Lately, I've been thinking about books. The really old type, the ones that your father read when he was young and the yellowed and battered copies are still on the bookshelf at home, out of the grubby reach of children. I really, really liked to read those books, partly because it was a way to connect to my dad, but the main reason is so I have materials for daydreams. Since the moment I got to touch the fully annotated version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Journey to the West, I was hooked. As any self-respecting, old fashioned Vietnamese book lover, my dad also have the translated work of famous French writers; two of the authors I've always come back to reread are Victor Hugo, whom wrote
Les Miserables, and Hector Malot, the author of
Sans Famille.
In both novels, one of the main characters would be an orphan or was abandoned, Cosette for Les Miserables and Remi in Sans Famille, respectively. Cosette was adopted by Jean Valjean, a former convict, after her parents' deaths while the poor and childless Mother Barberin after Remi was found abandoned by her husband. Valjean had ensured Cosette grew up in comforts and relative luxuries when Remi, homeless, wandered the countryside with his close friend. The more notable part I found in both novels is that the relationships between the adoptive parents and the children were happy ones. The parents provided for the children the best they could manage, giving them better lives than they would've had otherwise. In Cosette's case, Valjean witnessed the way her foster family abused and maltreated her; Remi would've grow up in overcrowded and underfunded orphanage without knowing a good childhood.
And because Mr. Barberin was absence from the home due to his work in the city, both Cosette and Remi were brought up in single-parent households. This proved that 19th century people, or at least French writers, believed a child would be better off in a loving environment rather than an ideal one. Case in point was Cosette, before she came to Valjean, she lived with the Thénardiers' (2 daughters, a father and a mother) but she was treated with less care than a pet might expect. After Valjean rescued her, he'd provided shelter, education, love and support above and beyond social expectations for a stranger's daughter without reservations. He sacrificed his life for his daughter's love interest and only passed his last breath after giving her away to said man.
Compare this to the single mother from Tennessee who gave up on her transnational adoptive son from Russia, sent the boy back to his native country by himself with a note inciting Russian government into "threatened to freeze adoptions for U.S. families" as AP Associates
reported. News like this makes me wonder if we could somehow measure what people called "mother instincts" and just how much the roles and relationship between a child and their parents is influenced by the parents' own relationships with their own sets of parents.
In both novels, one of the main characters would be an orphan or was abandoned, Cosette for Les Miserables and Remi in Sans Famille, respectively. Cosette was adopted by Jean Valjean, a former convict, after her parents' deaths while the poor and childless Mother Barberin after Remi was found abandoned by her husband. Valjean had ensured Cosette grew up in comforts and relative luxuries when Remi, homeless, wandered the countryside with his close friend. The more notable part I found in both novels is that the relationships between the adoptive parents and the children were happy ones. The parents provided for the children the best they could manage, giving them better lives than they would've had otherwise. In Cosette's case, Valjean witnessed the way her foster family abused and maltreated her; Remi would've grow up in overcrowded and underfunded orphanage without knowing a good childhood.