Mother's love in the Novel 'The Fifth Child' by Doris Lessing. (Book Report Sample)

Mother’s Love Name Institution Mother’s love changes complexly with children and circumstances. We will evaluate how mother’s love is shown in The book Game of Thrones and The Fifth Child. Game of Thrones uses three mothers and how they raise their children. We notice that the mothers exist in different conditions with different challenges and different kinds of children. The women too have different personalities and backgrounds. We realize from the book of the Game of Thrones and the book of The Fifth Child that women react differently regarding loving their children. The changes might be as a result of the nature of their children, their personal challenges, or the circumstances that they are living in. The four women that draw most interests in the two books include the Caitlyn, the mother of Arya, Sansa, Robb, Bran and Jon Snow. Cersei is the mother of Joffrey, the young king, and other two children. We will study the sister of Caitlyn who husband was killed under unclear circumstances. Finally, we will also study the motherhood of Harriet as she takes care of her five children with her husband. This essay is about how a mother’s love changes in different circumstances. Caitlyn shows different characteristics while taking care of her three children. A mother’s love is supposed to be unconditional. Mothers should love their children in no matter what situations, equally and visibly. Caitlyn, however, shows that one cannot love all their children equally. She particularly shows some of the aspects that might have caused the impartial treatment of her children. Her love for Arya is not as strong as her love for the other children of the home of Eddard. She treated Arya distantly, and Arya realized that her mother did not like as much. We can realize how she prefers Sansa to Arya in reading her thoughts. She thinks that Arya would have been better if she behaved and was more like Sansa. Sansa is more feminine, knits and participates in the home chores like her mother. Arya on the other side behaves more like a boy. She has learned how to fight using a sword and can even shoot better that her brother (Sandqvist, 2016). Her mother seriously gave the thought that Arya needed some refinement. "Sansa would shine in the South; Caitlyn thought to herself, and the gods knew that Arya needed refinement’ (Martin, 2011, P. 64). This kind of reaction to Arya was not without reason. When we study the personality of Caitlyn, It is so much like that of her daughter Arya. They both appear to be fighters, they conform less to femininity and are more confrontational. Her mother in the quote above knew her daughters were going to live in the royal house and needed her to have a better life. She could have been worried and in the process drew away from Arya (Sandqvist, 2016). Game of Thrones shows that Caitlyn was a feminist just like her daughter Arya. Arya on page 73 says that "a woman is important too," (Martin, 2011 P. 73). Her mother tells Blackfish, "A woman can rule as wisely as a man," (Martin, 2011P. 366). She shows that they have a lot like Arya. It is then confusing whether she is giving Arya love by drawing further from her or she is just concerned about her welfare in the south. While Caitlyn behaves so towards Arya, she is more hands-on to Bran. When Bran fell off the wall under unclear circumstances, Caitlyn knew there was something to it. She stayed at his bedside taking care of him. We see her getting very aggressive as the story develops trying to know who is behind the plan. She goes to the South at Headquarters of the seven kingdoms to secretly find her husband to help her know who was the owner of a knife that was used to try to kill her son. This daring ability of hers makes her to even kidnap a son of a very powerful man, Tyron Lannister. We see that she gets physical, emotional, and schemer in the protection of his son Bran. She also thinks and finds out that Bran must have seen something appalling about the Lannisters and she was supposed to die. This kind of intelligence is provoked by the status of her son. Mother's love here is shown to be triggered by misfortune. We can assert that when a child experiences a certain unfortunate incident, the mother grown strength to protect them (Tiffany, 2015). This is the same that happened in The Fifth child. Harriet took back Ben from the institution. She was concerned with how the life at the intuition was. She does not focus on the character of Ben as a bad person same as Caitlyn refuses to scold Bran fro climbing walls. They both focus on the condition that their children are now living under. Harriet is disappointed by the detention camp that was an institution for the children of the kind of Ben. They were not trained, ate bad food and above all occurred to even be worse than home. She knew who Ben was in character. She even feared Ben from the time he killed a Dog. Harriet against all the odds decided to bring Ben home and take care of him. It then very much seems that when children face challenges, their mother’s love grow for them (Stoddard, 2002). Caitlyn also shows that when she tries to trade Jaime for her two daughters. At first, we thought she did not love Arya and could not go extra miles for the two now going to stay at the royal house. Then later she asks Jaime to exchange his freedom for those two her daughters. On this incident, the mother experiences the pain of the child again. She feels her two daughters stuck in a foreign land with dictators and felt like she should help them (Tiffany, 2015) Caitlyn’s love for Jon Stark, the bastard gives the other side of the story. She hated Jon because he was imposed on her. He was not her son; he was the son of her husband. He was born out of the wedlock with a whore most probably. She seems to combat with the fact that Jon was not bad, but he represented what she hates. Hate sometime came out when she told that Jon that she wished it was Jon who had fallen from the wall, not Bran. She felt like Jon was scavenging on their power and could take away the kingdom of their sons who were the rightful owners. On the other side, she was practical. According to the book, "It was the one thing she could never forgive him. She had come to love her husband with all her heart, but she never found it in her to love Jon. She might have overlooked a dozen bastards for Ned's sake, so long as they were out of sight. Jon was never out of sight, and as he grew, he looked more like Ned than any of the true born sons she bore him. Somehow that made it wrong." (Martin, 2011, pg. 66). Cersei is another mother who is very interesting in the book Game of Thrones. She has three children, but her relationship with Joffrey is most interesting. Cersei was mistreated with her husband and sexually assaulted. Finally, she got pregnant with her brother and gave birth to Joffrey. She gave excess love to Joffrey to substitute for the love of Robert. She treated him as a king long before he could be one. She even planned for the death of her husband for herself and Joffrey. The novel can show us that she went an extra mile just like all the other mothers, to bring up Joffrey. However, during bringing her up, she made one very bad mistake of loving him too much. He grew to be a cruel, petty, irresponsible and brutal person. Cersei knows this very much but does nothing to change her son. She even tells Sansa that she knows Joffrey would not be her best (Sandqvist, 2016). This part is like the Fifth Child in many ways. In the Fifth child, Harriet loves Ben so much that she fail to know that he needs better parenting to be a good person. It is possible that their disagreement with her husband created the shift in the affection and turned towards Ben to give the love she would otherwise have given to her husband. David told Harriet at the hospital that, "It’s either him or us" (Lessing, 1998, P. 74). He was forcing Harriet to make a decision between the son Ben and the family. These are hostilities similar to those found in the Game of Thrones that might have cause Harriet to draw closer to Ben. When Harriet brought Ben back from the institution, David hated her. He looked at her as if she was a betrayer. David was trying to forget Ben who was a potenti...