What's Up With Orphans?

I'm writing as many reviews at Epinions as possible this summer to earn some much-needed income. Among other things, that means I'm reviewing almost every longer book the sweet girl and I have read aloud together this summer.

So I just posted my review of The Boxcar Children and found myself chuckling as I described the incredible resourcefulness of the kids. I mentioned that realism wasn't high on the author's agenda, since the book is not only a series book for the younger set, but an orphan story, following in the tried and true footsteps of that literary genre. Which got me thinking...what IS it about orphan stories? Why do people love to write them? Why do we all love to read them?

I've thought about this before, of course, but it hadn't dawned on me quite as forcefully as it did today just how many orphan stories dot the landscape of children's literature. Harry Potter, I think, has become the undisputed king of orphan literature, but J.K. Rowling certainly draws heavily on her predecessors.

Besides Harry Potter, and of course the Boxcar Children, I can think of a number of other famous literary orphans. The Little Match Girl. The Lost Boys. Maria Merryweather in The Little White Horse. The Fossil girls in Ballet Shoes. Pippi Longstocking. Oliver Twist (if you count that as literature for children....) . Anne of the Green Gables. Gilly Hopkins. Sara Crewe in The Little Princess. Cousin Maggy Hamilton who comes to live with the Austin family (though Madeleine confessed that she had a hard time getting Meet the Austins published because of Maggie's orphaned state, showing that the idea must have gone out of vogue at some point in the 1950s). Ender Wiggin isn't precisely an orphan, but he's taken from his parents at the very beginning of Ender's Game to live in a kind of army barracks with other special children who are being trained to fight a war. And Bean, Ender's Shadow, is an orphan.

And a lot of literary characters in stories for children and young adults have lost one parent. The March girls haven't lost a parent exactly, but their father is away on the frontlines of a war for over half of Little Women. In the recent marvelous family stories The Penderwicks, the Penderwick girls have lost their mother (though the second book deals with their eventually getting a new mother). Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Nancy Drew. Jim Frayne in the Trixie Belden series is an orphan (I put him here because he does at least have a stepfather, albeit a nasty and abusive one...Jim is adopted by a very wealthy family by the end of the second book. He still has to deal with orphan "issues," however, and the stepfather turns up like the proverbial bad penny a few more times in the series.) Luke Skywalker is orphaned to all intents and purposes (and okay, I'm stretching a bit to call him a literary character, but Star Wars is a big part of our cultural story consciousness). The Herdmans, in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, have a mother, but she's a stressed single parent whose kids are so out of control that she's become a workaholic in self-defense and not just because the family needs the money.

And don't get me started on literary characters who have neglectful, hurtful or emotionally absent parents. (Dudley Dursley and Eustace Scrubb, anyone?)

I'm sure I'm missing more...

And I'm sure someone has explored this phenomenon in depth somewhere in a master's thesis. Still, it's interesting, isn't it?

I wonder how much of it has to do with the general loneliness of the human condition. Even those of us who come from families where we feel loved and secure have known times when we've been absolutely sure that we must have come from some other family (especially in adolescence, when we feel we're just far too different from anybody else)! Clearly someone left us on our parents' doorstep. And growing up is a lonely business in general. Sometimes we feel all "on our own" as we learn to master certain things or come to grips with our feelings and with the state of our broken world. Whatever adversities we face, it certainly helps us to have heroes, heroines, role models who have faced worse, and shown that life can be "gotten through" -- and not just gotten through, but finally lived abundantly, joyfully and victoriously. So many of the stories just mentioned also show the power of community (outside of one's family) in someone's life: the characters forge relationships that sometimes feel as close or closer than blood kin.

I also wonder deep down how much of the need to write/read such literature stems from a deep spiritual hunger. We long for a deep sense of family, a deep connection with our Heavenly Father. Those of us who know Jesus and have been adopted into the family of God have been blessed to have those hungers fed, but we still know others and can still remember ourselves what it was like to be "outside the fold." As people made in God's image, but who are fallen and in exile, we know deep deep down inside ourselves what it truly means to long for home, to long for family, to hope for adoption.

No wonder we get find ourselves tearing up as we stand behind eleven year old Harry when he sits, mute and hungry with longing, in front of the images of his family in the Mirror of Erised.