Abandonment
The origins of the word "abandon," according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
demonstrate that it has not always had the wholly negative connotations it does today. In
the Middle French, for instance, metrè à bandon could have meant both "to proscribe"
and "to release from proscription." Thus, the term might apply equally to the slave who
is proscribed to his master and to the master who has given up the slave. Both are
engaging in "abandon," or according to one definition, the act of relinquishing a person or
an object to another. One may then abandon one's child, one's property, or one's self.
The common thread in these definitions in that there is an active choice being made and
that the nature of this choice is absolute. Abandonment is never accidental, and it is
never partial. It is deliberate and it is complete. It is, perhaps, these qualities that
account for the reoccurrence of the theme in folklore and mythology, in social science,
and in art and literature.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden. In being left
to their own devices, being forced to provide for themselves, they are, in their eyes at
least, being abandoned by God. Abraham casts off his wife's maidservant Hagar and
their son Ishmael, abandoning them to the desert and denying them Ishmael's birthright.
Baby Moses, cast among the bulrushes for his own protection, is abandoned by his
biological family into the care of another. Folklore and fairytales abound with stories of
abandonment: Snow White is left alone in the forest; Romulus and Remus, the
mythological founders of Rome, are placed in their cradle in the Tiber River; and of
course, Hansel and Gretel are forced from their home and into the lair of a witch. In
many foundational stories of abandonment, the abandoned child returns to his or her true
family in triumph, either as a leader or having earned great success in one way or another.
This triumph seems to mitigate the trauma of the abandonment, implying that the
abandonment resulted in some good and allowing for a happy, or at least a contented,
ending. In the case of Moses, for instance, it is his abandonment that saves his life. As
the Pharaoh has ordered that all male babies born to Hebrews be drowned in the Nile,
Moses's mother hid him in a basket in the river where he would be found (and ultimately
adopted) by the Pharoah's daughter. In the story of Hansel and Gretel, the children
return, having killed the witch, to find that their stepmother has died and they may live
happily with their father.
In other stories, however, the return from abandonment proves tragic. For
instance, in Sophocles' OEDIPUS REX, perhaps one of the most famous stories of
abandonment, Oedipus is abandoned as an infant because it has been prophesized that he
will grow up to kill his father and marry his mother, the King and Queen of Thebes. A
servant is ordered to take the baby away and kill him, but the servant cannot carry out the
order and leaves the baby at the gates of royal family of a distant city, Corinth. As a
young man, however, Oedipus hears the prophecy as well, thinks that it is in reference to
his adoptive Corinthian parents, and flees. Ultimately, the prophecy comes true as he
kills his real father, Laius, in self-defense and marries Laius' widow Jocasta, his real
mother. Jocasta then hangs herself and Oedipus blinds himself with the pins from her
dress. Obviously, in this case, grave tragedy resulted from the abandonment of the child,
implying that this fate might have been better avoided by keeping the child close.
Perhaps abandonment appears so frequently in art and literature because, as some
philosophers and psychologists believe, the fear of abandonment begins at birth.
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist thought of as the father of modern
psychological thought, believed that when we are born, and thus physically separated
from our mothers, this trauma becomes a central force in our lives. We must, according
to Freud, spend a great deal of our lives coming to terms with this separation, which we
internalize as an abandonment (Freud pg. #).
Later psychologists would delve deeper than Freud into the fear of and effect of
abandonment upon our young psyches. In his highly influential three volume work
Attachment, Separation, and Loss (1973), British psychologist John Bowlby discusses
his decades long studies of children and their attachments to their caregivers, specifically
their mothers. Bowlby notes that infants seek to find their mother when she leaves the
room as soon as they are able to crawl. Additionally, the child will follow any familiar
adult in lieu of the mother if she is unavailable (200-202). Infants demonstrate distress
upon impending departure of the mother as soon as they are old enough to sense the signs
that she is leaving, around six to nine months of age (204). For Bowlby, the infant is
exhibiting the innate fear of abandonment, which produces anxiety. Psychologist Yi Fu
Tuan calls fear of abandonment a "central childhood fear" and points to the frequent use
of the motif in fairytales as a method of playing on that fear and keeping control of
children (Salerno 98). If this abandonment does happen and it is prolonged, the anxiety
becomes a part of the infant's, later the child's, later the adult's personality. He claims
that adult anxiety disorders can be attributed to specific child-rearing practices; in
particular, he says, frequent and regular separations, or even frequent and regular threats
of abandonment bear huge consequences later in life (Salerno 97).
Modern philosophers have also considered the fear of abandonment as a central
component to modern consciousness. Soren Kierkegaard, 19th Century Danish
philosopher, defines modern angst or anxiety as a feeling of looming danger where the
source of the threat is unknown. G. W. F. Hegel, a German philosopher of the same era,
claimed that the true mark of becoming human is not to desire, but to want to be the
object of someone else's desire. Combining these theories then, and remembering as well
Bowlby's infants, can lead to the theory that humans innately fear being abandoned and
that as we grow older, we are consumed by a feeling that we will lose our most prized
object: another human being. In other words, we live as adults with a constant fear of
being abandoned, and if we were indeed abandoned as children, either actually or
metaphorically, this fear can be the source of debilitating anxiety.
20th-century philosophers have taken these ideas and demonstrated how the
detached, impersonal modern world exacerbates the natural fear of abandonment. The
Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century shift from rural, manual labor to automated,
technologically advanced work in the Western world, took control of the future out of the
hands of the family and placed it in the hands of a stranger. Philosophers such as
Theodor Adorno have theorized that this led to the breakdown of the family, as the
father-figure, who perhaps felt abandoned himself, abandoned his own family in search
of strong, authoritarian figures outside the family. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre,
the primary figure in the school of philosophical thought known as Existentialism,
rejected the very idea that the world is ordered and that human beings can make sense of
it. Thus, he argued, we realize that we are alone, abandoned in the world.
In literature, we see this crises of abandonment in the works of many different
writers. In Mary Shelley's FRAKENSTEIN, for instance, Victor Frankenstein, the doctor
who creates the famous monster, wants only to intellectualize, to think, never to emote or
to feel. He leaves his loved ones lonely and alone in search of individual, intellectual
glory. The monster he creates is in turned abandoned by Victor and spends the rest of the
novel in search of a connection, resulting in tragic consequences.
In Louise Erdrich's LOVE MEDICINE, abandonment is explored on an individual
level, as there are several characters who are left alone and helpless, but also on a
community level, as the Indian tribes of North American were abandoned by the U.S.
Government that had promised to protect and provide for them. This novel demonstrates
well why the theme of abandonment is so common in literature. On a personal level, all
human beings feel a fear of abandonment stemming from our childhood separations from
our parents. Additionally, however, in the modern world, whole communities might live
in a general state of abandonment based on the impersonal, disconnected nature of
modernity.
See Also: CEREMONY, THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS, HUMBOLT'S GIFT, I KNOW
WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, THE JOY LUCK CLUB, MEMBER OF THE
WEDDING, WHITE TEETH
Bibliography:
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. New York: Basic Books, 1973.
Salerno, Roger A. Landscapes of Abandonment: Capitalism, Modernity, and
Estrangement. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple