Ghost Kingdoms and Phantom Worlds:

Narrative Strategies in Adoptee Autofiction

Note to the Reader

Welcome to my digital thesis. Just want to share a few notes and thoughts with you before you begin your journey.

First of all, I want to make a note about the language that you will inevitably encounter here regarding the relationship names and roles of family members. I do recognize that I'm not alone in how I feel about the inadequate language we have to describe adoption. I've made it a priority to use neutral and scientific terms as much as is possible when I must clarify the roles. And for each case study, I've dutifully followed each author's language choices in my writing about their works. I'd like to assure my readers that if my feelings change over time about this or any other part of my thesis, I will update it here to reflect that change and publicly document the thought process.

I'd also like to give you a little bit of content warning here. The emotional content that I deal with in this thesis is quite heavy and includes: mother-infant separation, generational trauma, grief, loss, betrayal, rape, suicide, and the like. Though my case studies are all fictional works of art, they do reflect realistic snapshots of the inner lives of adoptees. This is why I ask that if you do not have a direct connection to adoption that you be mindful of the questions you may have and how you ask them. Remember, adoptees don't have the agency as infants or minors to consent to what is done to them, how their lives are rewritten for them. That's why, among so many other reasons you'll soon learn about, their narratives are so important to listen to and understand.

About This Thesis

The fancy academic version of this thesis has been embargoed for two years (I hid it in the library where nobody can find it), and I am currently working on a journal article. More on that later. When we near the end of our journey, I'll let you know where I'm at for citation purposes. For now, strap in for the digital version of my Master's thesis. We have a lot to talk about.

Dedication

For Emery Rose, my favorite human who I know will someday read this and everything else.

For the adoptee community, a warm and fierce group of people I am honored to be a part of. It turns out I’m not the only one. Thank you for all you do.

Abstract

In this thesis, I investigate Betty Jean Lifton’s theory of the Ghost Kingdom as it appears in adoptee-written narratives. Lifton describes the Ghost Kingdom as a “psychic reality” where what-if projections of lost or wished for persons (often conceptualized as characters) reside. Her theory describes both the ontological position of the adoptee situated in reality and the possible worlds they create within themselves through mental activity. Adoptees exist in both of these worlds simultaneously. Using primarily narrative theory, I argue that Lifton’s Ghost Kingdoms are a narrative framework adoptees use to compose narratives that blur the distinction between reality and fiction. When the narratives of such Ghost Kingdoms are written, they serve as a representation of a nexus of possible worlds where the imagined and the real can coexist. I demonstrate with this thesis how adoptee Ghost Kingdom narratives fill “the gap” between what could have been and what is with an imaginary world where characters and possible worlds “haunt” adoptees in reality. These fictions are adoptee responses to trauma and ambiguous loss, so they serve as an important building block for identity development in addition to acting as a substitute for a significant gap of knowledge about the self. To fill this gap, adoptees create narratives that are fictional, yet they make up very real aspects of the adoptee’s identity.