Misunderstandings and misconceptions continue to surround adoption. Especially critical is the idea of secrecy. Jennifer Kwon Dobbs had the opportunity to talk to Professor Marianne Novy about these issues. Marianne Novy was born in 1945 in Cleveland, Ohio, and was raised there by her adoptive parents, whom she joined when one month old. A pioneer in the field of adoption studies, Novy is the author of Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama and Imagining Adoption: Essays on Literature and Culture. She has been instrumental in developing adoption and literature as a critical area of literary study. She is also the co-founder of the Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture (ASAC).
Reading Narratives of Adoption: An Interview with Dr. Marianne Novy
By Jennifer Kwon Dobbs
APRIL/MAY 2010 CONDUCIVE
JKD: It’s wonderful to reconnect with you to discuss your work in adoption studies! In your first book, Imagining Adoption, you indicate how critics have looked through, not at adoption, because it’s such an effective plot device for dramatizing issues such as familial ambivalence, race, class, or colonialism. How did you begin reading for adoption?
MN: When I was in college and we read Oedipus, I commented in my notebook about what I saw as Oedipus’ specific experience as an adoptee, in particular his loneliness. I knew my later interest in Shakespeare’s plays about reunions between separated family members resulted partly from my own closed adoption. When I met my birthmother, my experience was not like that of most literary characters I knew of in a similar situation. I was struck by how different we were. Not only was there little physical resemblance, her life revolved around her political and religious conservatism—polar opposite views to mine–and her seven sons. Even though this meeting and our later relationship, which I maintained up to her death last year, helped me learn more about my prehistory, I didn’t feel that at this moment I discovered my true identity and my true family, as some literary portrayals suggest. So I became interested in writing a book that would discuss the difference between my reunion plot and various literary ones. On the other hand, there were also similarities between aspects of my experience as an adoptee and those of some literary characters: when I read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and found that Deronda, another adoptee, also felt he couldn’t discuss his questions about his origins, this resonated with me.
JKD: When I read Daniel Deronda, I was similarly struck by his struggles with secrecy. As you’re aware, this has been a larger community issue among both domestic and transnational adoptees. The open records movement in the U.S. has realized some success in states such as Oregon and Alabama. In transnational adoption, such secrecy is further compounded by geographic distance, a lack of governmental oversight, and differences in culture and language. Yet proponents of secrecy have argued that it’s for the protection of mothers and fathers to ensure their safety and privacy when surrendering their children for adoption. How do you view this seeming impasse between adoptee desire to know and birth parents’ desire to remain unknown?
MN: Actually, many birth parents want their adopted away children to know about them, and want to meet them. In the successful open records campaign in Oregon, for example, many birthmothers signed their names to support the bill, and subsequently the number of birthparents who have indicated a preference against contact has been very small. Many birth mothers have written memoirs emphasizing their wish for contact. I have read research suggesting that in Korea, women often choose international adoption over domestic adoption because they believe that children adopted in another country are more likely to seek them out. This sounds amazing, but part of the explanation is that they think children adopted domestically might not be told they are adopted.
Three other points: First, research shows that when birth records were closed in the US, state by state, the rationale was usually more for protecting the adoptive family, and also that in many states adoptees were legally able to get their original birth records for much of the twentieth century. Second, even though some birthparents do prefer secrecy and lack of contact, denial of original birth records to adult adoptees is an unfair denial of rights about their personal history, and giving adoptees this information does not mean they will harass their birth parents. Third, the complexity of the secrecy issue, and the relevant research not generally known, are reasons why the upcoming ASAC Adoption and Culture conference emphasizes the theme “Secret Histories, Public Policies.” Actually, there are many kinds of secret histories involved in adoptions. Some information is suppressed by closed records. Most birthparents have not discussed their experience. But additionally, while celebrity transnational adoptions make the newspapers, not that many people can imagine what it is really like to grow up as a transnational adoptee or a transracial adoptee. And adoptive parents also are likely to have many experiences that the general image of adoption doesn’t prepare them for.
JKD: Yes, it’s a myth that all birth parents want secrecy or that “many kinds of secret histories” necessarily are for the child’s protection or safety. In terms of genre, memoir has been an important way to talk back to narratives such as these and to build communities of scholarship as well as advocacy. Has this work – both in terms of talking back and community building – compelled you to transgress or trouble boundaries between public/private, secret/transparent, or even academic/activist?
MN: My book Reading Adoption is mostly literary criticism, but it also discusses social history and includes memoir-like discussions of my history as an adoptee, and frequently connects literary analysis with issues such as closed adoption records. Though I started writing about novels and plays, which I still believe can, among other things, help readers and spectators understand more about the great variety of experiences involved in adoption that might not be told openly because of privacy concerns, I have begun to teach and write about memoirs as well, and I write for newsletters of adoption-related groups as well as for academic venues. At our upcoming conference, several of the speakers have written memoirs about their experience as birthmothers–Lynn Lauber, Meredith Hall and Karen McElmurray–and Deann Borshay Liem will show her second film, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, dealing with her past as an adoptee from Korea in its historical context, while Lisa Marie Rollins will do her performance piece, Ungrateful Daughter. I think it is important that this conference includes films and creative writing, as well as talks by scholars and by activists, to try to build community and communication across often-vexed lines. Many of us as adoptees spent a long time thinking about adoption in isolation, and since adoptees are an invisible minority and have a great range of experiences it has been hard to build community among ourselves, let alone together with those involved with adoption from other perspectives. But it is only by sharing a variety of personal and scholarly perspectives that we will be able to understand how life can be better for adoptees, birthparents, and adoptive parents in the future.
JKD: The emergence of such networks “across often-vexed lines,” as you say, in the past 5 years has been astonishing and contributed to an increased visibility of adoptee voices. In your own work, what directions might we look forward to your academic and advocacy work taking?
MN: In my book in progress on outsiders, I will discuss Shakespeare’s bastards as well as Othello and Shylock. And I expect to put together a book of my writing on recent memoirs and novels about adoption. In Reading Adoption, I discussed a lot of novels and plays that simplified an adoptee’s experience and suggested that only one set of parents counted. There have been a lot more recent works that give a more complicated picture. I’m thinking of novels like Gish Jen’s The Love Wife, or Maile Meloy’s Liars and Saints or Ann Patchett’s Run. Or memoirs like Catherine McKinley’s The Book of Sarahs or A. M. Homes’ The Mistress’ Daughter. I’ll write about these in a book eventually, I hope. I find it impossible to predict my future advocacy work, though. I have done most of my advocacy so far by writing about literature in a way that I hope will educate people about adoption issues, or by arranging speakers and films for this purpose. I think there is a lot to be done to promote understanding of adoption outside those immediately involved, and even to help those immediately involved see more of the perspective of those involved in another way.
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Marianne Novy is collaborating with Sally Haslanger of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Philosophy, who is leading the ASAC’s third conference, which will take place at MIT from April 29 to May 2, 2010. Dr. Novy is also on the editorial board of ASAC’s biannual journal, Adoption & Culture, and directs the Pittsburgh Consortium for Adoption Studies. She is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, women’s studies, and adoption literature. Currently, she is writing a book on Shakespeare’s representation of outsiders.
Biography: Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Ph.D. is assistant professor of English at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Professor Dobbs is on the staff of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK). www.jkwondobbs.com
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