A real little child.

   After a difficult pregnancy Harriet is to give birth to her fifth child. She has always wished to have her babies at home but this time she has asked to have the baby at the hospital. The brief description of her delivery mentions her pain and her relief after the baby’s birth.  Harriet is surrounded with nurses, Dr Brett, her mother and David her husband. Dr Brett’s words “a real little wrestler… he came fighting the whole world” sound like a premonition. David “sounded dismayed” and is obviously at a loss what to say. People don’t seem to support Harriet : Dr Brett is said to be “annoyed at her”. Harriet is resentful “I’ve been through this with Dr bloody Brett” stream of consciousness technique and even unwilling to cooperate “Harriet held him out, challenging the nurse with her eyes to take him”. Everybody seems to be ill at ease as if they were conscious of something unusual taking place.  Ben is not introduced as a nice little baby ‘he was not a pretty baby’. The adjectives used “muscular” , “yellowish”, “heavy shouldered hunched look” all have a negative sense and convey a strange image of the baby. The description of his hands correspond to the idea of a wrestler : “his hands were thick and heavy with pads of muscle in the palms”. Ben’s eyes are compared to “lumps of soapstone”, it’s a stone that has no brightness, that is colorless and lifeless. This detail could be a hint from the narrator to let us know that communication with Ben is bound to be difficult if not impossible.  We witness Harriet’s attempt at having eye contact with “the creature” but not to avail “there was no recognition there”. Harriet also stresses the fact that the contact she has with her baby is not soft and full of love “As if he were trying to stand up, pushing his feet into her side”. When she is feeding him “the child looked at here and bit, hard”, it looks more like a confrontation than a normal relationship or link between mother and child. There is already a lot of violence in Ben’s attitude.  Harriet’s feelings for Ben are a mixture of pity and dislike. “Her heart contracted with pity for him” “his mother disliking him so much” This sentence could be the narrator’s or it could be Harriet’s real thought (stream of consciousness technique) . Harriet is trying to act as she did with the other babies and particularly with Paul but Ben is said to be “stiff and heavy”.