Innocence In Octavia E. Butler's Kindred

The SF genre accomplishes the subversion of normative gender roles through utilizing cognitive dissonance. Gender roles and relations tend to be culturally and societally relevant. The values upheld by a society are associated with their individual gender constructs. As seen through Bloodchild, the creation of an alternate reality provides the opportunity for the redefinition of gender roles. The Tlic have deliberately chosen to pursue a matriarchal society. While it is difficult to redefine biological sexual roles in reality, it is still possible to use this narrative to explore gender relations. Through role reversal, Octavia Butler provides a male context of female understanding of the world. If males are more sympathetic to the struggles

In Octavia Butler’s “Dawn” the protagonist Lilith serves as a mother figure in a variety of ways. Lilith is one of the few humans that have survived a nuclear war, and has been rescued by an alien race named the “Oankali.” These mysterious aliens have elected Lilith to lead the first group of humans in their return to Earth. In “Dawn” Lilith is both a literal mother to a deceased son Ayre, and a metaphorical mother to both a young boy named Sharad, and the group of humans. However, Lilith does not behave in ways in which we typically expect of mother figures; instead of a soft and gentle character we see a strong and independent female character who is in fact a mother, but not exclusively defined by motherhood. This is not to say Lilith is a “bad” mother, but rather an unconventional mother. Throughout “Dawn” Butler uses her characterization of Lilith to challenge societal stereotypes of mothers and to call into question what we consider maternal.

Question:Critically analyze the environment surrounding Rufus. How does his environment shape him? Positively? Negatively? Both?

In his letter he described his life as an indentured servant as one where he has nothing to comfort him but sickness and death. The life that he was living in colonial Virginia was one where you couldn’t escape or else you will be captured. Attempting it could of cause him to die, therefore he hoped his parents brought his escape but with his parents being poor there was no way of escaping the life of an indentured servant. Having no escape as an indentured servant, he wrote to his parents a letter asking that his parents bought out the indenture. In his letter, he wrote that he was trapped in a place filled of diseases that can make any body weak and leave you with lack of comfort and rattled with guilt. Those feelings constantly controlled

Ever wonder what it's like to have a changing relationship with a plantation owner's son back in the 1800’s? Dana Franklin is a younger African-American woman married to Kevin Franklin who is a middle-aged man. Dana travels from California in 1976 back to the early 1800’s whenever Rufus is in trouble. Rufus is a plantation owner son and is also the father of Dana’s ancestor. Dana’s travels are random; she gets lightheaded and dizzy when she is about to travel. In Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred, Dana and Rufus’s relationship is intricate in the following ways: Dana is more of a guardian to Rufus, Rufus and Dana become companions, and he finally starts acting like a slave owner while she starts acting like a slave that Rufus owns.

In Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, Rufus Weylin is one of the main characters who undergoes a lot of change throughout the novel, making him a round character. A round character is defined as a “major character in a story who encounters contradictory situations and undergoes transformation during this phase. Therefore, the characters does not remain the same throughout the narrative, making their traits difficult to identify from beginning until the end (LiteraryDevice).” The reader, along with Dana, follows Rufus’s growth throughout some major points in his life, from a young boy who forms a bond and friendship with Dana, to when he grows up to be a racist man who ultimately attempts to rape her. However, it is evident that Rufus’s ideology

Gan is the narrator of Octavia Butler’s science fiction “Bloodchild.” He is a teenage boy who lives on an alien planet that his ancestors settled on due to persecution. The Tlics are the main residents of this planet. They are big insect-like beings that need live hosts for their parasitic young. T’Gatoi is one of them. She is the Tlic politician that is in charge of the preserve that Gan’s family and several other humans live in. This ensures the safety and continual growth of the human species while still allowing access to their bodies for Tlic impregnation. N’Tlic is the name chosen for these impregnated humans, and T’Gatoi selected Gan to be hers three minutes after his birth. Gan starts his narration during one of T’Gatoi’s regular visits to his family where she gives them intoxicative sterile Tlic eggs. Later that night, T’Gatoi finds an N’Tlic man in

A normality in the literary world is that texts deeply nestled in the crosshairs of biopolitics, gender, nationalism, and other identity particularities often fall victim to one sided and dogmatic cultural critiques. Critic after critic find difficulty regarding how to analyze and essentially read a novel where intersectionality is intrinsic to its framework such as Kindred, because it does not fit the fairly common singular literary theory mold. This notion is articulated and defended in “"Some Matching Strangeness": Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler's "Kindred"” where Robertson explores Butler’s usage of Dana’s body to confront universal truths and to cement the idea that Dana is in a historical paradox due

Harming not only slaves but free blacks as well in the novel, when Dana is transported back to the moment right after Rufus rapes Alice: Dana attempts to express how she felt about Alice’s right to refuse Rufus sexual advances and he replied, sarcastically saying “‘She must have thought she was a free woman or something”. In the novel, shows the oppression of black women. Dana asks Rufus: “‘...your father whips black people?’” and he replies “‘when they need it’” (Butler 26). Rufus does not see any wrong in his father’s violence toward black people, instead he accepts this as normal gesture because he has accepted the racist idea that blacks are inferior to whites and that it is acceptable for whites to abuse them, even saying that they sometimes “need” to be whipped.

The characters are very important in Octavia Butler’s science fiction short story “Bloodchild”. A character is a person presented on a dramatic or narrative work. When it comes to the story of “Bloodchild”, most people would agree that gender roles are reversed. This agreement may end, however, on the question of character in Butler. It is safe to say that understanding the characters, who they are and what they do, help explain the theme of gender roles. Change in gender roles can be seen in “Bloodchild” by the position that the female character T’Gatoi has over the other Tlics, the way characters act, female characters killing and providing food for their family, and the fact that the female body does not carry the Tlic eggs, the male body does.

Relationships in which one person’s autonomy is not valued are destructive. For example, when Dana travels back to the Antebellum South for the fourth time, she finds Rufus being beaten by a man as a woman watches from a distance, wearing a torn dress. Dana learns that the woman is Alice, and the man beating Rufus is Isaac, Alice’s husband. She convinces them to leave, and when nursing Rufus back to consciousness, learns that Rufus was beaten because he tried to rape Alice after she refused to marry him. Shocked, Dana protests that Alice had the right to say no to Rufus, but Rufus angrily proclaims, “we’ll see about her rights” (Butler 123). By disregarding Alice’s right

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a science-fiction novel that depicts the life experiences of a young black woman named Dana, who is given the task of traveling back in time to the era of slavery to save her ancestors, but is unjustly oppressed and has most, if not all, of her rights stripped away from her simply due to her race and gender. As a result, the most prominent overarching theme of the novel is the inequality of power and social status given to people of varying gender and race, and the struggle that those people must go through to gain as much freedom and equality as possible. It is apparent that in both

In Kindred, Octavia E. Butler talks about a young African American aspiring writer that goes on a dangerous journey to Maryland in the eighteen hundreds. The eighteen hundreds was a time where slavery was a common thing in America. Dana, the main character, has a connection with a young white boy from the eighteen hundreds, named Rufus. As the story unfolds, we learn that Rufus would bring Dana back in time when he was in danger. Unfortunately, Dana’s experience in the eighteen hundreds was far from an adventure. Dana experienced grief, loss, and anger, due to the way Weylin, the slave owner and Rufus’s father, treated African Americans. To make matters worse, Dana unintentionally brought his husband, Kevin, back in time with her and left

Using time travel, Octavia Butler creates a new view of racism in her novel, Kindred, by having Dana experience the life of a slave from an outsider's perspective. Though Dana’s present is far from a race utopia, it has drastically improved the problems of the past. In the past, Dana is surprised to find herself growing used to the injustices which surround her. Overall, traveling gives Dana first-hand experience at how slavery warped slaves’ perception of freedom.

History does repeat itself. For instance, discrimination will always occur. Just because slavery stopped, does not mean forms of it will stop also. People are still negative towards people with different skin colors than them. Skin color is really deep for some people. They treat them differently than if the person has the same skin color as them. Things that happened in the past, will still be brought up now. It is still forms of slavery now, it is just kept quiet.