ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century fiction works simultaneously to define the form of the novel and the form of the family; the orphan proves the perfect figure to do both. The developing novel does not imagine the orphan as a solitary figure alone in the world, but as a figure inhabiting replacement family structures that problematize the idea of “blood,” or familial kinship relations. Crucially, the orphan guarantees that the replacement family will be a nonbiological construction and thus encourages the novel to position the family as reliant on fictional construction. Indeed, the orphan ensures a plot that makes this alignment of the family with fiction compelling: an original family must be lost or masked, a new family must be located and created without the benefit of biology, and the orphan must negotiate the gap between these biological and artificial, past and present, ideal and real families without the help of a guiding parent. As he or she negotiates these stories of the lost original and new replacement families, the orphan reveals the ease with which bloodlines can be narrated into and out of being. As a result, the orphan allows the novel to engage in self-reflective plotting: the original family is known primarily through stories, the new family needs to narrate its definition of family in order to affirm that it is one, the orphan must become skilled at differentiating familial fact from fiction, and the orphan must become a storyteller, able to provide convincing narratives of his or her family search. By tracing the trajectory of the orphan plot, this chapter demonstrates how the orphan interrogates the structure of both family and narrative and, ultimately, allows family-making to be equated with fictionmaking.
