Adopting America: Childhood, Kinship, and National Identity in Literature by Carol J. Singley (review)

Carol Singley is a leader in interdisciplinary childhood studies, and her book represents a major contribution to the field. A fellow at the Center for Childhood Studies and a professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden, she coedited (with Carol Levander) The American Child: A Cultural Studies Reader (2003), a collection that investigates the central role of the child in the construction of American culture as a site of growth and possibility. She cofounded (with Marianne Novy) the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture, a scholarly organization that sponsors biennial conferences, and she is a founding editorial board member of its affiliated journal, Adoption & Culture. Adopting America represents over a decade’s worth of research on American practices of and attitudes towards adoption and kinship, research that contextualizes a comprehensive rereading of literary representations of the family from the Puritans to Edith Wharton (Singley is also a major Wharton scholar).

While studies of nineteenth-century popular fiction have emphasized its themes of powerful maternal domesticity, Singley explains why adoption in specific is such a prevalent theme. Skillfully interweaving her historical narrative with subtle and cogent textual analyses, Singley argues that adoption—with its tug and pull between nature and nurture, between belief in genealogical and in environmental influences—has served as a mirror, first, for American anxieties about English origins (is the emerging nation an exiled orphan or a liberated runaway?), and, later, for pessimism about nurture’s power to overcome racial determinants of character and opportunity. Representations of adoption, she claims, are allegories of national self-definition.

The argument that adoption reflects the emergent nation’s ambivalence about origins appears most explicitly in powerful and deeply researched early chapters on the Puritans and on Ben Franklin and Ann Sargent Gage, while the core of the book comprises three chapters on white, middle-class novels published in the 1850s—Laura Huntley; The Scarlet Letter; The Wide, Wide World; and The Lamplighter—that debate the claims of birth and nurture by moving child characters between adoptive and birth families. I particularly like the idea that Hawthorne’s novel is talking back to overblown, sentimental claims for the redemptive power of adoption: while novels like Warner’s and Cummins’s see democratic possibility in the figure of the adoptee, Hawthorne’s skepticism gives more weight to blood ties and Old World inheritance. Although these chapters reference similar works, I wish there had been a more extended discussion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the most influential work of domestic fiction of its day and replete with representations of adoption and alternative family forms. These chapters richly explore the shift, across the nineteenth century, from the legal doctrine that children were paternal property to the view that children require maternal care, a shift emblematized by the passage of the first ever adoption law in Massachusetts in 1851. These chapters also explicate the difference gender makes: nineteenth-century adoption stories are mostly about girls, who are more susceptible to parental influence; boys tend to be mentored or to resist adoption altogether, insisting on their freedom.

Later chapters on Our Nig, on Louisa May Alcott’s many adoption plots, and on Wharton’s 1917 Summer, show American fiction moving away from its preoccupation with British origins and toward concerns about race’s role in making and unmaking the nation. The mixed race and underclass status of Wilson’s Frado exclude her from the comforts of home (adoptive or birth) that sentimental midcentury novels extol, while Alcott and Wharton—Wharton in dialogue with eugenics, Singley argues—allow bad “stock” to constrict the potential freedom of adopted characters. Early optimism about adoption’s beneficial provision of a fresh start—for individuals, for the nation—gives way to pessimism about adoption’s power to improve a faulty genetic heritage. Singley’s book in this regard makes an excellent complement to Julie Berebitsky’s Like Our Very Own: Adoption and the...