Deluded Perfection and the Realities of Motherhood: Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child , a woman gives birth to a violent boy who strangles the family pet and tries to kill his siblings. But as Mikaela Kyle argues in “Deluded Perfection and the Realities of Motherhood,” Ben is more than a monster. He awakens his parents from their dream, which is to raise a large and happy family while someone else does the housework and pays the bills. Ben disrupts this selfish and unsustainable fantasy by embodying everything that it excludes: violence, madness, anger, hunger, greed, scarcity, and fear. As Kyle argues, it is Ben’s mother, Harriet, who has to bear the brunt of this disruption. Everyone else in the novel is able to distance him or herself from the monster, but Harriet cannot. Does she deserve praise or blame? Neither, argues Kyle. The lonely reality of motherhood is that Harriet cannot ignore the threat that her child embodies. —Dr. Alice Brittan
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".