A few days ago in class we talked at length about history and the relationship between studying historical facts and the emotional implications of those facts. There were discussions on how one should study history, whether investing emotionally in the history is the right way to study the past or not.
While studying history at that depth might become mentally detrimental later on, I think it's an important thing to do, for everyone, to understand the lives of others. Octavia Butler does a wonderful job of fully immersing her main character Dana into her ancestral past. Dana comes out of her experience without an arm and (probably) PTSD as a result of visiting her past. While this is pretty severe, I feel as if Dana now really understands what her past had to go through to survive. The way Dana handles herself throughout the book is a testament to how she accepts her fate yet finds a way to fight back. While she is a slave, she still treats Rufus as a human is meant to be treated. She stands up for herself and others, never fearing to be punished or even killed. While she does test Rufus's self control and anger management, she understands what battles are worth fighting for and what aren't. For example, she gives into being Rufus's mother's slave because not only will she be treated nicely, she understands fighting Rufus and his mother isn't a battle concerning her well-being.
A battle she does continuously fight however is the battle of her free speech, especially around Rufus. She really tests Rufus when Rufus talks about Alice by telling him it isn't right. Rufus seems to ponder the idea but doesn't do anything with Alice while she's sick and recovering. I think this small time frame in which Rufus attempts to treat Alice like a human being is very important to Rufus's character's development. As we see later in the novel at the end, Rufus and Dana are together alone. While Rufus does make some moves on her, he doesn't do it right away, especially when he doesn't get his way with Dana. While this may seem a little insignificant, I think Rufus seeing Alice in such a vulnerable state changes him for the better.
While studying history at that depth might become mentally detrimental later on, I think it's an important thing to do, for everyone, to understand the lives of others. Octavia Butler does a wonderful job of fully immersing her main character Dana into her ancestral past. Dana comes out of her experience without an arm and (probably) PTSD as a result of visiting her past. While this is pretty severe, I feel as if Dana now really understands what her past had to go through to survive. The way Dana handles herself throughout the book is a testament to how she accepts her fate yet finds a way to fight back. While she is a slave, she still treats Rufus as a human is meant to be treated. She stands up for herself and others, never fearing to be punished or even killed. While she does test Rufus's self control and anger management, she understands what battles are worth fighting for and what aren't. For example, she gives into being Rufus's mother's slave because not only will she be treated nicely, she understands fighting Rufus and his mother isn't a battle concerning her well-being.
A battle she does continuously fight however is the battle of her free speech, especially around Rufus. She really tests Rufus when Rufus talks about Alice by telling him it isn't right. Rufus seems to ponder the idea but doesn't do anything with Alice while she's sick and recovering. I think this small time frame in which Rufus attempts to treat Alice like a human being is very important to Rufus's character's development. As we see later in the novel at the end, Rufus and Dana are together alone. While Rufus does make some moves on her, he doesn't do it right away, especially when he doesn't get his way with Dana. While this may seem a little insignificant, I think Rufus seeing Alice in such a vulnerable state changes him for the better.
I definitely agree that a key theme in Kindred is the question of how history relates to a person's own identity, and how Dana's moral dilemmas she faces are an interesting way of looking at this dynamic. Dana's own moral questions in some ways might echo our own qualms about the meaning of history -- what would we do if we were in the same situation?
ReplyDeleteI also appreciated how Butler took Dana's character and developed her as a product of both her past and present. Oftentimes, in classes, we look at history with statistics, numbers, graphs, and heavy paragraphs of longwinded information that never really goes deep into human value, and that leads us to ask the question of how well we actually understand the daily detriments in the life of a slave in the Antebellum Era. With Kindred, especially with scenes such as Dana observing Alice's father get killed by white patrollers in the middle of the night or the first time Dana receives a whipping from Tom Weylin, we are exposed to raw events of slave life, with details (such as the smell of sweat and blood) that are often glazed over in history textbooks to avoid student discomfort.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about it this way, but I agree, Dana's journey is a really interesting take on emotional investment in historiography. Through Dana, Butler sort of posits that no matter how hard you may try, ultimately your personal biases will always come out in the making and observing of history and at a certain point, you simply have to accept that, no matter how detrimental it may be to the history you're attempting to record.
ReplyDeleteNice post! For me, I think that emotionally investing in the past is inevitable. History is usually told through the eyes of the people who experience it. It becomes impossible for there to not be any bias. If there was none, basically history would exist. It would just be a memory forgotten by time.
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting, and I think this is something that I hadn't realized - Dana seems to always keep her values and attempts to treat the Weylins as humans, no matter how cruel they are. I think Dana's journey is a really interesting way to symbolize the affect that slavery has had on all African Americans, by symbolizing someone who actually was forced back into the time and had almost everything stripped from her as she was forced to live that life.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I liked your comments on Dana as a person in the strange and terrifying situation that she was in. There's not really any way anyone could judge her actions or how she thinks because of the situation she was in and the experiences that she went through.
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