Volume 1, Issue 2

Jill R. Deans, Ph.D.
Department of English

106 Denison Hall

Manhattan, KS 66506-0701

Phone: 785-532-2406
Fax: 785-532-2192
Email: jrdeans@ksu.edu

MLA Adoption Poetry Reading

Three prize-winning poets will read poetry about adoption at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, December 28, in an event sponsored by the Alliance for the Study of Adoption, Identity and Kinship. Jan Beatty, Kristin Herbert and Robert Bensen will read from 5:15 to 6:30pm in Columbus Hall K and L, Hyatt Regency

Jan Beatty will read poems from her book Mad River (Pittsburgh, 1995), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and her new book Boneshaker. Jan received the State Street Chapbook Prize for Ravenous (State Street Press, 1995), and the 1990 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, Oklahoma. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Pittsburgh and is also the host and producer of Prosody, a public radio show which interviews local and national writers. Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, Witness, Quarterly West, Southern Poetry Review, The Journal, Poet Lore, Cimmaron Review, Seattle Review, Louisville Review, 5AM, and elsewhere.

Kristin Herbert received the 1994 Academy of American Poets Prize, and has been awarded grants for her poetry from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. From 1995-99 she was Marketing Director for Sarabande Books, in Louisville, Kentucky. She has just moved to the San Francisco Bay area to launch a freelance career. She is co-editing an anthology, Reverie & Revelry: Literature at Play, forthcoming from Sarabande this Fall. Her stories and poems have appeared in Calyx, Colorado Review, Cream City Review, 5AM, Kingfisher, Louisville Review, Antioch Review, Green Mountains Review, and Red Brick Review.

Robert Bensen is Director of Creative Writing and Chair of the English Department at Hartwick College. In 1996 he received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry. Among other awards, he has received the Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award from the Independent College Fund of New York and NYSSEG. He co-edited Iroquois Voices, Iroquois Visions (Bright Hill Press, 1999) and other anthologies, and is currently editing an anthology called Children of the Dragonfly: Literature on the Custody and Upbringing of American Indian Children (focused on the period from 1879 through the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978) for University of Arizona Press. His articles and poetry have appeared in such publications as Cimarron Review, Pivot, Forkroads, Phoebe, Tamaqua, Akwe:kon Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, Slow Dancer, Paris Review and Carribbean Writer. Besides his own poetry, Bensen will be reading the work of Native American poets who deal with adoption, such as Terry Trevor, a transcultural adoption educator who has published articles in Adoptive Families and Roots and Wings, and Alan Michelson, a painter who has done installations in many galleries, such as the American Indian Community House in New York, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

Conference Abstracts

Last Spring, several scholars spent time on the road sharing their ideas on adoption in literary and cultural contexts. Included here are abstracts from four papers that reflect the current breadth and depth of research in the field.

The first was presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Convention in April, 1999 in a panel organized by Marianne Novy titled "Adoption in Literature: National Difference, National Fantasy, Nationalism."

"The Banished Children of Ireland: Adoption as Cultural Containment" by James M. Smith

Dermot Bolger’s A Second Life enjoys a contemporary social context, and the resonance between past and present collapses any neat separation between fiction and fact. In February 1996, Ireland’s National Archive announced that it had uncovered some 2,000 case files, dating from 1948-1969, that document Irish-born infants who were processed by the Department of Foreign Affairs for adoption in the U.S. The archive’s discovery made public legislative and personal anomalies: namely, that adoption was not legally available in Ireland until 1954, and that adopted children were falsely recorded during this period. Bolger’s representation of the "search" process interrogates a society that made "ghosts" of these marginalized citizens — be they birth mothers still mourning children they were forced to give up for adoption, orphans sent back from America and deemed tainted and unsuitable for adoption ever after, women confined to Magdalen laundries or threatened with committal to asylums, or adult adoptees, like Bolger’s Sean Blake, who are looking for answers to basic questions like "And why did she not want me?" (47); "What name was I given?" (223); and "Where was I born?" (243). In doing so, Bolger’s novel begs significant questions regarding the manner in which a culture imagines itself. Blake, I argue, challenges a post-colonial nativist morality where he and his birth mother "did not count for enough...to have their progress recorded." Ultimately, I conclude that this novel threatens to deconstruct Ireland’s architecture of containment and unearth the histories of the "Banished Children of Ireland."

The next three abstracts reflect papers delivered on a panel called "Adoption and Narrative" at Narrative: An International Conference sponsored by Darthmouth College and the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, also in April 1999.

"Adoption, Heredity and Choice in George Eliot and Barbara Kingsolver" by Marianne Novy

This talk discusses four novels that weigh the relative importance of heredity and adoption in the identity of adoptees. The first novel by each author — Eliot’s Silas Marner and Kingsolver’s Bean Trees — stresses environmental influences, while the second — Daniel Deronda and Pigs in Heaven — stresses heredity. The shifting emphasis in both cases can be related to a greater interest in race and ethnicity in both the late 19th and late 20th centuries, and with both authors’ increasingly critical view of the dominant culture in their society.

Both of these novels by Eliot — like some of her other works — move toward a choice by the adoptee between an identity associated with heredity and an identity associated with adoption. Silas Marner challenges the opposition between adoption and nature and presents adoptive relationships as natural in themselves. The language of the novel, like the plot, progressively encourages the reader to see parenthood as not only biological, so that when Godfrey tries to claim Eppie as his daughter more sympathy is on the side of her choice, instead of Silas, who has raised her.

Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda, likewise gives the title character a choice of identities when his birth mother, late in the novel, reveals herself to him and tells him that his heredity is Jewish. Although she herself doesn’t offer him a continuing relationship, his affirmation of his newfound Jewish identity is so dramatic that at the novel’s end he leaves England to help begin a Jewish nation in Palestine.

In both Kingsolver novels, the adoptee, Turtle, is a child rather than an adult, and the issue is less her choice than whether the legal system will confirm her adoption by Taylor. In The Bean Trees, the adoption is seen as an unproblematic good which justifies bending rules. In Pigs in Heaven, Turtle’s Cherokee grandfather, who wants her back, her hereditary milk intolerance, and how she will deal with anti-Indian prejudice, must all be reckoned with, and suggest that her adoption is more problematic than in The Bean Trees. Still, Kingsolver does not remove Turtle from Taylor — she invents a solution in which the grandfather is given joint custody with Taylor, and to further emphasize the wish-fulfillment element, he and Taylor’s mother seem likely to get married at the end.

From the shift in Eliot’s and Kingsolver’s emphases, we can see that the construction of identity in novels dealing with adoption depends on many other cultural issues. The search for parents provides a plot that can emphasize the importance of heredity or can be rewritten to emphasize heredity’s limitations in defining identity. The quest to legalize an adoption also provides a plot that can either celebrate an adoptive relationship or — when representatives of the birth family are given a hearing — acknowledge its problematic side. However, all four of these novels are complex enough that — regardless of which side of the adoption/heredity opposition they emphasize — they acknowledge some continuing influence of the other as well.

"Adoption Narrative as Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction" by Carol J. Singley

Although much has been written about the nineteenth-century American novel of development and about the orphan, few critics have explored adoption narratives as a subset of the Bildungsroman. Plots involving orphans yield myriad narrative possibilities, since separation from family frees characters for adventures impossible for children living securely at home. In contrast to orphancy, adoption constitutes narrative closure or resolution: adoption stories typically end positively with a child’s being taken in emotionally and legally by a new family. Yet the classic definition of the Bildungsroman — an organic development through experience into maturity, with a gain of identity and ability to assume one’s role in the world — implies forward progression and conclusion not always found in adoption narratives. Adoption stories, involving a disruption of genealogy and a grafting of new lineage onto the child’s present one, simultaneously look forward and backward, include origins and new beginnings, and evoke the past as well as the future.

The structure of nineteenth-century adoption narratives is also inflected by class, gender, nationality, and race. For example, adoption almost implies upward moral, social, and economic mobility for the adoptee. Girls often embrace adoption and family as the solution for orphancy and homelessness, whereas boys flee the restrictiveness of domesticity in order to assert their individual freedom. Adoption stories also parallel national narratives about America’s rupture with its "birth parent" England and its ambivalence toward issues of independence and affiliation. Some stories respond to nineteenth-century Americans’ anxiety about the past and future by incorporating both old and new in their endings: they suggest an American fantasy in which ties to England are simultaneously renounced and retained. Finally, a study of adoption Bildungsroman must take into account racial relations in the United States. For example, slave narratives and other adoption fiction by African American authors focus, not on the formation of adoptive relationships, but on reunification with birth families.

Consideration of adoption and the Bildungsroman, then, must take into account differences of class, gender, nationality, and race, as well as differences of kinship. Adoption stories may be understood as general forms of the Bildungsroman with distinctive narrative features.

"Adoption Stories: Autobiographical Narratives and the Politics of Identity" by Barbara Melosh

This paper examines autobiographical narratives of birth mothers as revealing historical sources — as evidence of dramatically shifting discourse about adoption and, in particular, as expressions and vehicles of the adoption rights movement.

Birth mother memoirs, I argue, are written by women caught between two stories, neither of which fully captures their experiences. Most write explicitly against the post-World War II consensus surrounding adoption, protesting the assumptions and practices of confidential adoption. Refusing the silence imposed by the stigma of transgressive pregnancy in the 1950s and 1960s, and the therapeutic narrative that they would "forget" their children and move on, these women reclaim the name of mother. But, writing in the 1980s and 1990s, when little stigma is attached to pregnancy out of wedlock, these women expose themselves to the intense stigma now attached to relinquishment. Their memoirs are efforts to reclaim selves lost to silence and stigma.

The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute continues its support of adoption scholars travelling to major adoption conferences. They will reimburse up to $800 of travel expenses to presenters at the following venues:

* American Adoption Congress (April 13-16, 2000, Nashville, TN)

* North American Council on Adoptable Children (July 27-July 30, 2000, Baltimore, MD)

* Child Welfare League of America National Adoption Conference (December 2000, Tentatively scheduled for Northern California)

The application deadline is February 1, 2000 for conferences held in the first half of the year (March-July) and June 1, 2000 for Conferences held between August and February. For information about the travel grants, the application process, eligibility, responsibilities, and future deadlines contact: Debbie Martin, The Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, 120 Wall St., 20th Floor, New York, NY 10005; email: dlmartin@adoptioninstitute.org

Also visit the Institute’s website and explore their many resources: www.adoptioninstitute.org

• Marianne Novy (co-chair, University of Pittsburgh)
• Carol Singley (co-chair, Rutgers University, Camden)
• Martha Satz (Southern Methodist University)
• Deborah Cadman (Skidmore College)
• Paris De Soto (Rutgers University, New Brunswick)

For more information about the Alliance, contact :

Marianne Novy, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh , 4200 Fifth Avenue,Pittsburgh, PA 15260; email: MNOVY@vms.cis.pitt.edu

To join our growing membership, contact:

Deborah Cadman, 110 Liberty Road, Troy, NY 12180; email: dcadman@skidmore.edu

As our membership grows, we are requesting information about you, your research interests, past and future publications or presentations in an effort to facilitate networking among scholars. Below is our current membership list, annotated in part. If you have not yet submitted information about your work, or would like to update your information for our Spring newsletter, please send 60-100 words to: Jill R. Deans, Dept. of English, 106 Denison Hall, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506 or email: jrdeans@ksu.edu

To join our membership, send $5 to our Membership Chair, Deborah Cadman, 110 Liberty Road, Troy, NY 12180.

Margot Gayle Backus, Associate Professor of English, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY 14618 (email: backus@sjfc.edu)

Julie A. Bokser, English Department, University of Illinois at Chicago. Preferred address: 1304 W. Grace Street, Chicago, IL 60613 (email: jbokse1@uic.edu)

Bill Brow, English Department, McPherson College, McPherson, KS 67460 (email: browb@cs.mcpherson.edu)

Deborah Cadman, Research Associate, English Department, Skidmore College. Preferred address: 110 Liberty Road, Troy, NY 12180 (email: dcadman@skidmore.edu)

Cynthia Callahan, English Department, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716-2537 (email:

callahan@odin.english.udel.edu)

E. Wayne Carp, Professor, History Department, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA 98447

(email: carpw@plu.edu)

Beverly Clark, Professor, English Department, Wheaton College, Norton, MA 02766 (email:beverly_clark@wheatonma.edu)

Deidre Dawson, Associate Professor, French Department, Georgetown University, Washington D.C. 20057 (email: dawsond@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu)

Jill R. Deans, Assistant Professor, Department of English, 106 Denison Hall, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66506 (email: jrdeans@ksu.edu)

Martine Delvaux, Professor, Department of Literature and Literary Theory, University of Quebec,

Montreal, Quebec H3C 3P8, Canada (email: delvaux.martine@uqam.ca)

Paris De Soto, 188 Westhill Drive, Los Gatos, CA 95032 (email: parisdesoto@yahoo.com)

Elaine Frederiksen, Department of Rhetoric and Composition, University of Texas, El Paso, TX 79968

(email: efrederi@utep.edu)

Nancy Gish, Professor, Department of English, University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME 04104

(email: ngish@usm.maine.edu)

Pamela Kemner, Academic Director of the Women’s Center, Clermont College, 4200 Clermont College Drive, Batavia, OH 45104 (email: kemnerpj@email.uc.edu)

Garry Leonard, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Toronto, Scarborough College, Scarborough, Ontario M1C 1A4 (email: garryle1@net.com.ca)

Barbara Melosh, Professor, Department of English, George Mason University. Preferred address: 7 Deer Run Drive, Wilmington, DE 19807-2403 (email: bmelosh@osf1.gmu.edu)

Pamela Monaco, English Department, Thomas Nelson Community College, Hampton, VA 23670

(email: monacop@tncc.cc.va.us)

Claudia Nelson, Associate Professor, English Department, Flowers Hall, Southwest Texas State

University, San Marcos, TX 78666 (email: cn02@swt.edu)

Kathleen Nelson, 23438 Oakley Court, Ramona, CA 92065-4246 (email: kathnel@aol.com)

Marianne Novy, Professor, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, 4200 Fifth Avenue,

Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (email: MNOVY@vms.cis.pitt.edu)

Current Co-Chair of the Alliance.

Tess O’Toole, Assistant Professor, English Department, McGill University, 853 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T6, Canada (email: totoole@leacock.lan.mcgill.ca)

Anabelle Rea, Professor, French Department, Occidental College, 1600 Campus Road, Los Angeles, CA 90041 (email: rea@oxy.edu)

Martha Satz, Assistant Professor, English Department, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275 (email: msatz@post.cis.smu.edu)

Laura Schattschneider, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2510 (email: schattla@socrates.berkeley.edu)

Carol Singley, Associate Professor, Department of English, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ 08102 (email: singley@crab.rutgers.edu)

James Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Pennsylvania State University, 116 Burrowes Bldg., University Park, PA 16802 (email: jms49@psu.edu)

Hertha Wong, Associate Professor, Department of English, University of California, 322 Wheeler Hall #1030, Berkeley, CA 94720-1030 (email: herta@uclink3.berkeley.edu)

Phyllis Wentworth, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire.

17 Coleman Road, Arlington, MA 02476 (email: paw@cisunix.unh.edu)

Family Matters by E. Wayne Carp

Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Harvard UP, 1998), draws on a vast range of primary sources including for the first time confidential adoption case records of a twentieth-century adoption agency — the Children’s Home Society of Washington — to trace the history of secrecy and disclosure in America. The book’s central insight, which is bound to surprise most adoption triad members, is that disclosure and openness have been the norm in adoption policy and practice; it is secrecy — resulting from the convergence of several unusual cultural, demographic, and social trends — that is the aberration. In developing this startling and unique idea, Family Matters provides a historical overview of adoption in America, traces the origins of adoption records, and how they were actually used by adoption triad members. It explains why disclosure in adoption gave way to secrecy, traces the rise of the Adoption Rights Movement, and delineates the response of the social work profession, the courts, and state legislatures to the adoption activists’ demands that the records be unsealed. It concludes with a discussion of the origins and growth of open adoption.

Four themes stand out. First, biological kinship has played a complex and ironic role in the history of adoption. Americans’ preference for blood ties over socially constructed families has waxed and waned throughout our history, stigmatizing but also romanticizing adoptive kinship. One irony of Americans’ bias for consanguine kinship was that it was responsible for professional adoption workers collecting detailed adoption records so that the adopted child would have knowledge of that all-important aspect of personhood: his or her biological heritage. Second, the stigma of adoption has been used at one time or another by adoption workers, social scientists, psychoanalysts, and adoption activists to promote both openness and secrecy in adoption. Third, the book reveals that social science theory, whether in the form of the eugenics movement or psychoanalysis has — by medicalizing and stigmatizing adoptive status — augmented the cultural bias against adoption with a "scientific" one. Fourth by exposing the unscientific nature of psychoanalytic concepts like "genealogical bewilderment" and medically bogus terms like "adopted child syndrome," Carp hopes to persuade adoption activists to jettison aspects of their ideology that stigmatize all triad members as psychologically damaged. The Adoption Rights Movement can justify the search for one’s family of origin, he argues, by recourse to several psychologically sound reasons including simple curiosity, medical necessity, or an existential need to know one’s identity, thus avoiding the mantle of victimhood and pathology. — E.W.C.

Carp’s latest book is an anthology on the history of adoption forthcoming from University of Michigan Press and containing the following:

Introduction: Adoption in Historical Context

1. "A Good Home: Indenture and Adoption in Nineteenth-Century Orphanages" by Susan L. Porter

2. "Building a Nation, Building a Family: Adoption in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature" by Carol J. Singley

3. "Inventing the Artificial Family: The Legalization of Adoption in England" by George Behlmer

4. "Rescuing the Innocent: The Construction of Adoption and the Delineator Magazine, 1907-1911" by Julie Berebitsky

5. "A Nation’s Need for Adoption and Competing Realities: The Washington Children’s Home Society, 1895-1912" by Patricia Hart

6. "An Historical Comparison of Catholic Adoption and Jewish Adoption Practices in Chicago, 1836-1938" by Paula F.

Pfeffer

7. "Adoption Agencies and the Search for the Ideal Family, 1918-1965" by Brian Paul Gill

8. "When in Doubt, Count: World War II as a Watershed in the History of Adoption" by E. Wayne Carp and Anna

Leon-Guerrero

9. "Childless Americans: ‘Who Are "Worthy" to Become Parents?’" by Elaine Tyler May

10. "Adoption Autobiography and the Construction of Identity" by Barbara Melosh

Marianne Novy has also edited an anthology, Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture, forthcoming from University of Michigan Press and containing the following:

Introduction by Marianne Novy

1. "Adoption and the ‘Improvement of the Estate’ in Trollope and Craik" by Tess O’Toole

2. "Adoption in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda" by Marianne Novy

3. "Orphans, Outcasts, and Outlaws: The Historical Imagination and Anne of Green Gables" by Beverly Crockett

4. "Redefining ‘Real’ Motherhood: Popular Representations of Adoptive Motherhood in the U.S., 1880-1945" by Julie Berebitsky

5. "From Charlotte to the Outposts of Empire: Troping Adoption" by Beverly Lyon Clark

6. "The Immaculate Deception: Adoption in Albee’s Plays" by Garry Leonard

7. "’I’m your mother; she was a carrying case’: Adoption, Class, and Sexual Orientation in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" by Margot Gayle Backus

8. "A Junction of Amends: Sandra McPherson’s Poetics of Adoption" by Jan VanStavern

9. "Adoption, Identity, and Voice: Jackie Kay’s Inventions of Self" by Nancy Gish

10. "Genealogy Revised in Secrets and Lies" by Paris De Soto

11. Natural Bonds, Legal Boundaries: Modes of Persuasion in Adoption Rhetoric" by Judith Modell

12. "’File it under "L" for Love Child’: Adoptive Policies and Practices in the Erdrich Tetralogy" by Jill R. Deans

13. "Adoption as National Fantasy in Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners" by Kristina Fagan

14. "Should Whites Adopt African American Children? One Family‘s Phenomenological Response" by Martha Satz

15. "Incorporating the Trans-national Adoptee" by Claudia Castaneda

Notices of events, publications, book/film reviews, and short articles are encouraged. Please send your contributions to: Jill R. Deans, Dept. of English, 106 Denison Hall, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS 66502; phone: 785-532-2406; FAX: 785-532-2192; email: jrdeans@ksu.edu.

Thanks to Martha Satz at Southern Methodist University in Texas, the Alliance is able to stay connected through a listerv. To subscribe, send an email message to: majordomo@post.cis.smu.edu. In the body of the message write: subscribe adopt_lit (do not write anything in the subject line). You should receive confirmation if the subscription is successful. If you have questions, contact Martha at: msatz@post.cis.smu.edu