Any interesting novel in literature
As a reminder, you need to use 3-5 sources (from a library database and NOT including the novel) in a 6-10 page research paper which has a clear thesis and explicates the meaning of your novel. This is NOT a report. You are a literary
scholar and you are making an argument about the meaning of the novel or a part of the novel
The submission must follow all MLA style guidelines, including formatting, in-text citations, and works-cited entries.
ANSWER
Kindred, by Olivia Butler
Kindred is a novel by Octavia Butler, an American writer. The novel incorporates time travel and is developed on slave narratives. Kindred has been used for many years as a text for community-wide educational programs and book organizations, and as a common choice for college and high school literature courses. Kindred presents an account of a young African-American woman, Dana, who finds herself taken back in time from her home in California in 1976 to a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation (Butler 2003). Dana meets her ancestors who are a black freewoman and a white settler who has forced her into slavery and concubinage. Dana stays in the past and interacts with the community at the plantation. She has to make hard choices to survive the rampant slavery at the time and ensure her travel back to her own time in 1976. Through the novel, Butler explores the dilemmas and dynamics of slavery from the thoughts of a 20th-century black woman who is fully aware of its history in American society. The novel explores various themes and tries to paint a picture of what slavery looked like. Octavia’s Kindred brings out the themes of survival and slavery as they relate to women in American society. Octavia Butler communicates that women have to struggle to survive in a society that treats them as inferior to men.
Butler herself is a great example of a woman who conquered a world dominated by men. She broke ground, not only as a woman but as an African-American, in the white male-dominated genre of science fiction. Her work is compelling and complex due to her deep interest in human nature. Many of the protagonists in her books are strong and believable black women. Kindred is about a contemporary African-American woman, Dana, who travels back in time to save an ancestor who is a white slave owner (Butler 2003). By saving him, she can ensure her own survival in the future. Dana witnessed first-hand the brutal nature of slavery, learning the true meaning of survival. She makes repeated attempts to escape and return to her time, her attempts going beyond her desire to return home to an easier existence. Since the past has already happened, the course of personal and cultural histories is beyond Dana’s ability to change. She, therefore, has to navigate the world she finds herself in while doing as little harm as possible and rescuing Rufus, a white slave owner who she comes to learn is her ancestor. Her future existence depends on the survival of Rufus as well as her own survival in slavery times.
Dana is conflicted about her ancestor’s (Rufus) concubinage and rape of Alice, a young proud black woman who is also her ancestor (Butler 2003). Dana also needs to ensure her own future by helping Alice. Alice’s attempts to escape slavery have more dire consequences than Dana’s, as Dana’s future relies on Alice. The theme of escape is ever-present in the novel. However, it is overshadowed by the theme of survival of the self, family, and the community. Dana lives a life of freedom in the present, one that she wishes to return to. In her attempts to return, she realizes how difficult it was to escape for her black kin in the past. This difficulty of survival and escape is brought out in the novel: “Nothing in my education or knowledge of the future had helped me to escape. Yet in a few years an illiterate runaway named Harriet Tubman would make nineteen trips into this country and lead three hundred fugitives to freedom … Why was I still slave to a man who had repaid me for saving his life by nearly killing me? And why … why was I so frightened now — frightened sick at the thought that sooner or later, I would have to run again?” (Butler 2003).
Dana is portrayed as an example of a strong female who struggles to survive the difficult times that she finds herself in. She is a strong protagonist who is strengthened by her personal responsibility, racial pride, her free will, and self-determination. Dana strives to transform her ancestor, Rufus, into a caring and compassionate man despite her struggles and uncomfortableness with white patriarchy. These struggles are represented by her resistance to white male control of her writing, an important aspect of her identity, in both the past and the present. Dana risks death by killing Rufus, becoming a permanent record or representative of the mutilation of her black ancestors through her armless body and her survival (Butler 2003). Dana also appears as a symbol of the helplessness of African-American women both during slavery times and in modern times. Butler uses Dana as a protagonist to demonstrate that women have been and continue to be victims in a male-dominated world.
Dana is constantly struggling to reconcile what she believes she knows about slavery from books, school, and in the media, with what she is experiencing in the slavery time that she travels back to. All the sources of information that she has read in her time have shaped her reality, in which an African-American woman has rights. The reality of Rufus has also been shaped by his father, his white upbringing, and the plantation system. Dana struggles a lot while living in Rufus’s time, having to live in Rufus’s reality while trying to maintain her sense of reality. She nearly fails to preserve her reality, falling more and more into the reality of a slave. Her surroundings start to take over her beliefs and appear real (Weylin house, whips and pallets in the attic, and Alice’s broken body). Butler tries to make slavery real to readers, just like it appears real to Dana in the novel (Richard 118). Most people today have heard and read about the brutality and horrors of slavery, just like Dana, but cannot truly understand the true nature of how horrible slavery was because modern society is removed from it by time. This time boundary is removed for Dana, enabling readers to experience the struggles, mental realities, and physical realities of slavery (Flagel 216).
In her present life, Dana works at an agency where she says “the people who ran it couldn’t have cared less whether or not [she] showed up to do the work they offered” (Butler 2003). This reality is different from her life at the Weylin plantation, where she experiences the struggles of slavery and women first-hand. Dana is forced to witness as the people she has established relationships with are bought and sold. She watches families get torn apart and slaves go through different types of torture under the hands of her ancestor, Rufus. She experiences and learns the physical reality of slavery: the rape, hard work, whippings, and other punishments, all of which are more excruciating than she ever imagined (Richard 118). She experiences the struggles of women in slavery, witnessing rape, and punishment. Humans make decisions based on what they believe or feel is right, morally, and ethically. Sometimes, however, people go against their morals and ethics to survive. Dana is forced to travel back in time throughout the novel to help one of her white ancestors. The readers can see all the uncomfortable decisions that she has to make to survive as a black woman at that time.
When Dana travels into the past, she soon learns that she has to survive to overcome the power struggle between her and her ancestor, Rufus. She is driven to save Rufus to ensure his existence and the existence of her entire family. Dana is a very educated young African-American woman, but she doubts that she has the strength and endurance that her ancestors, living during the slavery times, had. At first, she is not willing to fight or defend herself. Over time, however, she sets her calmness aside and realizes that she has to survive. During her second trip to the past, she does not defend herself from a patroller (Butler 2003). During her third trip, she is willing and ready to injure anyone who might hurt her to escape. The place of African-American women in society is portrayed in the irony that Dana experiences as a protector of her ancestor Rufus. She views herself as the worst possible protector for him “in a society that considered blacks subhuman” and “a society that considered women perennial children” (Butler 2003). She cannot understand how she is supposed to protect a white man, being an African-American woman, in a society that treated women as inferior to men.
Throughout the novel, the drive for survival is much needed. This, for the slaves, involves making very painful decisions and choices. Dana experiences these choices first hand. Some slaves choose to die rather than be a slave. Others choose to stay alive and be slaves rather than lose their lives. The white people use their power and authority to scare and trick the slaves. Some slaves try to befriend their captors, hoping to increase their chances of survival on the plantation. Some slaves choose to submit to the power of the white people, giving away all control over their lives just to survive. Dana experiences all the sorrow and pain that her ancestors went through. This made her realize how horrible slavery was, with everything being based off on written papers, property, and contracts since slaves were treated as things or belongings. Butler is able to bring out the struggles of women in society. Women were not expected to be smarter than men. When people realized that Dana was an educated woman, it was not a good thing especially for Tom, who was not very educated but “owned” the slaves. Men are shown to have ownership and control over slaves, from expecting women and slaves to bring them breakfast to sleeping with them without their consent. Besides creating a vivid picture of how slavery was, Octavia Butler brings out the aspect of women struggling to survive and thrive in a male-dominated society and how they are treated as unequal to men, in Kindred.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2003.
Flagel, Nadine. “”It’s Almost Like Being There”: Speculative Fiction, Slave Narrative, and the Crisis of Representation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Canadian Review of American Studies 42.2 (2012): 216-245.
Richard, Thelma Shinn. “Defining Kindred: Octavia Butler’s Postcolonial Perspective.” Obsidian III (2005): 118-134.
