An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and its Contemporary Literature Catherine Margaret Lynch A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Sydney 2007 Contents Dedication 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 6 Chapter 1. A Subject Adoptee 28 adoption identity; adaptive bodies; closed-record adoption in Australia; changeling bodies, including an official birth certificate and an original birth certificate; the intellectual study of the adopted body in Australia. Chapter 2. The Metaphor of an Adopted Body 75 production/construction/birth of the adopted body; production/construction/birth of the adopted body in Australia; secrecy provisions and the denial of human rights; the vetoed changeling body; actualising the adopted body as a literary tool. Chapter 3. The Discourse of Detachment 127 the closed-record adopted body as analogy; the metaphor of the closed-record adoptee; the return of the repressed: the adopted body as neurotic symptom; adoptee writers; the discourse of detachment read upon the body of Australian Literature. Chapter 4. An Ado/aptive Reading of Peter Carey’s 171 True History of the Kelly Gang Chapter 5. An Ado/aptive Reading of Janette Turner Hospital’s 232 Due Preparations for the Plague Chapter 6. An Ado/aptive Reading of Luke Davies’ 292 Candy Conclusion 347 Appendix I Conditions 377 Appendix II Non-Identifying Information 378 2 Bibliography 381 Dedication This doctorate is a salute to that generation of adoptee subjects who never spoke themselves; because of the conspiracy between those closest to them and the wider Australian public and its laws, they lived their entire lives without ever knowing who they really were. They may have been ‘relinquished’ but the closed-record adoption system stole their identities in the process, withholding them for the duration of whole lifetimes. In particular it is a tribute to one of my high school teachers who served as my only adult model for a ‘grown up’ in the closed-record adoption system. I also recognise that ‘for many orphans, refugees, and others whose loss of familial past is accompanied by much more material loss than most adoptee’s experience, adoptee’s consciousness of difference may seem like a luxury.’1 3 1 Marianne Novy, ed. ‘Introduction’ in Imagining Adoption; Essays on Literature and Culture, University of Michigan Press Michigan 2004 11 4 Acknowledgements Thanks to my parents for their love and support, Professor Elizabeth Webby for her guidance and editing, and my partner. Thanks to my brother and sisters and all those in both my families, the University of Sydney, and Helena. 5 I say that society by sealing birth records, by cutting adoptees off from their biological past, by keeping secrets from them, has made them into a separate breed, unreal even to themselves. Betty Jean Lifton, PhD, Twice Born; Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter. 6 INTRODUCTION This thesis is about discovering the self by solving an identity puzzle. It is a work of creative non-fiction in the genre of the ‘new biography’: life-writing in the post-modern age.2 It is a literary document about life experiences that have historical significance and can contribute to a fuller understanding of Australia’s cultural heritage. It is what happens when life intrudes so much into the research and writing of critical analysis that it takes over the subject matter and objective scholarship becomes suffused in emotion and self-discovery. For a closed-records adoptee caught up in the reunion processes sparked by the 1990 changes to the Adoption Act, critical readings of Peter Carey and Janette Turner Hospital developed into the invention of the Adopted Body, the Subject Adoptee and a new way of seeing: ado/aptive reading and writing. Perhaps in the field of ado/aptive theory, the stolen generations, intercountry adoptees and the white closed-record adoptees of Australia can re-invent themselves, develop their identities and create a genre of academic theory unique to Australia. The Ethics of Writing the Subject Adoptee Even though all mothers may be said to be ‘adoptive’, as even a birthgiver must engage ‘in a social, adoptive act when she commits herself to sustain an infant in 7 the world’3, in relations of adoption, the constructed nature of such relationships is foregrounded. Whereas the significance of ‘work in kinship’ is increased4, the experience of being an adoptee might also be said to involve an experience of familial intimacy different to that of the biologically grounded individual, because of the absence of biological connection over time. One way of creating intimacy is through intellectual connection. ‘Life writing’, a broad category that includes ‘analytical and reflective writing that take “self” or “selves” as its focus’, while making intellectual enquiries into ‘the role of narrative and the formulation of identity,’5 also has the benefit of connecting intellectual subjects, and can allay the heightened sense of loneliness experienced in the development of the subject adoptee. Unfortunately, the very nature of closed-record adoptee status can preclude the pleasure of such intimacy as soon as the ethics of life writing are confronted. Considerations brought up in the recent debates over the ethics of biography, autobiography and life writing,6 such as the naming of real people in life stories largely fabricated, or the responsibilities regarding writing about the deceased who cannot defend their reputations, apply to writing the adopted body. However, in every turn of 2 This definition comes from the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America’s 1997 conference call for papers. 3 Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking Ballantine New York 1990 51 4 Judith Modell, Kinship with Strangers: Adoption and Interpretation of Kinship in American Culture University of California Press Berkeley 1994 229 5 Mary Besemeres and Maureen Perkins, “Editorial” in Life Writing; Exploring the Contemporary Meanings of Life Narrative Vol. 1 No. 1 Australian Public Intellectual Network Perth 2004 vii 6 See Paul John Eakin The Ethics of Life Writing Cornell University Press Ithaca and London 2004 8 legislation in the development of the closed-record adoption system, and the cultural ethos of secrecy that worked symbiotically with it, the rights of adoptees to know themselves were railroaded in the consideration of such ethics. To protect the privacy and reputations of all adult parties, the adopted infant was forbidden the development of the most basic understanding of self; to intentionally remove that ability is a denial of the human rights of the subject. Once adoptees have been returned that right, and given access to some degree of factual information about their biological origins, they must suffer a second substantial imposition in the telling of their stories. The very personal anxieties that surround the naming of things that are, for so many people involved in adoption, always unspoken, can prevent writing. Senses of loyalty and of duty, the fear of causing pain or offence to loved ones, the desire to protect others as well as the self, can prevent writing. For the adoptee was adopted because of the unspoken, the painful, the taboo: infertility, infant death and society’s abandonment of young pregnant women. These are things that many people do not wish to be reminded of and yet the alternative is that the subject adoptee will always be a silent subject. If the adoptee prioritises concern for others, she very probably will not write, for fear of being unable to predict the consequences. Regardless, the conviction that adoptees have been deprived of intimacy with other human beings in a way that the biologically grounded individual cannot 9 understand, drives my writing of my self, on behalf of other adoptees who cannot speak, not because our stories will be the same, or even remotely similar, but as a gesture of intimacy. Terry Eagleton reminds us of the benefits and risks of reaching in from the borders: To be inside and outside a position at the same time - to occupy a territory while loitering skeptically on the boundary - is often where the most intensely creative ideas stem from. It is a resourceful place to be, if not always a painless one.7 Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptee subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia. For the reader, if a non-adopted subject caught up in the closed-record adoption system, reading the Life Writing of a subject adoptee should be more rewarding than painful, for it is the intellectual subject, not the emotional body, which is reaching out to the reader. If there are emotional responses they must always be tempered by the acknowledgement of artistic license, the artist’s prerogative. The adoptee, especially, has lived her own kind of fiction, provided by others, and writing the body is her response, a fictional work, partly fact, mostly experience. 10 For all readers, if culture is a way of ‘marking the distinction between sameness and difference’8, reading life writing can delineate ‘which aspects of our lives are universal, which are shared, and which are unique to ourselves.’ 9 Reading the writing of adoptees is also a way to learn about yourself as the reader, regardless of your emotional reaction as a possible player in and around the adoption triangle. In my introduction I define adoption as it is used in this dissertation and detail the subject, as adoptee. Methodology in line with theories of embodiment,10 subjectivity and detachment are provoked in this interrogation of the adoptee subject, which must not be mistakenly termed ‘the adopted subject’, although ‘the adopted body’ is not misleading.