Abstract

The central issues raised in much of feminist literary theory's early scholarship remain prescient: how does narrative engage with the social‐historical? In what ways does it codify existing structures? How does it resist them? Whose stories are not being told, or read? In this article I use Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child (1988) as a text with which to begin to address the above questions by reading with attention to the mother story but also the ‘other’ stories operating both within and outside of the novel; in particular I am concerned with the convergence of maternity, disability and narrative. The novel's co-implication of sexual difference and corporeal difference reveals the ways in which the mother's story is both made possible and authorized by the disabled body of her child, and by his inability to tell his own story. Yet, if The Fifth Child is a horror story that uses the disabled child's body as its ground, it is also about the horror of maternity, in its conception and attendant choices. In this fictional story as well as in the social‐historical narrative circulating at the time of its publication in the late 1980s, both child and mother are indicted in their otherness and it is ultimately impossible to separate one from the other.