Genre and Historical Context in Understanding “Kindred” by Butler Essay

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What would be coming through a person’s mind if his or her day turned out to last for several years in the early 1800s and resulted in a loss of an arm and unintentional homicide? It is only natural for a reader to think that the main questions running through the person’s head would be how is it possible to travel through time and space, and why half of the person’s arm got stuck in the past. However, Butler in her neo-slave narrative Kindred fails to acknowledge any of those questions and points out that the only need would be “to reassure yourself that you’re sane” (Butler 264). This literary analysis will try to relate the questions mentioned above to the novel’s genre and historical context.

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The Importance of Genre

There is a particular reason for Butler to address the issue of slavery through the form of a science-fiction novel. While it is evident that slave narratives should have disappeared with the death of the last enslaved African American, the genre reestablished itself with the introduction of Kindred as a neo-slave narrative (Donaldson 95). The main difference between the two genres is that instead of just telling a story about the life of enslaved African Americans, neo-slave narratives tend to relate these stories to the contemporary reality. Butler chooses a mix of the two genres to draw obvious parallels between the present and the past, showing that the Emancipation Proclamation failed to result in freedom for African Americans (Donaldson 95).

It is only apparent that Kindred offers more questions than answers as the beginning, and the end of the novel is a mystery. There is no explanation why on June 9, 1976, after feeling nauseous Edana Franklin finds herself kneeling on a riverbank somewhere in the 1800s. There is also no answer to the question why after her final return Dana is left without an arm. While the readers would be pleased to know the answers to the questions, Butler wastes no time for addressing them. Instead, the author uses the fact that the main protagonist is transported physically and mentally to an antebellum plantation to provide the first-person experience as the primary evidence for promoting her case.

First, Butler draws parallels between Kevin, Dana’s husband, and Rufus Weylin, the owner of Dana’s ancestor, Alice Greenwood. While Kevin seems to have nothing in common with Rufus at first glance, Butler promotes likeliness between those two characters in their facial expressions, word choice, and even accents (Crossley 275). This uncanny similarity promotes the idea that little has changed for African American women from the 1830s until 1976, as “husbands” became new “masters” for them.

Second, the author of the novel shows similarities in white people’s attitude towards black females. As Crossley points out, Butler’s childhood memories influenced Kindred considerably (270). Butler’s mother operated in white society as an invisible woman and was often treated as a non-person (Crossley 271). Little is different for the African American female characters of the novel, as most of them are treated like animals that have to work from dusk until dawn. One of the main Dana’s and, consequently, Butler’s achievements was the depiction of such characters as Sarah as individuals. In summary, the ability to draw parallels between the past and the present from the first-person perspective drives Butler to address the question of slavery through the form of a mixed genre of neo-slave narrative and science-fiction novel.

Historical Context

It is crucial to consider historical context while analyzing Kindred as it offers a deeper understanding of the Butler’s idea. The book was written during feminism’s second wave, thus drawing the attention of the reader to the fact that little had changed from the times when feminism was nonexistent in the United States. Moreover, the novel appeared in the time when science fiction novels depicted African Americans only as secondary characters (Crossley 275). In Kindred Butler creates her main protagonist as a contrast to all of the science fiction main characters of the time.

There also should arise the understanding that the story takes place soon after the Second World War. Between her journeys to the nineteenth century, Dana reads the memoirs of Jewish survivors of the Nazi concentration camps: “Stories of

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beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred” (Butler 116). Here Butler draws parallels between the oppression of the Jewish people during WWII and the constant beating of the enslaved African Americans. In brief, looking at Butler’s novel through the context of historical events adds to the understanding of the novel’s ideas.

Conclusion

While the question of how Dana manages to travel through time will remain unanswered, Crossley states that there is a way to explain why Dana lost her arm (267). While it may seem that Dana’s arm is severed in the zone between past and present for no particular purpose, the fiction has a ruthless logic to its design. Butler could not let Dana return home as a whole after such a wild trip (Crossley 267). Dana’s hand is a symbol of the non-healing wound that slavery left on the body of the American society that will continue hurting throughout all times. The fact that Dana finally returned home on July 4, 1976, the bicentennial of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, also adds to the understanding of the author’s perspective. By this fact, Butler shows that Americans should remember the actual suffering of all the slaves not only through faceless celebrations but also through deep individual thought. In conclusion, the appreciation of the book is facilitated tremendously by the choice of genre and understanding of the historical context.

Works Cited

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2003.

Crossley, Robert. Reader’s Guide: Critical Essay. Kindred, by Butler, Beacon Press, 2003, pp. 265-287.

Donaldson, Eileen. “A Contested Freedom: The Fragile Future of Octavia Butler’s Kindred”. English Academy Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2014, pp. 94-107.

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