With the first law[1] passed in 1851 in Massachusetts adoption had received its first legal framework in the USA that is still partially in place nowadays. Over the next 25 years the law was passed in 25 other states of the USA. The law had settled the legal boundaries between the adoptive parents and the child and the responsibility to handle in the interests of the child. The law also obliged the parents to provide the child with a suitable nutrition and education and dissolved all legal boundaries between the child and the biological parents (Kahan 53-54). These facts are reflected in Edith Wharton´s short story “The Mission of Jane”. Published in 1902, the short story explicitly mentions the legal adoption. Jane´s biological mother had died before the moment of narration; one-year-old Jane had to stay in the hospital under the care of nurses until she was adopted by the Lethburys. The story also gives a hint to an alternative for a legal adoption: “Lethbury, at first, resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but when he found that his wife´s curiously limited imagination prevented her regarding the child as hers till it had been made by process of law, he promptly withdrew his objection” (Wharton, “The Mission of Jane). This could mean that in the state where the Lethburys live there already was a law that regulated adoption, but it was still possible to take the child from the hospital without a legal process. The Lethburys decided to adopt Jane legally; and this process gives her the surname Lethbury. The process of a legal adoption itself is not described in the story.

The childhood of Jane is supposed to be happy: her adoptive mother and a nursemaid take care of her health and well-being, she is educated by the best teachers, which indicates the above-average living conditions of living of the Lethburys that are required by the law to be able to adopt the child legally. The material status of the Lethburys is undoubtful, nevertheless the emotional state of the adoptive parents can be questioned. According to Hermione Lee, the story Wharton tells about the childhood is usually one of alienation and secrecy (11). In "The Mission of Jane" Jane´s feelings and thoughts stay a secret for the reader, but the reader still can see that Jane feels like a stranger in the family she grows up. Her mother is bored and needs someone to “pet it, and dress it, and do things for it…” (Wharton, “The Mission of Jane), her father is cold and distant, and never wants to spend time with her. Jane grows up with the feeling her parents don´t want her to be in the house anymore and at the end they marry her off their hands to the man she doesn´t love. The story of Jane in “The Mission of Jane” is the story of the voiceless child who was adopted to kill the loneliness and boredom in the Lethbury family and was passed to Mr. Budd to get rid of her.

[1] For further information click here.

Sources:

Kahan, Michelle. “”Put up” on Platforms: A History of Twentieth Century Adoption Policy in the United States”. The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare. Sep. 2006: 51-72. Western Michigan University, 2006. Web. 13.06.2018 <https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol33/iss3/4>

Lee, Hermione. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage, 2008. Print