Grotesque maternity: reading "happiness" and its eugenics in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child (1988)

This paper contexualises and reads Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child (1988) as a criticism towards the Family Acts conducted by Thatcher’s government in 1980s Britain. The article principally draws attention to the main and minor protagonist’s “annomalous” bodies and their relation to ablism that underlies the British government in its utilitarian campaign to strengthen the values of “conventional families”. Lessing’s text shows the way in which society makes a mother be intimate to her child, simultaneously distancing them from society, and relating the child’s heath to the idea of “happiness”. To prove this close maternal relationship, first of all, we will look at the Family Acts that the Conservatives propounded in the eighties, and investigate the rhetorics involved in their justifying the blueprint of the “conventional family” (nuclear family, stable income, home purchase, moral for “healthy” reproduction and nurturing). Based upon this point, secondly, I will show how the couple Harriet and David internalise the “happiness” of the conventional family in Fifth, and the way in which their happiness is destroyed by the birth and growth of their fifth child, Ben, by the effect of the story’s Gothic narrative. Positioning Fifth in the neo-Gothic revival movement by women writers, I will argue how the Gothic narrative is employed in an effective manner in Fifth for blurring the boundaries of the bodies between mother and child: using the theories of Margrit Shildrick, I read it as the leakiness of the bodies in the text making readers uncertain as to who is the monster, the baby or the mother. The leaky maternal body, which represents the intimate physical relationship between the mother and the baby, and the Gothic narrative both lead to distancing the mother-and-child from society, as the mother/child are seen as monsters. Finally, this chapter will point out the narrative in which Ben is always closely associated with minor characters in the novel (the disabled and the unemployed). From these readings, Ben’s monstrous physicality and Harriet’s fixation on a “happy (conventional) family” shows Lessing’s accusation of the exclusive and utilitarian society that Thatcher made for Britain: behind the “happiness” that neoliberalism offers, the citizens in such utalitarian societies are asked to be productive and have able bodies, and especially for forming “happy conventional families”, mothers are asked to give birth to “healthy” children, who are productive for society at large

Regression with a Slowly Varying Regressor in the Presence of a Unit Root

This paper considers the regression model with a slowly varying (SV) regressor in the presence of a unit root in serially correlated disturbances. This regressor is known to be asymptotically collinear with the constant term; see Phillips (2007). Under nonstationarity, we find that the estimated coefficients of the constant term and the SV regressor are asymptotically normal, but neither is consistent. Further, we derive the limiting distribution of the unit root test statistic. We may here observe that the finite sample approximation to the limiting one is not monotone and it is poor due to the influence of the collinear regressor. In order to construct a well-behaved test statistic, we recommend dropping the constant term intentionally from the regression and computing the statistics, which are still consistent under the true model having the constant term. The powers and sizes of these statistics are found to be well-behaved through simulation studies. Finally, these results are extended to general Phillips and Perron-type statistics.

Asymptotic Efficiency of the OLS Estimator with Singular Limiting Sample Moment Matrices

This paper presents a time series model that has an asymptotically efficient ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator, irrespective of the singularity of its limiting sample moment matrices. In the literature on stationary time series analysis, Grenander and Rosenblatt's (1957) (G-R) classical result is used to judge the asymptotic efficiency of regression coefficients on deterministic regressors satisfying Grenander's condition. Without this condition, however, it is not obvious that the model is efficient. In this paper, we introduce such a model by proving the efficiency of the model with a slowly varying (SV) regressor under the same condition on error terms constrained in G-R. This kind of regressor is known to display asymptotic singularity in the sample moment matrices, as in Phillips (2007), such that Grenander's condition fails.

Target Mass Corrections to QCD Bjorken Sum Rule for Nucleon Spin Structure Functions

We discuss the possible target mass corrections in the QCD analysis of nucleon's spin-dependent structure functions measured in the polarized deep-inelastic leptoproduction. The target mass correction for the QCD Bjorken sum rule is obtained from the Nachtmann moment and its magnitude is estimated employing positivity bound as well as the experimental data for the asymmetry parameters. We also study the uncertainty due to target mass effects in determining the QCD effective coupling constant $\alpha_s(Q^2)$ from the Bjorken sum rule. The target mass effect for the Ellis-Jaffe sum rule is also briefly discussed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 1 figure (.ps files) appended after \end{document} as an uuencoded compressed tar fil

Nonlinear Realization of Partially Broken N=2 Superconformal Symmetry in Four Dimensions

We investigate the nonlinear realization of spontaneously broken N=2 superconformal symmetry in 4 dimensions. We particularly study Nambu-Goldstone degrees of freedom for the partial breaking of N=2 superconformal symmetry down to N=1 super-Poincar{\'e} symmetry, where we get the chiral NG multiplet of dilaton and the vector NG multiplet of NG fermion of broken Q-supersymmetry. Evaluating the covariant differentials and supervielbeins for the chiral as well as the full superspace, we obtain the nonlinear effective lagrangians.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX, minor typos correcte