55 pages • 1 hour read
Ann LearyThe Foundling
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Sexism and the Mistreatment of Women
Content Warning: This novel discusses eugenics, forced institutionalization, racism, and child sexual abuse. It also uses outdated terminology for discussing mental health and disabilities, which is reproduced in quotation in this guide.
The Foundling examines the different ways sexism and the mistreatment of women manifest, including sexual abuse and social and legal inequality between men and women. Additionally, the text highlights the way women can be complicit in oppressing other women, often through classism or racism. Mary’s journey shows that sexism can be fought by uniting with other women rather than maintaining social hierarchies.
Several of the women in The Foundling are sexually abused when they are vulnerable. Mary’s uncle molested her as a child until he died in a car accident. Lillian is raped by Tom Henning when she gets too drunk at his speakeasy, and Ida, one of the inmates at Nettleton, is raped by Mr. Whitcomb, the bank president. None of the men face legal repercussions for their actions, while their victims are ostracized. In Lillian’s case, she is punished by being sent to Nettleton. Notably, falsely accusing a Black man of rape would save her from this fate, highlighting the way white men are protected by the law while Black men are not. In Ida’s case, Mr. Whitcomb is extorted by Dr. Vogel but Ida receives no justice, and Dr. Vogel simply sends him a new girl. Like Tom Henning, he is immune to consequences, and Dr. Vogel uses the situation to her advantage, deepening the divide between privileged women like her and disadvantaged women like Ida. Mary sees the closest thing to justice when her uncle dies, but the effects of this trauma persist—she feels responsible for his death and complicit in what happened to her. She eventually comes to terms with this abuse by receiving genuine love from Jake and being treated as an equal, giving her an alternative vision of sex and intimacy. This healing is represented by her initiating sex with Jake, having consensual sex for the first time, and working to save other women from abuse by exposing Nettleton.
The inmates who are interned at Nettleton are largely there because they do not have the wealth or status to navigate a sexist and patriarchal legal system. Moreover, they are punished for “moral weakness,” a loose and flexible concept that can arbitrarily change based on interpretation. Men are not subject to the same laws, especially around sex, and they are not labeled “feebleminded” and locked away indefinitely. Moreover, men are able to use the justice system to send women away and ultimately control women’s fates. For example, Tom Henning is responsible for Lillian’s incarceration—his accusation is considered strong enough proof that Lillian is not given a trial. While he has committed an actual crime in raping her, she is the one who is punished.
Women in positions of power are also regularly distrusted or ignored. When Mary and Bertie discuss their concerns about Nettleton with Father Doheny, he is dismissive: “I must say that I consider those Nettleton girls, if they are, as you say, not afflicted like the others, those misused girls are especially fortunate that they’ve been allowed to live in the sanctuary the Village provides them” (183). He is frustrated when his views are challenged by women and reasons his way into an explanation that leaves no room for dissent. Mary and Bertie are relatively powerless to counter him; his evaluation is final. Even Dr. Vogel is frequently disrespected because she is a woman. She bitterly recalls, “Mary, I’d been a doctor of psychiatry for seven years, before I was asked to be superintendent here. But I wouldn’t be trusted with the vote for another decade and a half” (81). Dr. Vogel is frustrated that she has so few rights as an educated woman while uneducated men can vote and make decisions within society. She complains to Mary that even after achieving suffrage, women continue to be disenfranchised. One example is through property laws; Dr. Vogel refuses to get married because her husband would be allowed to take ownership of all of her property. While Dr. Vogel can maintain her power by abusing marginalized women, it does not change the sexist status quo or elevate other women. As such, the novel argues that maintaining these hierarchies will not lead to women’s liberation.
Eugenics and the Mistreatment of Vulnerable Populations
Eugenics recurs in the novel as a justification for the mistreatment of vulnerable populations, showing how institutions formalize biased viewpoints and use violence to reinforce them. Dr. Vogel regularly cites eugenics to justify the mistreatment of the inmates at Nettleton as well as to disparage foreigners and non-white United States citizens. When Dr. Vogel uses this rhetoric to fundraise from garden club and church luncheon crowds, it highlights how this supposed scientific study is sensationalistic and rooted in fear and bias:
She reminded her audiences that women were to thank for the Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted immigrants from China, Africa, and, most important, Southern and Eastern European countries. The Europeans who were barred—Jews and Catholics, mostly, the doctor added—without fail, posed the greatest threat to America. There were laws against interracial marriage here, but no laws barring a good Christian American girl from marrying the offspring of mentally defective, inbred foreigners who’d been teeming onto our shores for decades, threatening to destroy, forever, something she called America’s ethnic homogeneity (166-67).
While eugenics purports to be rational and scientific, Dr. Vogel’s language here—“teeming,” “threatening to destroy”—is hyperbolic and nonfactual. Her status as a doctor lends respectability to these beliefs, showing how they become enshrined in the social fabric.
This speech is especially ironic because while Dr. Vogel cites wanting to protect vulnerable young girls, she consistently puts the women at Nettleton in danger.
For instance, the institution is run by inmates’ unpaid labor, and she sends other girls out to work for free, essentially enslaved in others’ homes. They are “feebleminded,” so she feels they are only good for labor. Likewise, Dr. Vogel uses Ida’s supposed limitations to dismiss the severity of Mr. Whitcomb’s rape. This point of view becomes enshrined in Nettleton’s policies; staff members let the inmates drink dirty water and they torture them, beat them, and exploit them. They do this because eugenics says the inmates are basically animals and not deserving of human consideration or social inclusion.
At first, Mary believes Dr. Vogel because she believes society is ultimately just and moral. She initially trusts Dr. Vogel’s assertions about Ida, even though her own traumatic experiences of sexual assault tell her that something is wrong. She wonders, “But Ida had the mind of a toddler. Did she even know what happened to her?” (79). The belief that a person is “feebleminded,” established through eugenicist IQ tests, immediately casts doubt on that person’s humanity and opens them up to exploitation. In early arguments with Lillian, Mary cites these tests, trusting doctors and judges to be objective. Only later, when she views Lillian’s file and sees the disconnect between the person she knows and what’s on the page does she see that institutional legitimacy does not make eugenics truthful. By disregarding eugenicist rhetoric and really looking at the inmates, Mary comes to see that the ideology is a lie used to oppress others rather than a real scientific practice.
Friendship and Loyalty in the Face of Social Injustice
The motivating action of Mary’s growth is her loyalty and friendship with Lillian in the face of the injustice Lillian experiences at the hands of Dr. Vogel, Nettleton, and the justice system. Mary is initially resistant to helping Lillian. She finds excuses to justify why Lillian deserves to be institutionalized, labeling her “feebleminded,” manipulative, and perverse. She relies on a misogynistic medical system and normalized racism to explain why Lillian should remain at Nettleton. By the end of the novel, however, Mary chooses her friendship with Lillian over her own aspirations, highlighting the solidarity needed to overcome discrimination and oppression.
Mary first chooses this path because she recognizes her own story in Ida. She sympathizes with Ida because she was sexually abused as a child. While she knows that she is witnessing and enabling an injustice when Dr. Vogel extorts Mr. Whitcomb rather than turning him in to the authorities, she is initially able to rationalize that injustice. However, she is never comfortable with Mr. Whitcomb evading justice, and learning a new girl has been sent to him drives her to side with the inmates at Nettleton over Dr. Vogel. While Dr. Vogel hopes to exploit Mary’s ambition, Mary is ultimately loyal to girls like her, who have endured abuse from the powerful.
At first, the reminder of her sexual trauma triggers resentment toward Lillian. Lillian becomes a reminder of Mary’s difficult past, and she blames Lillian for her uncle’s sexual abuse and her guilt over his death. Only after Mary encounters Lillian several times and hears from both Jake and Bertie does Mary recognize that she and Lillian are similar—they are both doing their best to navigate an impossible situation. Once she has this realization, she is able to help Lillian and the girls in Building Five. Mary becomes a good friend and grows into a mature adult who is able to soberly confront her past and present realities. Through this friendship, she taps into her courage and helps Lillian escape Nettleton and the injustice she has endured.
Leary does not exaggerate the effects of this kind of solidarity. She presents it as a choice that is complicated by one’s circumstances and the capacity to reflect and accept oneself. Before Mary becomes a friend to others, she becomes a friend to herself. This transformation suggests that within complex systems of oppression, the right choice is often difficult to make. Additionally, making the right choice does not always lead to large change. However, one can stand up to injustice by being honest with oneself and with one’s community, and through that, individual lives can be impacted.
