Novy - Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture

In one of the most famous works of literature dealing with adoption, Oedipus remembers a strange event of his youth: At a feast, a drunken man maundering in his cups / Cries out that I am not my father's son. As the adoptee and poet Jackie Kay says, interviewed by Nancy Gish in this anthology, It is different to grow up knowing that your mother is not actually your mother, and that your father is not actually your father, but nonetheless they are your mother and father.

Is an adoptive parent a real parent? If so, is a biological parent who does not nurture after birth really a parent? How does the biological mother's experience of pregnancy and birthenforced nurturancemake her situation different from that of the biological father? Adoption makes ambiguous the definition of parenthood and of such other important terms as family; kinship, and identity; as well as father and mother.

Many well-known works of literature have plots that turn on the definition of parenthood. After discovering birth parents, Oedipus thinks of them as his parents, and, less tragically, so does Perdita in Shakespeare's Winters Tale.

These stories are myths because of the way they act as paradigms (though they conflict) to shape feelings, thoughts, language, and even laws about adoption. In the two versions of the search story, the birth parents are clearly the real parents. In the happy adoption story, the birth parents may exist in memory, but no matter how important this memory is, as in Oliver Twist, it does not constitute a living complication to the reconstructed family. All three myths assume that a child has, in effect, only one set of parents. To many readers, this will seem like an inevitable axiom. But for othersincluding many adopteesit is not necessarily so obvious.

Although these are the dominant paradigms through which our culture has traditionally tried to imagine adoption, much literature complicates them considerably, as essays in this book will show. Even the works I mention have more dimensions to their analyses of adoption. Some of the literature and media representations discussed in this anthology follow these dominant plots; others, however, look at them obliquely, examine their cost, follow their characters after their supposed end, or play off against readers' expectations, explicitly dramatizing deviation from them. One of the purposes of the book, indeed, is to emphasize how much variety is possible in ways of imagining adoption, even though many of the same conflicts recur in different contexts.

Why has adoption figured so importantly in literature? First, as I have been suggesting, adoption plots dramatize cultural tensions about definitions of family and the importance of heredity. Questions about whether adoptees need knowledge of their ancestry, about whether it is healthy or possible for a birth mother to put the memory of a relinquished child behind her and what her privacy rights are, and about whether birth or nurture is more important in cases of disputed custody, all now being debated in legislative sessions and in courts, are also at issue in such novels as Silas Marner, Great Expectations, and Bleak House.

Furthermore, representing adoption is a way of thinking about the family, exploring what a family is, that is at the same time a way of thinking about the self, exploring distance from the family. While both of the happy-ending stories celebrate the family, that celebration is ambivalent. As Freud discussed in his theory of the family romance, for most peoplenonadopted peoplethe fantasy of discovering that they were adopted and can be reunited with a different family elsewhere is a way of dealing with negative feelings about their parents. The same could be said, even more emphatically, about the fantasy of being an orphan who is then happily adopted. And the more interesting the outsider in literature that follows the disastrous adoption plot, the more that plot too deals with ambivalence about the familyas in