Adopted or Married
Families of Choice in Ann Petry’s The Narrows
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11272750 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cynthia Callahan (The Ohio State University at Mansfield), Cynthia A Callahan (The Ohio State University at Mansfield, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 103-123 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mly027 |
| OpenAlex | W2884976024 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 5 |
In The Narrows (1953), Ann Petry proposes that all people either adopt or marry one other and creates a fictional world that downplays the significance of the bionuclear family. This analogy between adoption and marriage captures the tensions around affective bonds of choice in kinship; they are encouraged when it comes to adoption yet violently regulated when an interracial couple transgresses the boundaries of race and marriage. Through the character of Link Williams, who is adopted multiple times, the novel highlights chosen kinship’s vulnerabilities and traces those vulnerabilities to mid-century hostility to interracial sexuality. Link’s murder in his lover’s sitting room by her family suggests that threats to individual family identities—the individual’s sense of self as a husband or a mother—are as much to blame for resistance to interracial sexuality as larger political motivations. Furthermore, by placing adoption at the center of a reading of this novel, this essay also calls attention to Petry’s unusually progressive approach to kinship, especially the way she anticipates the psychic effects and rewards of adoptive kinship from multiple family perspectives, particularly that of an African American male adoptee many decades before the adoptee point of view would become commonplace.
Blame · Genealogy · Hostility · Human sexuality · Kinship · Sociology · Anthropology · Child Welfare and Adoption · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Psychology · Short Stories in Global Literature · Social Psychology
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |