Analysis Of Octavia Butler's Kindred

Jenna Caddy

Mrs. Cross

AP Literature and Composition

15 May 2023

Kindred

AP books earn their classification by fitting certain criteria that make the novel have meaning beyond the surface level. These novels contain stories that carry a significant message with them, sometimes more clear than others, to bring attention to the importance of an issue. Octavia Butler, for example, uses the story of an African American woman and her white husband traveling back in time to antebellum South to create a novel criticizing the inherent oppressions of society. Due to her efforts to create a meaningful novel, Octavia Butler’s Kindred classifies as an AP book due to the novel’s ability to access multiple time periods as the book transitions between two

Though Dana is highly educated in her own time, her studies of history do nothing to prepare her for the reality of living in the time. Harriet Tubman, being that she had suffered through a lifetime of the oppression of slavery, was able to use her own intelligence of her experience to escape and aid others in doing so. This comparison between the educated and uneducated shows the importance of experience aiding in a true understanding of a situation. “Butler’s Kindred suggests, in fact, that ignoring the similarities between the past and present is not only pointless but dangerous” (Mitchell) due to the persistence of racism in society. Dana understands racism as she deals with it in her relationship with Kevin in her own time; however, her knowledge of history’s systematic racism only aids her in understanding how to deal with her antagonists, not how to escape from their oppression. Dana is able to appease her tormentors, but she never truly escapes as she had not lived in the time long enough to fully comprehend every aspect of it, specifically because she was said to have acted like she was white. While she feels somewhat at home on the Weylin plantation,

The novel mostly takes place in antebellum South where the institution of slavery still existed. Though Dana deals with racism in her own time, her oppression intensifies when she travels back in time to the extent that she is now perceived as an object. Her view of herself was forced to alter to adhere to the times that she found herself in when she claims, “To slaveholders and patrollers, I was just one more [slave], worth so many dollars. What they did to me didn’t have much to do with me personally” (Butler 179). Dana had to become aware of her situation in the sense that in the eyes of her oppressors, she was not a person but property. Butler uses this notion of objectification to emphasize the severity of racism in the antebellum South. Butler utilizes the story of an African American woman in the antebellum South to spread the message about the cruelty of slavery from a perspective that sees the torment for what it is as Dana’s own race automatically puts her at a disadvantage against white people, like Rufus and even her husband, in the past society. She is viewed as property by default being a black woman while Kevin earns respect simply by being white, acknowledged by assumption as her