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Orphan Narratives: Navigating Loss, Finding Identity

Orphanhood endures as one of the universal themes of literature, finding expression in
stories ranging from ancient myths to contemporary graphic novels. The most familiar and
popular representations of orphan figures appear in classic Anglo-American texts by writers such
as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, but childrens literature has also frequently portrayed
orphaned characters.1 Avoiding certain limited representations of orphans, such as
characterizations of the orphan as a sentimental or picaresque figure, this paper will connect
various literary representations of orphans, primarily from American literature, in order to
explore how orphaned children navigate traumatic experiences related to the loss of family and
to investigate ways in which they seek to reestablish their identity.
This paper will argue that orphanhood involves the physical and emotional loss of family,
but also of cultural heritage, an idea put forth by Valrie Loichots book, Orphan Narratives:
The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse, from
which this paper also takes its title. Loichot explains that the terms orphan and narrative point
to two important modes of transmissionkinship ties and the passing on of stories (2). In order
to reconstitute missing links in family lines, she argues, Orphan characterscreate and master
their family narratives. The possession and control of family stories prove that they belong to
these families, that they have family (3). This paper will draw on Loichots conception of an
orphan narrative as a reconstruction of family identity as well as trauma theorys claims about
the healing potential of linguistic representations of trauma (Gilmore 6).2 For the purpose of this
1

Mills claims that novels about orphans may seem more the rule than the exception in childrens literature (227).
Mattix finds that 37% of Newbery Award winning books from 1922-2011 include an orphan protagonist, with the
percentage rising above 50% for the period between 1961-1980 (42, 131).
2
Gilmore writes that the relation between trauma and representation, and especially language, is at the center of
claims about trauma as a categoryTrauma mocks language and confronts it with its insufficiency. Yet at the same
time language about trauma is theorized as an impossibility, language is pressed forward as that which can heal the
survivor of trauma (6). See also Vickroy 1-11.

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paper, then, the phrase orphan narrative will refer to a narrative initiated by an orphan that
represents the trauma of orphanhood, but also serves as a means of creating new identity through
its transmission.
Literary representations of American slavery, a socioeconomic structure which
systematically separated children from their families, provide numerous examples of these
orphan narratives. In his memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass begins
his account of his life as a slave by describing his separation from his family. Never having
known the true identity of his white father, Douglass writes, My mother and I were separated
when I was but an infantbefore I knew her as my mother, noting the separation of mothers
from their children at an early age as a common practice of slaveholders in Maryland (Douglass
9-10). By foregrounding the separation from his family in his slave narrative, Douglass equates
slavery with orphanhood. Pazicky elaborates, Slavery not only made Douglass an orphan but
robbed him of a personal and historical identity. His traumatic experience and the strategies of
identity formation he developed in reaction to it are representative of the struggle undergone by
all slaves (180). Pazickys conclusion corroborates Douglass characterization of slavery as
institutionalized orphanhood, which methodically stripped any sense of family identity from
children born into slavery.
Harriet Jacobs similarly conflates slavery and orphanhood in her memoir, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs first becomes aware of her status as a slave when her mother dies:
When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk
around me, that I was a slave (Jacobs 10). Jacobs sequencing of the two events suggests that
the loss of familial identity initiated by the former event finds its culmination in the latter. The
lack of maternal presence in Jacobs life tragically echoes in the lives of her own children, who

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she fears will grow up almost without memory of a mother (Jacobs 109). Jacobs narrative
embodies the cyclical trauma inflicted by the separation of parents and children in slavery. Both
Douglass and Jacob wrote their memoirs to raise support for the cause of abolition. Their ability
to represent their suffering for persuasive purposes and their roles as advocates for slaves
demonstrates the self-actualizing nature of their narrative transmission.
No other author portrays the personal and collective trauma of the cross-generational
orphaning effects of slavery through fiction as prominently and extensively as Toni Morrison
(McKee 77). Jessica McKee identifies the orphan as one of Morrisons three most prevalent
motifs, appearing in multiple forms in each of her works of fiction (6). While any one of Toni
Morrisons works could be examined in conjunction with the purpose of this work, this paper
will focus on Beloved due to its prominence in Morrisons corpus and A Mercy due to its
purposeful presentation of an orphan narrative.3
Like Jacobs Incidents, Beloved portrays the trauma of the orphaning experience of
slavery as it is passed on from mother to daughter. Vickroy notes that Sethe was a wounded
child before she was a wounded mother (McKee 77, Vickroy 60). Sethes memory of being
deprived as a child (I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you) leads her to
make the desperate decision to kill her daughter, Beloved, instead of give her up again to slavery
(Beloved 236). Sethe projects the memory of her traumatic childhood experience onto her
children and uses it to justify her horrific act: if I hadnt killed her she would have died and that
is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it shell understand, because she
understands everything already. Ill tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter
(Beloved 236). Morrison portrays how Sethes sense of neglect reproduces its opposite, an

See Loichot chapter 5 for a discussion of the orphan narrative in Song of Solomon, Rubenstein for Sula, Mobley for
Tar Baby, and McKee chapter 2 for Paradise.

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overpowering mother-love, and vice versa for Beloved, who exhibits an aggressively needy
daughter-love as an expression of her sense of abandonment (Vickroy 59). Repetitions of phrases
such as I cannot lose her again and You are mine haunt the narrative without an identifiable
speaker and underscore the shared nature of this trauma (Beloved 250, 255-256). The fragmented
sections merging Sethes and Beloveds subjectivities into one represent the damage caused by
their mutual reliving of the traumatic experience: You are my face; I am you. Why did you
leave me who am you? / I will never leave you again / Dont ever leave me again (Beloved
256). Through passages such as these, Morrison depicts the annihilation of individual
subjectivity caused by the intersection of the destructive forces of slavery and orphanhood. In a
sense, then, Beloved portrays an orphan anti-narrative, an idea underscored by the concluding
refrain This is not a story to pass on (Beloved 324). Only Paul D suggests the possibility of
renewal for Sethe by put[ting] his story next to hers and replacing their yesterday with
tomorrow, revealing that, at times, an orphan narrative may require a kind of narrative
redemption from outside itself in order to transcend the past (Beloved 322).
Morrisons later novel, A Mercy, exemplifies the self-actualizing potential of an orphan
narrative to recreate the identity of an orphaned child. Florens carries the memory of her mother
giving her up to Jacob Vaark as a burden throughout the text: A minha me begs no. Her baby
boy is still at her breast. Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me (A Mercy 8).
Florens struggles to separate her identity from her sense of abandonment, which she describes
vividly as Mother hunger (A Mercy 73). Her fear of rejection leads her to conform to the
identity given to her by others, and she says to Malaik, You are my shaper and my world as
well (A Mercy 83). When Malaik rejects her later in the novel, she experiences another loss of
identity, compounding the loss of her mother: I feel the clutch inside. This expel can never

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happen again. Where my face should be is nothing (A Mercy 162). Again, Morrison
demonstrates the loss of identity as a result of the orphaning experience. Florens effort to tell
her story, however, allows her to reclaim agency and recreate her identity: I am become
wilderness but I am also Florens. In full (A Mercy 189). Vega Gonzlez concludes that through
her own voice, the writing of her own storyshe has finally processed her plight as an orphan
and will be empowered by her own narration and by her renewed self (131). Florens revival
through her story represents the power of the orphan narrative to provide a therapeutic means of
navigating loss and reshaping identity.
Amari, the protagonist from Sharon Drapers young adult novel, Copper Sun, engages in
a similar process of identity reconstruction when slavery severs her from the cultural narrative of
her homeland. Amaris village in West Africa, where the novel begins, privileges the
transmission of stories as a means for the preservation of culture: As chief storyteller, Amaris
father was highly respected. Komla knew every story, every proverb, every bit of tribal history
ever told or sung by her people (Draper 9). After she witnesses her parents death, Amari finds
herself cut off from them not only in body but also in spirit as a result of the silencing of her
familys stories. She finds herself alienated in the plantation culture of the American South: The
storytellers who had absorbed her history, the villagers who breathed the same air and dreamed
the same memoriesall of them were black. She did not have the words to express the depth of
her loss (Draper 117). Amaris inability to give form to her own story further emphasizes the
loss of her personal and family narrative. When Amari finds out that she carries the child of her
former master, she vows to reclaim the identity of her child from the dominant narrative of
slavery: I will tell this child of her ancestors and her grandparents and tell her the stories my
father told me. My child shall never be enslaved (Draper 301). Amaris orphan narrative asserts

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her own family stories and history as a response to the white cultural narrative imposed on her
and her child (Pazicky 199, Loichot 3). Her narrative relocates herself and her child within the
biological and cultural line of her family. By recreating their family ties through the telling of her
familys stories, she redeems them from orphanhood.
In the same way that Amari finds herself orphaned from her cultural heritage,
postcolonial literatures, especially of the Caribbean, often identify themselves as orphan texts,
unable to claim any single culture for their ancestry as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and
colonialism. The St. Lucian poet Derek Walcott expresses the fatherless identity of his work
most explicitly in his essay, The Muse of History: I say to the ancestor who sold me, and to
the ancestor who bought me, I have no fatheralthough I can understand you, black ghost, white
ghost, when you both whisper history (64). The speaker in his poem A Far Cry from Africa
expresses the same ambivalence toward the conflicting cultures which form his hybrid ancestry:
I who am poisoned with the blood of both, / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? (26-27).
Similarly, Shabine in The Schooner Flight finds himself caught in the same schizophrenic
struggle for cultural identity:
I had no nation now but the imagination.
After the white man, the niggers didnt want me
when the power swing to their side.
The first chain my hands and apologize, History;
the next said I wasnt black enough for their pride. (3.1-5)
Shabine finds himself orphaned by all identifiable ethnic or sociocultural groups in his
experience. The line, I had no nation now but the imagination, however, suggests the

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possibility of creating a new cultural heritage within the space of poetry and language, a central
drive of Walcotts work.
While texts dealing with the personal, cultural, and historical impacts of slavery provide
some of the most prevalent examples of orphan narratives, texts based in other historical contexts
also contain orphan narratives that deal with the same themes of trauma, identity, and narrative
representation as a means of recovery. Vickroy explains that many trauma narratives recreate
specific historical conflicts, but also present the missing perspectives of conventional histories of
these conflicts (168). In the same way, orphan narratives, some of which overlap with Vickroys
trauma narratives, often portray the personal and collective trauma induced by historical
conflicts. The following two examples of orphan narratives find their origin in the historical
contexts of the Dust Bowl and the Cold War.
In Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse sets her collection of poems written for young adults
amid the debilitating storms of the Dust Bowl era. Immediately following the accident that leads
to her mothers death, Billy Jo finds herself unable to provide any response, recalling I / stayed
in my room / silent on the iron bed, orphaned in her own home as a result of her fathers tacit
blame for her mothers death (Hesse 71). Various images recall her mothers absence, such as
when she sees the porch steps covered in dust and saw them with Mas eyes and thought about /
how shed been haunting me (Hesse 109). In the fragmented poem, The Dream, the image of
the piano represents her silent / mother, and The mirror / with my mothers eyes (Hesse 193194). The substitution of these images for linguistic representations of the loss of her mother
emphasize Billy Jos inability to express her loss coherently through language.

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After fleeing and returning home, however, Billy Jo begins forming a cohesive narrative
that allows her to overcome the loss of her mother and recover her identity within her family.
The poem Met marks this transition after Billy Jo returns home:
My father is waiting at the station
and I call him
Daddy
for the first time
since Ma died,
and we walk home,
together. (Hesse 205)
Billy Jos choice to call her father Daddy renews the father-daughter relationship which had
been lost and represents her progress in forgiving him and forgiving [her]self (Hesse 205).
Billy Jos recovered relationship with her father restores the family structure, the certainty of
home, that had been destroyed after her mothers death (Hesse 221). Within this stable family
environment, Billy Jo learns to incorporate the loss of her mother into their familys narrative in
a healthy way that leads to new life:
[Daddy said] hed bring the grass back
like Ma wanted,
.
And Im learning, watching Daddy, that you can stay
in one place
and still grow. (Hesse 226)

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Billy Jos constructed narrative of her familys renewal reflects the physical and emotional
restoration of her family, an outcome which most orphan narratives only accomplish in linguistic
and aesthetic terms.
In The Book of Daniel, E. L. Doctorow portrays the cultural trauma of the McCarthy
hysteria in the United States during the Cold War era as the reverberation of Daniels personal
trauma caused by his parents execution (Gibbs 77-78). Like Florens, Daniels sense of
abandonment leads him to perpetually identify himself as an orphan; when he meets his sister, he
thinks: it was their thing, this orphan state, and that it obliterated everything else and separated
them from everyone else, and always would, no matter what he did to deny it (Doctorow 9). As
a piece of metafiction, the entire text can be conceived of as Daniels attempt to overcome the
all-encompassing trauma he experiences as a result of the loss of his parents. Daniel frequently
draws attention to his own writing of the story as a matter of form and a means of catharsis, even
outlining Subjects to be taken up, which include the comments Or are you just looking for
another father and IS IT SO TERRIBLE NOT TO KEEP THE MATTER IN MY HEART, TO
GET THE MATTER OUT OF MY HEART, TO EMPTY MY HEART OF THIS MATTER?
(Doctorow 16, 17). The Book of Daniel makes great efforts to establish itself as an orphan
narrative in the making. The finality of his dissertations title, DANIELS BOOK: A Life
Submitted suggests that Daniel reaches a sense of wholeness upon the completion of his
orphan narrative (Doctorow 302). Furthermore, the biblical benediction that serves as the texts
conclusion, Go thy way, Daniel; for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end,
implies that the completion of his narrative opens the door to new life (Doctorow 303).
These diverse representations of orphan narratives demonstrate the universality of the
traumatic impact of the orphaning experience but also of the possibility of renewal through the

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transmission of story. While stories cannot physically bring back lost family members, these
orphan narratives present the possibility of memorializing lost loved ones through story and
affording them dignity that may have been denied them in their life or death. On a broader level,
the transmission of stories also preserves family histories and cultural heritage, especially in
cultures with strong legacies of oral traditions. Finally, these narratives allow their tellers to
mediate the trauma of their loss in a way that leads to recovery, demonstrating the power of
language to bring hope out of loss and find new life.

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Works Cited
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Clayton, DE: Prestwick
House, 2004.
Doctorow, E. L. The Book of Daniel. New York: Random House, 2007.
Draper, Sharon M. Copper Sun. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.
Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2014.
Gilmore, Leigh. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell
University Press, 2001.
Hesse, Karen. Out of the Dust. New York: Scholastic, 1997.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Norton Critical ed. Eds. Nellie Y. McKay
and Frances Smith Foster. New York: Norton, 2001.
Loichot, Valrie. Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant,
Morrison, and Saint-John Perse. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007.
Mattix, April A. "The Orphan among Us: An Examination of Orphans in Newbery Award
Winning Literature." Diss. University of Pittsburgh, 2012.
McKee, Jessica. Ghosts, Orphans, and Outlaws: History, Family, and the Law in Toni
Morrisons Fiction. Diss. University of South Florida, 2014.
Mills, Claudia. "Children in Search of a Family: Orphan Novels through the Century." Children's
Literature in Education 18.4 (1987): 227-39. Print.
Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. Narrative Dilemma: Jadine as Cultural Orphan in Tar Baby. Toni
Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and
Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. Print.

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Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.
---. A Mercy. New York: Vintage, 2008. Print.
Pazicky, Diana Loercher. Cultural Orphans in America. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1998. Print.
Rubenstein, Roberta. Pariahs and Community. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and
Present. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Anthony Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993.
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Vega Gonzlez, Susana. Orphanhood in Toni Morrisons A Mercy. Toni Morrisons A Mercy:
Critical Approaches. Eds. Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally. Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011.
Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2002.
Walcott, Derek. The Muse of History. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1998.
---. A Far Cry from Africa. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007.
---. The Schooner Flight. Selected Poems. Ed. Edward Baugh. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2007.