“Desperately Seeking Susan”: The Trauma of Separation and Loss in Roxana
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Adoptees are uprooted from their birth family and transplanted into another; severed from the tie to their birthmothers and also from their biological roots, the adopted experience separation that causes trauma. Similarly, along with adoptees, birthmothers--who have been silent figures and received little acknowledgment of their grief--are a neglected party in the adoption triad and they suffer severe, lifelong damage after relinquishment. Lamentably, shrouded and peripheralized by other issues and discourses, the grief of Susan and Roxana, an adoptee and a birthmother, is disenfranchised and/or sporadically mentioned but not fully acknowledged, accepted, nor given a chance to be mourned for in the text and/or within the literature of Roxana. In this respect, this paper rereads Roxana through the lens of trauma theory as well as adoption theory/discourse: Nancy Newton Verrier's account of primal wound, Birthmother Syndrome/trauma, adoption narratives and therapeutic views on trauma are employed as effective frameworks for the analysis of Susan and Roxana's separation, loss, and the aftermath, including Susan's desire to search for her origins/birthmother, Roxana's rejection, and Susan's death/disappearance. By applying theories concerning the trauma of separation and loss, this study draws attention to the grief of birthmothers and adoptees engendered by the surrendering of children. In this vein, the article invites a new reading of Roxana while tracking myths and truths surrounding relinquishment, as well as demystifying the novel's “unfinished-ness,” and reclaiming the perspectives and the silenced voices of the birthmother and the abandoned daughter.
Abstract
Adoptees are uprooted from their birth family and transplanted into another; severed from the tie to their birthmothers and also from their biological roots, the adopted experience separation that causes trauma. Similarly, along with adoptees, birthmothers--who have been silent figures and received little acknowledgment of their grief--are a neglected party in the adoption triad and they suffer severe, lifelong damage after relinquishment. Lamentably, shrouded and peripheralized by other issues and discourses, the grief of Susan and Roxana, an adoptee and a birthmother, is disenfranchised and/or sporadically mentioned but not fully acknowledged, accepted, nor given a chance to be mourned for in the text and/or within the literature of Roxana. In this respect, this paper rereads Roxana through the lens of trauma theory as well as adoption theory/discourse: Nancy Newton Verrier's account of primal wound, Birthmother Syndrome/trauma, adoption narratives and therapeutic views on trauma are employed as effective frameworks for the analysis of Susan and Roxana's separation, loss, and the aftermath, including Susan's desire to search for her origins/birthmother, Roxana's rejection, and Susan's death/disappearance. By applying theories concerning the trauma of separation and loss, this study draws attention to the grief of birthmothers and adoptees engendered by the surrendering of children. In this vein, the article invites a new reading of Roxana while tracking myths and truths surrounding relinquishment, as well as demystifying the novel's “unfinished-ness,” and reclaiming the perspectives and the silenced voices of the birthmother and the abandoned daughter.
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