Welcome to Bookchat where you can talk about anything...books, plays, essays, and books on tape. You don't have to be reading a book to come in, sit down, and chat with us.
Tonight's edition is a pinch hit one, because Herself, the magnificent, the ineffable cfk, is undergoing her second knee surgery in order to complete her transformation to Bionic Bookflurrier. Once that's complete, she'll be reading five books
a day. She said that a friend may drop in tonight to let us know how the procedure went (and how many books she read during it).
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851 (Don't you love 'devious-cruising?)
In a lot of the books I've been reading recently (The Goldfinch, Saving Fish from Drowning, the Melendy Quartet, and the non-fiction The Boys In The Boat), the protagonist, while still a child, experiences the loss of one or both parents, and is profoundly affected by that experience. And once I started thinking about it, the number of literary orphans and half orphans is immense. It's almost easier to come up with books and genres in which you're
not likely to stumble over an orphan protagonist. Hard-boiled
noir detectives come to mind. Is Philip Marlowe an orphan? Sam Spade? No way. They both sprang to life fully formed from the unholy alliance of empty bourbon bottles and lipstick-stained cigarettes left at a crime scene.
There are classes and subclasses of orphans.
1. The Foundling
Who are his people?
--as one's mother used to say
or, as Madeleine Albright was reportedly wont to ask when one of her daughters brought a young man home,
Is he of Our Party?
When a character's family, antecedents, place in society aren't known, he or she could be anyone, and most importantly in English literature, of any class. Tom Jones' parentage is unknown until the end of the book, and the uncertainty leads to a lot of memorable comedy when it looks as though he's inadvertently slept with his own mother, the scamp. The revelation that he's actually the nephew of the benevolent, genteel Mr. Allworthy establishes his own ultimate goodness -- and his place.
In Emma, Harriet Smith, "the natural [illegitimate] daughter of somebody," attracts Emma's interest because of the mystery about her birth and therefore her place in society. Emma enjoys imagining that her parents, or one of them, may be well born gentility, even nobility, and takes charge of marrying Harriet off to a man whose social worth equals what Emma imagines Harriet's to be. She's wrong, of course, but Emma mostly is wrong. Harriet winds up in the Correct social class in the end (and True Love prevails too. Bonus!)
Heathcliff. Ooh, Heathcliff. He only has one name, that's how mysterious he is. In his case, things don't turn out so well. His true love decides she can't marry him because of his unknown origins, she marries another guy, Heathcliff is furious, and everyone goes to hell in a handbasket until the next generation, only half of which goes thither.
You know who all these people remind me of? Jay Gatsby. We, and he, know where he came from -- a poor German American farming family in North Dakota, of all places. But he was having none of it. He overcomes knowledge of his origins and becomes a self-made foundling.
For the ultimate in foundlings, there's Falk, the adult hero of Le Guin's City of Illusions. The bad guys wipe his brain, so he winds up on an alien planet with no language and no memory and has to grow up all over again.
2. Parents dead; protagonist doesn't remember them
This is the group I think of when I think of orphans in literature.
For Harry Potter and Tom Riddle, the identity of their parents is crucial to the story, and drives their development. J.K. Rowling has said that the fact that Harry was loved, and Tom Riddle was not, as infants, helped shape their characters (and the fact that Draco Malfoy is loved devotedly by his mother, even though she's a fathead, plays a part in his redemption).
On the other hand, we don't know much about the parents of Pip in Great Expectations, Anne Shirley, Becky Sharpe, Oliver Twist, or Jane Eyre. Their children may think about them, long for them, imagine them, but they are left to create themselves out of whatever materials and models they can find in the present.
By contrast there's Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden, whose parents seem to have disliked her. Luckily J.K. Rowling isn't writing her story; she's redeemed by the beauties of nature.
3. Hero orphaned just before or during the book
Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield, Theo Decker in The Goldfinch (also Pippa and Hobie in the same book), and Tyrion Lannister all know at least one of their parents, and experience the death of that one. Huck Finn's father tries to kill him before his own death. David's mother breaks his heart, and his first marriage is to a woman very much like her ("the first mistaken impulse of my undisciplined heart"). Theo's mother is his idol; his father assaults him and tries to steal from him, and he realizes he inherited qualities from both. Tyrion - well, he certainly inherited qualities from the father who despises him, but that doesn't work out so well for their relationship (I haven't read the books yet, though; just watched it on the TV).
4. Orphaned by one parent; the other is important to the story:
This category seems to turn up a lot in children's literature, and it's usually the mother who's dead. The Little Princess (father dies too, off stage, in the book, resulting in her being adopted by the father's friend, which is either more or less creepy than the creepy Shirley Temple movie where the father survives). In the Melendy Quartet, by Elizabeth Enright, the mother is dead, and fairly recently. The older children remember her, but don't give her much thought. In this story and others, maybe including To Kill A Mockingbird, the absent mother may be a device to give the child characters more autonomy, and to allow the character of the father to be developed more fully.
Adults can have their parent problems too in this category. The Brothers Karamozov have three different mothers among them, all dead, and their relationships with their (living) father are central to the novel. Stephen Dedalus and Leonard Bloom, in Ulysses, are both affected by their fathers, with Stephen's father living on after the recent death of his wife, and Leonard's dead by suicide. In Tender Is The Night, Nicole Diver's mother dies when she's a child and her father molests her; Rosemary Hoyt's is long gone and she's raised and managed by her mother.
5. Definitely not orphans
Then there are adult characters who are perhaps overburdened with parents, say in long running series/sagas. Miles Vorkosigan, in Bujold's Vorkosiverse, and Ramses Emerson, in Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series, both come to mind. They don't become adults until several stories into the series, they each have two very strong parents who don't die, and they are very strong characters themselves. It's easy to imagine them wishing their mothers and fathers weren't quite so present all the time, thinking enviously of Philip Marlowe, and perhaps even contemplating self-foundlification a la Jay Gatsby.
What orphans most appeal to you?
Diaries of the Week:
Write On! Finding The Ending that Fits
by SensibleShoes
Contemporary Fiction Views: Murikami's searching characters
Robert Fuller sez:
At long last, the saga of The Rowan Tree is coming to an end. Here is this week's chapter, in which Adam hands over the responsibilities of the Free World.
http://www.rowantreenovel.com/....
I hope those who have been reading will be spot the Arthurian legend in play!
Here is the free Kindle download:
http://amzn.com/....
The audiobook should still be available $1.99 to those who have downloaded the free Kindle ebook.
Most of my other books are available for free from Smashwords here:
https://www.smashwords.com/....
And don't forget plf Wednesday mornings early!