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enamelled prence,” and the “attractiveness” which she wears as a “shell of bright paint” (17, 63). She is acutely aware of the boundaries between people, “outlining” pass-ers-by with her criticism, so that “listening to her was to acknowledge the limits we all live inside” (30). As she ma-tures, “chrysalis after chrysalis outgrown,” her thinning skin makes her vulnerable, but it also gives her the nsitivity to nurture the next generation (53). Eggshells provide tempo-rary protection, but ultimately Memoirs eks to demolish them along with the walls. In a final hatching even the iron egg is shattered, and its fragments themlves demateriali. As “the last walls dissolve,” the “collapd little world” is replaced by “another order of world altogether” (182), a world which Bachelard calls “the sort of Utopia where in-side and outside are no longer abandoned to their geometri-cal opposition,” an Edenic world without architecture (230). Here space is liberated, but lacks its dizzying distance. It is circumscribed by a new kind of enclosure—neither that of the solid wall nor the imprisoning egg. The new world is held “within the hollow of a great hand,” the hand of the female “Prence” for whom the narrator has been preparing (87). Gerald, his children, Emily, her parents, and pet are all absolved, all protected, in a celestial nest which is cross-generational and cross-species. “Outside” no longer exists, and “inside” is
enclosure without exclusion.
WORKS CITED
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space . Trans. M. Jolas.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.
对联印刷厂Bloomer , Jennifer . “Big Jugs .” Gender Space Architecture:An中国医学史
Interdisciplinary Introduction . Ed. J. Rendell, B. Pen-ner, and I . Borden . London : Routledge, 2000. 371−84. Fahim, Shadia. Doris Lessing: Sufi Equilibrium and the
Form of the Novel . New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Influ-
ence . Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1972. ---. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic
Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in So-cial Evolution . New York: Harper & Row, 1966.
--- . “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Women Who Did: Stories by
Men and Women, 1890−1914. Ed. A. Richardson. Lon- don: Penguin, 2002.
Le Corbusier. New World of Space . New York: Reynal and
Hitchcock and The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1948. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space . Trans. D.
Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.
Lessing, Doris. The Memoirs of a Survivor . London: Flam-
ingo, 1995.
Raschke, Debrah. “Cabalistic Gardens: Lessing’s The Mem-
oirs of a Survivor.” Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing . Ed. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis. West-port, CT: Greenwood Press. 1999. 43−54.
Wilson, Sharon. “The Cosmic Egg in Lessing’s The Mem-
oirs of a Survivor .” Doris Lessing Studies 23.1 (Winter 2003): 13-17.
“No Such Thing as Society”: Thatcherism and Derridean Hospitality in The Fifth Child
Richard Brock University of Calgary
The year 2008 marked the twentieth anniversary of the pub-lication of Doris Lessing’s novel The Fifth Child , an occa-sion which, coupled with Lessing’s recent receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, provides an opportune moment to reflect on the uncanny prescience of this claustrophobic little book, and to examine the ways in which it radically unttles the ideologies of 1980s Britain, anticipating the imminent collap of Thatcherism with a piercing clarity. The novel’s relationship to Thatcherite nationalist ideolo-gies is discusd at some length in Loui Yelin’s subtly argued book From the Margins of Empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer . Yet, where Yelin es at best an ambivalent attitude to the insularity of Thatcherism, and at worst a capitulation to its vision of “an England under siege by an alien horde” (106), I align mylf rather with Susan Watkins’s position that Lessing employs “the gothic convention of the return of the represd” as a basis for “a critique of the confluence in the Britain of the 1980s of de-fensive family values and fear of social unrest” (7). Watkins situates her reading of The Fifth Child in a persuasive
broader argument that Lessing strategically employs “the ‘minor’ genres of urban gothic, picaresque, and disaster narrative” (6) to express political solidarity with groups marginalized by the exclusionary cultural nationalism that pervaded 1980s Britain.
While I am in full agreement with Watkins’s conclu-sions concerning Lessing’s politics, my focus here will be rather different. I want to examine in detail the ways in which Lessing utilizes the xenophobic paranoia characteris-tic of Britain in the aftermath of the Falklands War as a de-parture point for a comprehensive satirical dismantling of the contradictions and paradoxes that render Thatcherism unsustainable and doom it to collap. I shall accomplish this through a discussion of The Fifth Child in the light of Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality, which will provide a framework for examining the progressive violation of the threshold of David and Harriet Lovatt’s Victorian family home, and the resultant erosion of the integrity of the That-cherite England which the hou microcosmically reprents. The threshold is a central conceptual device in my discussion, fulfilling multiple literal and metaphorical functions. Concretely, the threshold is manifested in the doorway to the home, the portal through which individuals pass physically, according to certain conditions dictated by the Lovatts themlves. It also functions, in both physical and imaginative realms, to demarcate a boundary between “inside” and “outside.” The single point on this boundary
Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 28 No. 1
8 which is capable of being, at different times, both complete-ly open and completely clod, the threshold is uniquely placed to disclo the “threats” against tho within (wheth-er manifested in everyday meteorological phenomena, open-ly violent threats of physical force, or, more abstractly, ideas and values which go against tho subscribed to inside the home), and therefore to foreground the protection the bounded space of the home affords against such threats. Psychologically, then, we may view the threshold in the novel as a literalization of the Lovatts’ obssive territorial-ity , conceived, in Peter J. Taylor’s terms, as “a form of be-haviour that us a bounded space, a territory, as the instru-ment for curing a particular outcome” (151). The Fifth Child is overwhelmingly centered on the sin-gle locale of David and Harriet’s domestic idyll—a fortress for “that stubborn individuality of theirs,” outside which “beat and battered the storms of the world” (Lessing 29). When the novel commences, in the socially liberal 1960s, this bastion of Victorian family values ems absurdly anachronistic. By the time the novel concludes (roughly the time of its publication), the values it reprents are far less out of step with the conrvative trends of 1980s society, yet, paradoxically, it is the social unrest generated by this conrvatism that makes them less sustainable than ever. Continually gesturing both forwards and backwards in time, the Lov
atts’ home is uniquely placed to facilitate the novel’s critique of a government which officially sanctions anti-quated conrvative values while its economic policies rve to erode the very social fabric that might sustain such val-ues.
The paradoxical approach to social cohesion characte-ristic of Thatcher’s government is perhaps best summed up in the now infamous phra, uttered by Margaret Thatcher herlf during a 1987 interview, that there is “no such thing as society,” only “individuals and . . . families” (qtd. in Evans 115). Though there is nothing to suggest that The Fifth Child engages directly with this statement (indeed, the dates would em to render this highly improbable), I want nevertheless to suggest that the novel engages cloly with the values expresd in it, in particular the implication that individuals and families are somehow antithetical to the notion of “society.” Indeed, as I shall subquently argue, The Fifth Child identifies the source of the social decline it so graphically depicts precily in the Thatcherite prioritiza-tion of the individual at the expen of society, and the re-lated conception of the family home as an insular fortress within which the individual is able to shield her/himlf from the outside world.
It is perhaps the “society” statement, more than any other, which has come to symbolize the Thatcher era for political commentators of all persuasions, succinctly ex-pressing what is en vario
黄洒usly as a hard-headed asrtion of monetarist values, an insistence on the importance of the traditional nuclear family, or a deeply unpalatable cham-pioning of a cynical, greed-fuelled, materialist individual-ism. The terms of political reference implied in this state-ment are, however, complex and contradictory, and bearwto是什么意思
clo scrutiny in order to unpack them effectively. Kenneth Newton discuss Thatcher’s asrtion in terms of “social capital,” which he defines as
a t of values and attitudes of citizens relating primari-ly to trust, reciprocity and co-operation. Seen in this way, social capital is a subjective phenomenon of social and political culture, which refers to the collective atti-tudes people have about their fellow citizens, and there-fore to the way that citizens relate. . . . High levels of social capital are associated with treating others as fel-low citizens, rather than as (potential) strangers, com-petitors, or enemies. (4)
For Newton, then, “[w]hen Thatcher insisted that ‘there is no such thing as society,’ she was expressing her personal belief that social capital is of little importance, and by virtue of her own economic and social policies she was making it more difficult for citizens to act as if it was important” (17). Newton’s explanation is a helpful one, identifying one par-ticular conception of “society” and off
ering, as we shall e, a telling diagnosis that Thatcherite ideology’s default view of “fellow citizens” conceptualizes them as “potential stran-gers, competitors, or enemies.” This is, however, only part of the story; for, in consider-ing Thatcher’s disavowal of “society,” we must also consid-er her placement of “family” on the opposite side of a binary distinction. This opposition is a complex one, given that the cultural nationalism inherent in conrvative political frameworks such as Thatcher’s relies extensively on a me-taphorical doubling of family and nation. (And of cour, if we follow Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined community,” which is “always conceived of as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7), we can hardly view it as anything other than a configuration of “society.”) The apparent contradiction here is best explored in the light of George Lakoff’s asrtion that the family rves as the cen-tral metaphor in conrvative politics, uniting aspects of conrvative thinking that appear contradictory—even para-doxical—from the outside. According to Lakoff, a great deal of conrvative thought revolves around what he terms the “strict father model” of the traditional (which is to say, patriarchal) nuclear family (191). Conrvative conceptions of the state, he argues, revolve around a nation-as-family metaphor, which allows a social conrvatism reinforced by strict government legislation to coexist with an economic liberalism that demands small government and champions individualism. According to Lakoff, the strict father model of family, in conjunction with the nation-as-family meta-phor, has no trouble reconciling the t
wo contradictory ideas: the strict father is a disciplinarian, but “grown child-ren are expected to go off on their own and be lf-reliant and then deeply rent parents who continue to tell them how they should live” (193).
Lakoff’s explanation offers a profound insight into the mechanisms of metaphorical thought which unite social conrvatism and economic liberalism, but neglects to ex-amine an important site of contradiction in the territoriality which attaches to the “bounded spaces” both of the family
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(i.e., the home) and the nation. For Taylor, territoriality is a powerful mechanism which “mould[s] politics into a fun-damentally state-centric social process . . . , so much so that conflicts not involving the state are often en as outside politics as generally conceived” (151). This insular, exclu-sionary consciousness is exhibited by the Lovatts through-out Lessing’s novel, and to this extent their family life reprents a perfect microcosm of Thatcher’s isolationist, “Euro-sceptic” (or more accurately “Euro-phobic”) national-ism. Yet if the Lovatts create a quasi-national space inside their own home, their insularity precludes the social links outside the home which are necessary to the creation of a n
ational consciousness, since nation is fundamentally a “community . . . indissolubly linked to the land in which it develop[s]” (Taylor 155). The cultural nationalism so integral to Thatcher’s brand of conrvatism is therefore fatally compromid by the opposition of family to society, since, according to its own models of thought, it is precily through the metonymy of family that national “society” coa-lesces. For Taylor, then, Thatcher’s denial of such a thing as society is “a most remarkable statement from such a ‘natio-nalist politician,’ implying as it does no territoriality” (160). From this paradoxical state of affairs, Taylor inevitably draws a paradoxical conclusion, that a statement almost un-iversally en as perfectly encapsulating Thatcher’s worldview can be en as nothing more than “an aberration” (160).
As the foregoing discussion has shown, the oppositional relation between the family and society implied in Thatch-er’s statement is a critical point of contradiction and paradox at the very centre of her political consciousness, and it is no surpri therefore to find it also occupying the thematic cen-tre of Lessing’s novel. This binary opposition is crucial to the Lovatts’ construction of their domestic fortress, and its ultimate erosion governs the novel’s critique of Thatcherite values. However, an examination of the ways in which the novel approaches this critique necessitates clor attention to subtle distinctions among various ns of the term so-ciety itlf. It is necessary therefore to unpa
ck the term fur-ther, and identify the different ways in which we might ap-ply it to the complex interpersonal transactions in The Fifth Child .
The notion of society is applicable in three distinct (though of cour cloly related and complexly interlinked) ways to Lessing’s novel and its relationship to the context of its production, each of the three applications correspond-ing roughly with one of the first three ns associated with the term in the Oxford English Dictionary . The first of the is approximately equivalent to n 1—“Association with one’s fellow men, esp. in a friendly or intimate manner; companionship or fellowship.” This n is the most cen-tral to the interactions early in the novel which fall into the framework of hospitality: David and Harriet actively ek out the society of their family and friends, which, especially on special family or religious occasions, forms an important component of their enjoyment of their home.
The cond n of the term society offered by the OED is defined as “[t]he state or condition of living in asso-ciation, company, or intercour with others of the same species; the system or mode of life adopted by a body of individuals for the purpo of harmonious co-existence or for mutual benefit, defence, etc.” This meaning of society is approximately equivalent to Newton’s definition of “social capital,” and is the n which lies at the heart of Thatch-er’s famous disavowal: in insisting
on the individual as an inviolably discrete entity, she effectively precludes the pos-sibility of a “body of individuals” working cohesively for mutual benefit, and hence of society in this n. This n of the term is implicit throughout The Fifth Child in its criti-que of individualism, but also becomes increasingly promi-nent towards the end of the novel, as the Lovatts become aware of the increasing violence and civil unrest in the world around them which signals a near-total collap in the “harmonious coexistence” of individuals.
The final context in which I will apply the term society relates to the OED ’s third n, “[t]he aggregate of persons living together in a more or less ordered community.” Of interest here are the ways in which this “aggregate” is viewed by the Lovatts as a homogenous, undifferentiated entity against which they lf-consciously position them-lves at the start of the novel. Here, society is approximate-ly equal to what we might term social trends—the prevailing ideologies from which David and Harriet, at least in the 1960s when the novel commences, believe they can find no disnters except each other. It is certainly society in this final n which David and Harriet actively ek to exclude from their domestic space when they first establish it: their fortress is sustained by their “stubbornly held view of them-lves, . . . that they were ordinary and in the right of it, [and] should not be criticized for emotional fastidiousness, abstemiousness, just becau the
were unfashionable qual-ities” (7). Self-consciously opposing this view to the “fa-shionable” liberalism of the time, they construct an envi-ronment in which they are free to pursue “happiness, in the old style” (28), explicitly and defiantly refusing the over-whelming momentum of libertarian social change.
Despite their wholesale rejection of the practices and values of “society,” however, the Lovatts’ home becomes a venue for numerous social events to which they invite friends and extended family members who engage far more readily with the social conditions of the time. The events are enjoyable for hosts and guests alike: the guests all enjoy themlves “[a]round the great family table, where so many chairs could be comfortably accommodated” (25), while Harriet and David enjoy welcoming their guests into their domestic idyll, and the opportunities for social interactions the occasions afford. Already, on both a mantic and an ideological level, the binary opposition between family and society implied in Thatcher’s statement appears to have been eroded. The Lovatts do not only welcome the society (in the OED ’s first n of the term) of the family; but also the family as society, that is to say, family members as rep-
Doris Lessing Studies Vol. 28 No. 1
画纹身
10rentatives of tho trends of the homogeneous “aggregate” of society that the Lovatts have rejected so emphatically.
Yet, while on the surface of the exchanges we recog-nize hospitality in its everyday n in the apparently un-conditional welcome which the Lovatts as hosts extend to their guests, Derrida’s treatment of hospitality would teach us to be rather more suspicious of the exchanges. Under clor examination, the events reveal themlves to be far more tightly regulated than we might initially have sus-pected. It is true (or at least the novel gives us no cau to doubt) that David’s and Harriet’s guests thoroughly enjoy the social occasions spent at the Lovatt family home, and in all probability do not feel that there are any restrictions placed upon them in this tting. Yet, in tting foot over the threshold, they have implicitly agreed to certain conditions which constitute, in a n, the “price of admission.” Spe-cifically, the price of this enjoyment is the acceptance of David and Harriet’s domestic vision—they are forced to admit that “the hou was made for it” (25).
This form of social transaction, in which the values of the host are impod upon the guest in exchange for the lat-ter’s enjoyment of a privileged welcome into the former’s home, is an example of what Derrida terms a “violence” within the customs and rituals of hospitality, located at “the very moment of welcoming”:
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Hospitality gives and takes more than once in its own home. It gives, it offers, it holds out, but what it gives, offers, holds out, is the greeting which comprehends and makes or lets come into one’s home, folding the foreign other into the internal law of the host . . . which tends to begin by dictating the law of its language and its own acceptation of the n of words, which is to say, its own concepts as well. (“Hostipitality” 7)
In the apparently unconditional transactions of hospital-ity, the Lovatts are able to maintain the integrity of their domestic space while still enjoying the society of tho who ingress and egress they regulate at its threshold. Cru-cial to understanding the ways in which such transactions operate in The Fifth Child is Derrida’s u of the phra “foreign other” (as distinct from the “absolute other,” an equally important component of Derrida’s discussion of conditional hospitality and one which I shall have occasion to revisit later). As we have already en, by delineating its boundaries, asrting its values, and (implicitly) coding the rules by which visitors are expected to behave—and hence the conditions by which they are welcomed—the Lovatts have in effect configured their domestic space as a quasi-nation. The values and norms of the world immediately out-side this space are fundamentally different to tho adhered to inside it, but they are not unknowable. The Lovatts and their guests (reprentatives of “society” at large, who society David and Harriet have
explicitly sought via an invi-tation to a specific social event) each understand the values adhered to by the other party, at least insofar as each reprents a partial rejection of the other’s values. This de-gree of familiarity enables a (tacit) negotiation to take place on the threshold of the Lovatts’ domestic space, where the
guest temporarily agrees to suspend her/his normal operat-ing practices for the duration of her/his stay. Through this negotiation, the host ascertains the guest’s status as a “for-eign” other, i.e. one who is prepared to acquiesce to the val-ues pertaining within the host’s realm, and who otherness is therefore both knowable and capable of regulation.
The novel’s construction of home as nation reprents one component of core Thatcherite values, embodied both in the domestic boundary as a mediator between family and “society” configured in a relationship of binary opposition, and in the ideology of home ownership as the key means by which individuals and families might best maintain their discrete identities. Just as importantly, however, this con-struction also forcibly invokes the rever configuration, nation as home—the nation as a domestic fortress who boundaries must be maintained at all costs from the (pre-sumed hostile) ideological influences of nations in imme-diate geographical proximity. Such fears characterized the foreign policy of Thatcher governments, which consistently exhibited “a calculated measure of xenop
土豆炒芹菜hobia” (Evans 82), especially where relations with Britain’s nearest neighbors were concerned. This deep suspicion of foreign influences in general, and an increasingly united Europe in particular, was echoed in much of the popular press, due in part to the enthusiastic surge of patriotic ntiment and “unpreceden-tedly crass and distasteful xenophobia” (Evans 97) which had accompanied tabloid media coverage of the Falklands War. The insularity of the Lovatts’ “nation-home” is thus entirely in keeping with the jealously defensive national posture characteristic of much of Britain during the 1980s.
The Lovatts’ domestic practices, then, encompass a va-riety of Thatcherite ideals, including the insistence on the primacy of the family over “society,” the paranoid defence of space against the ideological “other,” and the enthusiastic embracing of the 1980s capitalist dream of home ownership. Yet, paradoxically, it is this last feature of Thatcherite eco-nomics that threatens to undermine their attempts to regulate ideological traffic at the threshold of their home. No single policy epitomizes the shift away from welfare-bad models towards the materialist individualism characteristic of the Thatcher-led administrations of the 1980s more than the drive towards home ownership, which the government en-couraged through a raft of measures designed to make mort-gages more accessible and easier to obtain than ever before. The resultant ri in home ownership brought about an un-pre
117是什么电话cedented boom in hou prices, which peaked in 1987. Yet this boom was doomed to bust, and a stock market crash in October 1987 duly precipitated a decline in hou prices, combined with a sharp ri in interest rates.
In retrospect, it hardly ems necessary to obrve that the housing boom of the 1980s was a fundamentally in-cure phenomenon, predicated on an “incread ratio of debt to disposable income [which] meant that the housing market became much more nsitive to shocks” (Backhou 330). In The Fifth Child , Lessing ems to allude to the innate incurity of this economic climate and perhaps even to an-ticipate its ultimate collap, introducing an analogous ele-
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ment of fragility into the Lovatts’ domestic situation through an emphasis on their financial overextension in buying their dream home. Immediately after an extensive description of the bustling scenes in the Lovatt houhold during an Easter gathering, Lessing bluntly reminds us of the financial arrangements which have given ri to it: “And how was all this paid for? Well, of cour everyone contri-buted; and, of cour, not enough, but people knew David’s father was rich. Without
that mortgage being paid for, none of this could have happened. Money was always tight” (27). This ominous passage foreshadows the disintegration of the domestic space that is to come by reminding us that David and Harriet are not ultimately in financial control over it.
The earliest indications of this lack of control are mani-fested in the almost imperceptible erosions of the domestic boundary that ari as a result of minor violations of the “contracts” of hospitality negotiated at the threshold of the Lovatt family home. To begin with, the breaches appear entirely innocuous—in the shape of guests who “said they were coming for a couple of days and stayed a week” (27)—but by the time an exhausted Harriet is undergoing her diffi-cult fifth pregnancy, the Lovatts’ control over their thre-shold ems to have declined markedly: Harriet’s mother Dorothy is dismayed that “everyone is expecting to come here for Christmas” (43), and when the guests inevitably arrive—more as a result of an assumed connsus than an explicit invitation—the occasion gives ri not to the usual round of festivities but to “Harriet lying pale and unsociable on her bed, and then coming down determined to be one of the party but failing, and going upstairs again” (47).
This gradual erosion of the Lovatts’ control over the threshold of their domestic space is crucial, since, in robbing them of the power to regulate traffic across the threshold, it also robs them of the c
apacity to act as hosts and to offer hospitality—which in Derrida’s account expressly rests on
the necessity, for the host, for the one who receives, of choosing, of electing, filtering, lecting their invitees, visitors, or guests, tho to whom they decide to grant asylum, the right of visiting, or hospitality. No hospital-ity, in the classic n, without sovereignty of onelf over one’s home, but since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercid by filtering, choosing, and thus by excluding and doing vi-olence. (Of Hospitality 55)
In their economic overreaching, then, the Lovatts have fatal-ly compromid the integrity of the structures they have erected for the very purpo of regulating the physical and ideological traffic between family and “society.” That their adherence to the Thatcherite values of individualism, the nuclear family, and the inviolability of the domestic space has been undermined by the economic incurities to which the values inevitably give ri ironically expos the para-doxes at the heart of Thatcher’s model. But this is only the beginning of the Lovatts’ troubles. The limits of the regula-tory powers of hospitality, and hence of the home as a bounded and cure space, are about to be expod by the arrival of Ben, the other not from without, but from within.
The figure of Ben is a complex one to interpret, reprenting a striking and violent incursion of the fa
ntas-tic—if not the supernatural—into the hitherto realist frame of the novel. Yet there are numerous indications, both be-fore and after his birth, which suggest an allegorical reading of him as reprentative of all tho aspects of “society” against which the Lovatts have attempted to insulate them-lves. To begin with, Harriet’s pregnancy with Ben coin-cides with the increasingly insistent incursions of the TV news into the Lovatt houhold, “a professionally cool voice . . . telling about some murders in a London suburb” (55) providing yet more evidence of the increasing permeability of the domestic space, and perhaps the strongest hint yet of the non-viability of the Lovatts’ attempts to maintain the family/society binary. Then there is the striking imagery which recurs in the scenes in which Harriet imagines Ben as a kind of evolutionary throwback. Watching as Ben “banged [a] tray with his stone, in a frenzy of exulting accomplish-ment,” Harriet reflects that “one could easily imagine him, in the mines deep under the earth, with his kind” (85). Coupled with the year of Ben’s birth (1974—the year of the miners’ strike which effectively brought down Edward Heath’s Conrvative government), this reference to mining ems once again to situate the novel politically, in addition to reinforcing Ben’s otherness. Like the hou itlf, Ben simultaneously invokes past and future: in its suggestions that Ben is a throwback to another age, the narrative ges-tures towards a distant past even as it reflects the political climate of its own time and anticipates the final defeat of the miners by Thatcher after the 1984 strikes.
The appearance of Ben constitutes an uncanny manife-station of the increasingly turbulent “society” which the Lovatts have tried to imagine out of existence through the construction of their physical and psychological domestic boundaries. Yet the boundaries are of no effect against Ben, precily becau he comes—physically—from within. He does not initially access the domestic space via the thre-shold, and there is therefore no space for the staging of the negotiations of hospitality which we have examined thus far. Unlike the other Lovatt children, however, Ben remains a psychological outsider, and cannot be normalized into the routines and values which the other children have absorbed naturally. This is openly acknowledged not only by the oth-er children—Luke assures his sister Jane that “[Ben] isn’t really one of us” (93)—but also by David, who insists that “he certainly isn’t mine” (90). Thus Ben is defined as what Derrida terms the “absolute other”: unlike the various “for-eign others” whom the Lovatts admit into their home and (temporarily) absorb into their value system, he is unknow-able, and incapable of knowing them. No such negotiation would be possible with Ben even if he were to enter the family home (as subquently happens) as a physical out-sider, via the threshold. The disavowals from Ben’s fami-ly members are particularly significant to the hospitality-bad reading of the novel I have been proposing, since Der-rida identifies the notion of filial associations as crucial to
