While Butler's novel Kindred can easily be seen as an anti-slavery book based on the horrifyingly accurate depictions of the life of a slave through a 20th century perspective, it is easily ignored that the novel can also be regarded as a coming of age book as well. Introduced to one of the main characters, Rufus Weylin, at a very young age, throughout the course of the story we see his character develop into the role of a southern plantation owner within the Antebellum south. However Rufus' upbringing isn't your average story of a privileged white boy. Throughout the course of his life, he finds himself mysteriously intertwined with an African-American women from 1976, who for some unknown reason has the ability to travel back in time whenever Rufus finds himself in trouble. Though Rufus can still be viewed as a white supremacist at heart due to how he was raised, his distinctions from his father Tom Weylin, your stereotypical plantation owner, can arguably be a result of Dana's influence.
While I disagree with a lot of the choices Rufus makes, overall I feel pretty sympathetic towards him due to his extremely unusual upbringing. His relationship with Dana completely upsets his understanding of the accepted racial power structure between blacks and whites, causing Rufus to look for more out of slaves than the color of their skin. This can especially be seen when Rufus admits to saying he wishes he could marry Alice if he lived in Dana's time. I almost wish Butler would have had Alice and Rufus travel to the 20th century so they could be together, however Alice probably would not have been too thrilled about the idea. This can be seen in contrast to Tom Weylin's views on slaves, treating them as his property he can use as sex toys or even split up families and sell them.
Though it may have been Dana's goal to try and mold Rufus into a better person, she ultimately has an impossible conflict of interest with insuring her own existence. While she can preach to Rufus all she wants about respecting a person regardless of skin color, in the end, Rufus must still feel as though he has the power over Alice to rape her and have their child Hagar, Dana's relative. And even if Rufus does change his outlook, he would be viewed as an outcast in his community for going against the social norms. Therefore while Rufus could be deeply unhappy with his lifestyle, following in his father's footsteps and adopting his similar values can be seen as a survival strategy.
Even though Rufus and Dana's relationship is very peculiar, I think its interesting how easy it was for both characters to almost walk in each other's shoes. Dana is shocked and disturbed how easy it was for her to accept slavery, and Rufus and shocked and disturbed at how easy it was for him to see slaves as more than his property. Together there share an unusual form of mutual trust between each other, and even though Rufus threatened Dana with a gun begging her not to leave him, I wonder if their relationship will be able to look past the incident. However I do think it must have hindered their level of trust for each other, which I'm curious to see of this takes effect.
I don't really like and don't really want to like Rufus because he rapes Alice repeatedly and uses his position of power (as a slave owner) against Dana, who has saved him many times, yet I still end up feeling some sympathy for him as well. Along with having Dana in his life, I think he upbringing induces sympathy in me for him because early on, we learn that his father whipped him and that he disliked his father very much. Having Tom Weylin as a father is probably not that great of an experience, but he seems to be the only role model for Rufus, since Rufus' society tells him to distance himself from people of a different skin color than you. It's difficult to blame Rufus entirely for the way he acts because he is mimicking what he sees to be the "best" life (of a dominant white male slave owner,) but I still tend to dislike Rufus because he does have Dana as an example of future times of more equality.
ReplyDeleteThis "coming-of-age" dynamic is important in terms of the novel's analysis of history, I think. There would be little point in asserting that every one of the hundreds of thousands of slave-owning white men throughout the South for the more than 200 years of slavery in this country were all just inherently evil. Butler, through Rufus and Dana's ability to watch him come of age in accelerated, episodic time, takes the view that a social and economic system may be evil, and one of the ways its evil is manifest is that it nourishes evil in the people who grow up under it. Under other circumstances, in another time and place, Rufus could be a perfectly okay guy. He doesn't seem to have an inborn desire to own slaves; it's the way of the world he's born into, and all of his worst traits are enabled and nourished by the system. Like all of us (and this is a sobering thought), his character and moral values are overwhelmingly a product of his poisonous environment.
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