A helping hand in coping with the thorny issues raised by adoption

Birthlink will be helping people find one other again soon, says Gary Clapton

So many story lines in fiction (books, film, television) have adoption as a central thread. Or maybe it just seems that way to those of us who have personal experience of adoption in real life. In fiction, the news that someone is adopted or has given up their child for adoption is either a plot twist or the big “reveal” at the end. Surprise and shock are staple ingredients, as genealogies are revealed, relatives discovered, and those separated by adoption are reunited.

The antecedents of these stories are not hard to trace. Moses was adopted and fairy tales are full of stories of orphans, foundlings, secret princesses, and wicked step-parents. As we move through the centuries, tales abandonment and lost and found have never failed to grip readers’ imagination. Dickens’ Oliver Twist, with his secret heritage, and his Pip of Great Expectations are orphans, as are Jane Eyre and Daniel Deronda. In her book on adoption in fiction (Reading Adoption, 2005), Marianne Novy observes that at the base of it, adoption is about identity.

Age-old questions are played out in these stories. Who are we? What forms our characters and our path in life? Nature or nurture? In Great Expectations, Estella refers to “my nature; the nature formed within me” in analysing the influence on her of her adoptive mother, Miss Havisham. Other social questions are grappled with, illegitimacy is conceived as a moral handicap, a disgrace (“born of bad blood”) under which the protagonists have to constantly battle to assert their place in the world. Thankfully social opprobrium is much less of an issue now, though inheritance can remain a thorny one, after all adoption severs all legal ties between a child and his or her biological parents. Another powerful theme that remains with us today is that of the rootlessness that can be felt by adopted people. After the death of Jane Eyre’s parents and the uncle who adopted her, Jane becomes an outsider in her aunt’s family, someone whose lack of “blood” connection with the family leaves her unprotected and rootless. She feels an “uncongenial alien”.

The detective-like search for kinship, a longing for home and family and belonging, drives these stories. Adopted or fostered people are usually the protagonists with birth parents having a secondary part. Birth parents have no less powerful narratives of loss and tragedy, of renunciation and reunion. In Bleak House, Esther, our heroine, meets her birth mother Lady Dedlock for the first time, her face is for some reason “like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances”. Lady Dedlock realises that Esther is the daughter she thought was dead, and they have one brief intense meeting in which she asks forgiveness and announces that she will keep their relationship secret and they will nevof