harriet and Ben started inspecting their identities established by the circumstance.The mother and the son experienced a journey of evasion and resistance for the reconstruction of their identities by reversing the power of the middle-class.Finally,the conclusion restates the structure of the thesis and the main argument.Harriet succeeded to shift women’s responsibility into a deconstructive power to the family.Besides,the abnormal child at last found his own community and united with them to launch revolution by conquering the Victorian house of the middle-class family.Both Lessing and Foucault hold a suspicious attitude towards any kind of dominancy.The Fifth Child expresses Lessing’s humanitarian concerns for the vulnerable groups who exist under the domination of middle-class power.The tragedy of the Lovatts reminds people to examine the significance of madness and its meaning for civilization.