Family Romance By Freudian Analysis

The next significant quest of Joe is in relation to his foster care. Foster care was a much more approved form of alternative “home” for orphans and impoverished children from the mid-nineteenth century. Compared to the “inhuman” institutionalizing of children in orphan asylums, a foster care provided children with more “homelike” surroundings with foster parents. Between 1854 and 1929, orphan trains delivered more than 200,000 children from the East to the Midwest or to the West. Alienated from their immigrant, non-Protestant locale and from poverty-stricken city life, the children were believed to be able to lead a “healthy” life in the Protestant rural environments. The White House Conference on Dependent Children in 1909 played a decisive …show more content…
When they are disappointed with their parents as they mature, they construct family romances - fantasizing about their “real” parents who are exceptional than their parents before they learn about sexuality or fantasizing about their mother’s affair and his “real” father after they gain some sexual knowledge. However, Freudian family romance turns nightmarish in an adopted child’s case like Joe’s. The child’s fantasy goes beyond the “family” and links up all potential social factors he can make up. Instead of a cheerful reverie about his “nobler” origin, a child keeps asking himself why his real parents abandoned him and goes through all circumstances of his “bad” origin. Poverty? Probably. Illegitimacy? Perhaps. Out of an interracial relationship? Could be. Joe begins his “confession” of his blackness to Bobbie by saying, “You noticed my skin, my hair” (196). In contrast to other passing narratives, Light in August does not have a moment of self-scrutiny in which the main character scrutinizes his own body to differentiate whiteness and blackness in his appearance. In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography o f an Ex-coloured Man, a “black” child is looking for the vestiges of his “blackness” through his image in the mirror; his ivory skin color, the shape of his mouth, black lashes, and his black wavy hair have become the object of racial scrutiny. Reevaluating all of them as signs of his “race,” the boy learns to transform what used to be the mark of his beauty into what makes him a “nigger.” Although the scenes of self-examination are rather absent in the novel, Joe’s self-consciousness of his skin and hair implies that he has spent much time reflecting upon his skin and hair as pointers to suggest his partial black blood as prospective grounds of his