“Like Topsy, We Grow”:

The Legacy of the Sentimental Domestic Novel in Adoption Memoirs from Fifties America

Abstract

This article analyses the cultural work of adoption memoirs by stakeholders in transnational and transracial adoption in fifties America, Helen Doss and Bertha Holt. Their memoirs were instrumental in making transracial adoption acceptable in the eyes of a racially segregated society whose adoption policy had been premised upon the standard of maximum resemblance between adopters and adoptees. This rhetorical feat can be explained through their effective recycling of the tropes and commonplaces of the nineteenth-century sentimental, domestic novel. Grafting their memoirs upon the time-honoured script of a genre that is deeply ingrained in American culture, Holt and Doss also inherited the genre’s maternalist bias. Analysing the nineteenth-century generic conventions and ideological assumptions that govern the life writing of these self-styled pioneers of transnational and transracial adoption serves to paint a rich picture of the ethical complexities involved in twentieth-century adoption practices.