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Building a Nation, Building a Family Adoption in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Literature Although orphans and orphanhood are frequently discussed in studies of nineteenth-century American fiction, few critics have turned their attention specifically to the subject of adoption.1 This omission is striking both because adoption is a logical outcome of orphanhood and because adoption occurs frequently in American literature and culture. Indeed, adoption plots shape such now classic nineteenth-century novels as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Adoption is also a familiar event in American society, affecting, according to one source, more than 10 percent of the population.2 Nineteenth-century literature written expressly for children offers a unique lens through which to view the complexities of adoption. Written to instruct as well as entertain readers, this literature highlights issues of concern not only to parents and families but also to society as a whole. Americans took special interest in children, sometimes ascribing qualities to them that were perceived in the young republic. In the more than thirty children’s novels and stories, written between 1850 and 1887, that I examine in this essay, the experiences of adoption reveal a range of American attitudes toward self and family. These narratives even serve as a microcosm of the society and nation as a whole. Adoption as Trope An analysis of adoption extends our understanding of nineteenth-century American literary and cultural practices as well as of the premises underlying those practices. A focus on adoption as a distinct narrative form provides an opportunity to study the structure of stories, particularly the bildungsroman (novel of development), of which the adoption narrative is but a subset. For example, plots involving orphans yield a multitude of narrative possibilities, Carol J. Singley 51 since separation from home and family frees the character for adventures that are impossible for a child living securely at home. Adoption narratives may include various subplots and extended plots, as orphans struggle first to find a home and then to accept a new family’s behaviors and values and as adoptive families cope with the challenges of assimilating new, young members. In some stories, adoptions are meant to be temporary or may even fail because of conflicts —over a child’s fit with the new family or because of circumstances that impede successful bonding. In rare instances, the narratives do not involve family ties at all.3 However, in contrast to orphanhood, adoption constitutes narrative closure, or resolution. Adoption stories typically end with a child being taken in by a new family and with the acknowledgment—legal and otherwise —of the finality of this domestic arrangement. Adoption generally resonates positively—that is, it is preferable to institutionalized care, indenturing, or foster care, and it benefits both children and parents. Most adoptees eagerly look forward to joining their new families. For example, in a story about two homeless children, adoption is “good news” that “gladden[s] the hearts of the little orphans.”4 In another narrative, a boy who was once passed over for adoption gratefully acknowledges his new home, saying ,“the old life was . . . a hard bitter reality from which you saved me.”5 When asked if she would be glad to be adopted, the heroine of another tale responds, “Glad? . . . It’s just next to having God for my father.”6 Adoption also benefits adults by curing loneliness, providing an outlet for parental affection, and encouraging acts of Christian charity. In most stories, the care and expense of adopting a child are amply rewarded when the child helps with household chores, obeys the parents’ wishes, and matures into a virtuous, responsible adult. As one woman muses about her prospective adoptive daughter, “I should so love to dress her and teach her and have her always near me. . . . I could learn her to dust the things and feed the canaries—and soon she could run errands. I don’t believe she’d be so much care after all.”7 In another story, a woman responds to her physician’s reminder that “God gives us our homes make somebody happy in” by adopting an orphan otherwise destined to remain in an asylum.8 Adoption narratives share structural characteristics. They look forward and backward, simultaneously engaging issues of origins and new beginnings, and thus invite consideration of the past as well as the present and future. Adoption is by nature intercultural and interfamilial, even if it involves members of...

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