In Kindred, Dana is repeatedly forced to visit the Antebellum South
and adapt to her surroundings. By using this unpredictable mode of time travel
and the relatable way in which Dana’s story is told, Octavia Butler forces us
to reckon with what we would do if we were in Dana’s place.
Dana’s first trip to the
1800s seems like the most straightforward version of the time travel. She is
sent back without warning, but upon arrival, she knows exactly what she has to
do: “Before me was a wide tranquil river, and near the middle of that river was
a child splashing, screaming…Drowning! I reacted to the child in trouble. Later
I could ask questions, try to find out where I was, what had happened. Now I
went to help the child.” (Butler 13). Dana is the hero in this situation. She
saves Rufus using 1970s technology, despite not totally knowing artificial
respiration. Margaret beats Dana and Tom threatens to kill Dana, but
nonetheless, she saves Rufus. She is then transported back to the 1970s. This
is probably the most cut-and-dry situation Dana faces: A toddler needs her help in a life-or-death
crisis. Dana is immediately sympathetic. As readers, we would like to think
that we attempt to do the same. This creates a precedent for a reader’s
perception of Dana: she is a reliable narrator and moral person by our
contemporary standards.
The reader’s initial identification
with Dana makes her subsequent choices more understandable. In her second encounter with Rufus, Dana
learns more context about the time period of her travels. She puzzles out the
real reason she keeps travelling back in time is “to insure my family’s
survival, my own birth” (Butler 28). Therefore, a sense of preservation
prevents her from harming Rufus or Alice because doing so could jeopardize her
own life.
Throughout the rest of
the novel, Dana makes incredibly difficult moral decisions about what to do in
the 1800s. Rufus is a slave owner. Dana must struggle with the immorality of his
position and his actions with the need to preserve her own life. As readers, we recognize and
identify with her contemporary morality.
Thus, we are forced to go along with her choices.
Butler makes it very
hard for readers to question Dana’s decisions. By painting Dana as a morally
responsible character who is trying her hardest in unpredictable situations,
Butler makes Dana sympathetic to the reader.
Through Dana, we must confront the difficult and uncertain options of
what it means to behave morally.
Dana's morality is definitely one of the hardest things readers are forced to grapple with throughout Kindred. I'm definitely very conflicted, because on the one hand, some of the things that Dana does are super questionable - encouraging Alice to let Rufus rape her, for example. On the other hand, I know for a fact that I would not have been able to make good decisions if I were in Dana's place. I probably would have done the same thing, which makes questions about Dana's morality really unclear.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like Dana's morality changes throughout the book as she becomes more accustomed to the antebellum South and her relationship with the other people there changes. With her first and second trips, she only really knew Rufus and Rufus's relationship with other people in the antebellum South were also very innocent. As Rufus gets older and his relationships with the slaves get more complicated, Dana's relationship with Rufus gets more complicated because she is also closer to many of the slaves on the plantation. The distance that the shorter trips to the South gave Dana, helped keep her morality more grounded.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem that Dana's first time travel is what connects us to her, as we like to think that we would do the same. Thanks to this initial connection, we are able to relate to and understand Dana's struggles later in the novel. If that first connection wasn't made, if the first time travel didn't involve saving toddler Rufus from a river and giving him CPR, perhaps our perception of Dana would have changed and we might not have been as empathetic to Dana's emotions and struggles.
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