“Street-Arabs" och en “cat of another colour” : en undersökning av adoptionspraktiker i R.M.Ballantynes dusty diamonds och L.M.Montgomerys serie om Anne på grönkulla

Current moral values and ethical practices towards adoption are significantly different from the methods employed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before adoption became a legally mandated practice in Canada and England, households often took in young orphaned or abandoned children who were allowed to co-habit within a household in exchange for performing housework or farm labor. My thesis investigates evolving attitudes towards adoption in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth centuries through the lens of three fictional texts: R. M. Ballantyne’s Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished: A Tale of City-Arab Life (1884) and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Rainbow Valley (1919). Here, I demonstrate that in Dusty Diamonds, adoption is a transactional practice in which children are adopted for the economic value that they bring to their respective homes. In Anne of Green Gables, although Anne’s adoption is initially motivated by the practical need for cheap labor, she eventually becomes an integral part of the family. In Rainbow Valley, Mary Vance’s adoption is driven by philanthropic sensibilities and a sense of communal duty. The thesis is informed by the child emigration movement in the late nineteenth century in which over a hundred thousand street-children from England were exported to colonies such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia as cheap labor sources. The chapter on Dusty Diamonds presents the perspective of the country that exported the street children and the chapter on the Anne books represents contemporary Canadian attitudes and reception towards orphaned children with particular attention to the children’s social class. My research provides a critical framework to study the various sociocultural factors that initiated child adoption and to trace out evolving attitudes towards adoptive practices. The thesis follows a new historicist approach which is combined with relevant theoretical frameworks. In the first chapter, the new historicist approach is combined with theories on propaganda studies. Here, I support my work through the framework of Jacques Ellul’s work, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965). In the second chapter, the new historicist approach is supported by John Cawelti’s book on formula fiction, Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (1976). In the first chapter, through the framework of propaganda studies, I investigate the socio-cultural and socio-political climate that legitimized and normalized the mass emigration of pauper children. In the second chapter, through Cawelti’s theories on formula fiction, in which he suggests that formula fictions evolve over time and adapt the formulaic patterns to changing cultural contexts, I study the evolution of attitudes towards adoption in Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Rainbow Valley (1919). In my thesis, I aim to answer two main questions: How do the stories of the orphan children in the selected texts reflect contemporary attitudes towards adoption? How are class distinctions conveyed through attitudes towards adoption?

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