Reading Adoption: Family And Difference In Fiction And Drama

Reading Adoption Reading Adoption } Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama Marianne Novy The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2005 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America c Printed on acid-free paper 2008 2007 2006 2005 4 3 2 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Novy, Marianne, 1945– Reading adoption : family and difference in fiction and drama / Marianne Novy. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-472-11507-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. English literature— History and criticism. 2. Adoption in literature. 3. American literature—History and criticism. 4. Oedipus (Greek mythology) in literature. 5. Family in literature. I. Title. pr408.a36n688 2005 809'.933556—dc22 2005003517 For my daughter, Liz Carrier and in honor and memory of her three grandmothers Dorothy Kern, mother by adoption Louise Carrier, mother by birth and adoption Geraldine Govier, mother by birth Acknowledgments It took the equivalent of a village for me to write this book. First, it took a social movement—the open-records movement and its founding mothers, Betty Jean Lifton, Jean Paton, and Florence Fisher, who were helpful to me personally as well as through their writings, and in Jean’s case through the resources of her collection of books about adoptees and orphans. It took other people personally involved in adoption, and especially in adoption and literature, with whom I talked about my experience. I’ll begin with the adoptees and near-adoptees: long ago, Jim Simmonds, Suzanne Polen, Pat Hinchey, Anne Steytler, and Jean Vincent; near the beginning of this project, Penny Partridge, Amy Cheney, Katie Lee Crane, and especially Margot Backus, Jill Deans, and, more recently Emily Hipchen, who have been active in the Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity, and Kinship. Judith Modell, Barbara Melosh, and, especially, Carol Singley, longtime cochair with me of the Alliance, bring the professional and personal together in studying adoption as adoptive parents, and they too have been helpful to me for years. I needed audiences to try out my ideas, and I thank the audiences and organizers at a number of conferences: the American Adoption Congress; the University of Richmond conference “Shedding Light on Secrecy and Openness in Adoption”; the Pennsylvania Adoption Forum Conference; the Three Rivers Adoption Council Annual Meeting; Seen and Heard, a conference on early modern childhood; the conference of the Association for Research on Mothering; the International Shakespeare Congress; the Shakespeare Association of America; the American Anthropological Association; the International Conference for the Study of Narrative Literature; the Kansas State Cultural Studies Symposium on Family, Kinship, and Cultural Studies; conferences at the University of Pittsburgh on Theater, Drama, and History and on Children, Literature, and Culture; and the University of Auckland Women’s Studies Program. I would also like to thank the students in my classes on adoption literature. In chapter 5 of this book I expand on my essay “Adoption in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda,” previously published by the University of Michigan Press in my anthology Imagining Adoption: Essays on Litera- viii Acknowledgments ture and Culture, and I use a few sentences from my introduction to that book in the ‹rst chapter of this one.