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abandonment
The origins of the word abandon, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrate that it has
not always had the wholly negative connotations it
does today. In the Middle French, for instance, metre
à bandon could have meant both “to proscribe” and
“to release from proscription.” Thus, the term might
apply equally to an outcast shunned from society
and to the former outcast being welcomed back.
Both are being “abandoned.” One may then abandon
one’s child, one’s property, or one’s self. The common
thread in these definitions in that there is an active
choice being made and that the nature of this choice
is absolute. Abandonment is never accidental, and it
is never partial—it is deliberate and it is complete.
It is, perhaps, these qualities that account for the
recurrence of the theme in folklore and mythology,
in social science, and in art and literature.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve are banished from
the Garden of Eden. In being left to their own
devices, being forced to provide for themselves, they
are, in their eyes at least, being abandoned by God.
Abraham casts off his wife’s maidservant Hagar and
their son Ishmael, abandoning them to the desert
and denying them Ishmael’s birthright. Baby Moses,
cast among the bulrushes for his own protection, is
abandoned by his biological family into the care of
another. Folklore and fairy tales abound with sto-
ries of abandonment: Snow White is left alone in
the forest; Romulus and Remus, the mythological
founders of Rome, are placed in their cradle in the
Tiber River; and, of course, Hansel and Gretel are
forced from their home and into the lair of a witch.
In many foundational stories of abandonment, the
abandoned child returns to his or her true family in
triumph, either as a leader or having achieved great
success in one way or another. This triumph seems
to mitigate the trauma of the abandonment, imply-
ing that the abandonment resulted in some good
and allowing for a happy, or at least a contented,
ending. In the case of Moses, for instance, it is his
abandonment that saves his life. As the pharaoh has
ordered that all male babies born to Hebrews be
drowned in the Nile, Moses’s mother hides him in
a basket in the river where he would be found (and
ultimately adopted) by the Pharoah’s daughter. In
the story of Hansel and Gretel, the children return,
having killed the witch, to find that their stepmother
has died and they may live happily with their father.
In other stories, however, the return from aban-
donment proves tragic. For instance, in Sophocles’
oedipus the kinG, perhaps one of the most famous
stories of abandonment, Oedipus is abandoned as an
infant because it has been prophesized that he will
grow up to kill his father, the king of Thebes, and
marry his mother, the queen. A servant is ordered
to take the baby away and kill him, but the servant
cannot carry out the order and leaves the baby at the