The Role of the Observer in Kindred
Although Dana primarily assumes the role of an active participant in history while in the 19th century, she remains distanced from various aspects of the time period. On her initial visits to the past, Dana is immediately forced to enter an active role in history, interacting with her surroundings in order to survive. However, there are aspects of the past that she is never forced to confront due to the nature of her time-traveling circumstances. On a spectrum of involvement with the 19th century, Dana falls somewhere between the actual slaves who are condemned to a lifetime of brutal servitude and Kevin who is exclusively “an observer” of past events (Butler 101).
Dana, a Black woman planted in a time where slavery is a legal institution, has no choice but to integrate herself into the past by taking on the role of a slave, thus becoming an active participant in history. In order to survive, Dana must adhere to the characteristics delineated by nineteenth-century social expectations for slaves. By accepting her active role as a slave, she hopes to form friendships with other slaves and garner goodwill from Rufus and Tom Weylin. Fully engaging in life on the plantation allows her to harbor connections with a wide selection of people. These people serve as her 19th century support system, providing aid in times of need. The Weylin plantation is the only “friendly territory” available to Dana in an otherwise hostile world, and she is forced to maximize its utility by cultivating relationships through her labor.
Although Dana actively involves herself in the past, she remains distanced from certain aspects of slavery which ultimately reveal her role as a partial spectator. In many ways Dana holds a privileged position relative to the other black people on the plantation. Primarily, she is favored by Rufus who holds significant (and eventually absolute) authority over the plantation. Additionally, she finds solace in knowing that she is not permanently confined to the 19th century – “nineteen seventy-six shield[s] and cushion[s] eighteen nineteen for [her]” (Butler 101). In tandem, these factors allow Dana to experience a mitigated version of slavery. Throughout her time in the 19th century, she bears witness to several of the atrocities that her personal circumstances shield her from. For example, Rufus’ repeated violations of Alice demonstrates a dynamic of perverse exploitation that Dana is not personally forced to confront (until the very end). Because of her complicated relationship with Rufus, Dana is able to observe the coercion from a distance rather than being subjected to it. Similarly, she is not personally subjected to the oppression of the slave market. On the Weylin plantation, many of the slaves live in constant fear of being sold or having their family members sold. The Weylins use this fear tactically to subdue their slaves, however Dana is not affected by this form of oppression. Her favorable relationship with Rufus, impermanent residence in the 19th century, and lack of enslaved family reduce her chances of being sold to nearly zero. Instead, she is forced to watch passively as other slaves are sold to merciless plantation owners in the deep South.
Interesting concept, how while Dana and Kevin are being transported to the past, they are not actually experiencing it exactly as the people of the time, rather assuming the role of an observer. This can also be tied in to the fact that they are from 1970, having different viewpoints, and thus making them note certain changes in lifestyle more expressly. Good blog post!
ReplyDeleteI think Butler's intention in using a modern (at the time) main character was to force the reader in Dana's shoes and subtly break through the fourth wall by using a contemporary setting. Because of Dana, the distance between the reader and the events of the story is lessened compared to a non-time travel antebellum slave story. Butler makes some concessions in the brutality of slavery in favor of worldbuilding, but Kindred is still an important novel.
ReplyDeleteYou make excellent points about Dana's "in-between" status, where she is more affected by and immersed in the slavery system than Kevin, because her form of "role-playing" entails actually behaving as an enslaved person every waking minute of the day. But she does remain insulated in many ways as well, and nowhere is this more evident to me than in the scene where she persuades Alice to "go gently" to Rufus in order to be raped. She has so many conflicts of interest in that scene, NONE of which she can or does share with Alice. Dana can say "it's your body, it's your choice," even though she knows full well that the whole POINT is that Alice does not have this control of choice over her body. Dana, to a significant extent, retains this degree of choice--she always knows she doesn't really belong in this context, even when she's fully role-playing.
ReplyDeleteI think here of the analogy between Dana and the historian: in this view, a Black woman historian would have a different, maybe deeper, maybe more personal and profound experience doing a deep dive into the slavery era, and even if they continue to live in the present day, the past would affect them in so many ways, emotionally, psychologically. I imagine it wouldn't be easy to retain "intellectual distance" while studying the finer details of domestic arrangements under slavery--as indeed Butler herself would have done while preparing this novel, which is deeply researched and historically grounded in its details. But this historian (or Butler herself) would always know they aren't experiencing slavery in anything like the way the people they are studying would have.
Some of the most self-aware moments in Dana's narrative are when she's commenting on how much stronger her ancestors are than she feels herself to be. On some level, she knows she isn't *really* surviving in this system--unlike everyone else on the plantation, she has an escape hatch. And she also knows how the future turns out, that this system will not persist forever. The people living on Weylin's property in 1819 don't have any reason to believe that this system won't persist forever, and they have no hope.