Essay Assignment
Writing Prompt
Out-Of-Class Final Essay The Fifth Child
We've been discussing all semester how the monster's body can be read as a text.
Now it's time to do just that.
Chose one of the following to write your final essay on:
(A) Disability is not seen as a fixed quality inhering in specific bodies but as a product of the relationship between, on the one hand, individual bodies that have some kind of impairment and, on the other, often discriminatory societal, cultural, and environmental structures.
(B) It is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation on society.
In Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, by many definitions (A) Ben is a monster deserving no sympathy created as a warning/metaphor reflecting a societal, cultural, or environmental structure of conformity; by some, (B) he's a child with disabilities and challenges and society is the monster for insisting on his isolation, exclusion, and/or destruction/punishment/alteration.
Write a well-organized essay choosing one of these arguments A or B. Develop and support it with evidence from the text.
Write a 1,000 word essay.
MLA format
The Fifth Child is your primary Source. You must incorporate a Secondary source as well. You may include as many other Primary sources as needed. So your work cited page should have a minimum of 2 sources.
This is a thesis driven essay and MUST have a thesis statement that reflects the complexities of the point of view chosen. Strict adherence to MLA format regarding citations and Work Cited pages will be expected.
This essay should show a culmination of understanding of the concepts we've discussed this semester (i.e. using the 6 elements of style to assist you in your analysis, Discussion of the Five Fears, etc.).
Keep in mind "society" also includes the society of his family, not just broader society. Think in terms of microcosm (family life and structure) and macrocosm (Ben's world outside the family).
Submit your essay as a Microsoft Word document in to Dropbox by the deadline.
No late essays will be accepted. No exceptions.
Some areas of research that might assist you in discussing this text:
Eugenics, Disability Theory, Disability Tropes in Literature.