If I Was You, I'd be You, Too
We've been talking a lot in class about the question of self - where does performance become the self? Kindred seems to assert that there is a very fine line, if there is a line, between the self and the performance. We see this assertion when Dana feels shame coming out of Kevin's room in the morning at the Weylin house, when Weylin winks at her - her "act" has meshed with the reality of the world she's living in, and she's internalized feelings which she never thought she could have. We see this also in the (slightly?) sympathetic portrayal of Weylin and Rufus, which complicates our perceptions of slaveowners by forcing us to view them as real people. In some sense, not only does the novel raise the question of "what would it be like to live in another time period, and what happens to our sense of self" but also "what would it be like to be someone else?" In a way, the first question turns into the second one when Dana sympathizes with Rufus, when she feels shame. It suggests that identity is not fixed. Had any of us lived in the ante vellum period, we would all like to think that we would be abolitionists. Kindred challenges those notions by showing the effects that time travel has on Dana and Kevin, on their views of themselves and their views of slaveowners like Weylin and Rufus, and even slavery itself - it shows the potency of one's environment in shaping their beliefs and character.
This theme made me think of two things, the first of which I'm not really sure how to fit it in with the narrative. The first thing it made me think about was acting and method actors, who consciously try to become the characters they're playing even when they're not on set. In a sense, Dana is doing this involuntarily - in order to survive in 1819 she has to "play" the character of a slave, which effectively turns her into a slave, doing the same work as slaves, suffering the same abuses and conditions, and living in the same culture. What's the difference between her act and slavery? This reminded me of Man on the Moon, in which Jim Carey plays comedian Andy Kaufman. Carey got so into character that he adopted many of Kaufman's character traits, annoying directors and not cooperating the same way Kaufman would. He embodied Kaufman so well that Kaufman's family actually went to meet him while he was working on the movie, and talked to him like he was Kaufman. Carey was "playing" Andy Kaufman but had so many of the same mannerisms that he talked to Kaufman's real daughter as if he was really Kaufman, and that was therapeutic for her. That's crazy to me. At that point, what is the difference between Carey and Kaufman? Is it context? To me, this means that if I was born you, or anybody else, I would be you - there would be no difference between us besides the world we are born into. I agree with Kindred's assertion that any person is only made up of their circumstance, and if you put yourself in the same circumstances, or try hard enough to imagine those circumstances like Carey did, you can effectively "become" another person. Unfortunately, this means that we have to re-realize history: we would all love to say we would have been abolitionists, but Kindred complicates the reality of that statement.
The other thing I thought about was how Butler is using this idea. If in some way Kindred asserts that we would be anyone else if we were born them, then how does this assertion interact with our ideas about slaveowners? I think that Butler uses this idea not only to make slaveholding characters (slightly) more "sympathetic," but also to criticize the entire institution of slavery for its complete lack of ability to see slaves as people, much less as people who we could be had we been born them. These two concepts almost seem to oppose each other. Where do you think Butler going with this idea? Is it perhaps a similar thing to what Vonnegut does with war in Slaughterhouse Five, in that he makes it less glamorous and evil, in order to truly criticize it? In a way, making slaveowners feel more like people that the reader could have been born as makes the reader even more nauseous about slavery - they are forced to try to think about and understand the completely sick, horrific mentalities that justified the abuse, rape, and oppression of many people, as opposed to immediately reject it, which in some ways keeps them from understanding what was so evil about slavery. Does that comparison make sense? Do you think it's true? The analogy isn't perfect, but I think Slaughterhouse Five and Kindred have a lot in common in that they are sharp criticisms of historical events which do not present themselves like that on the surface.
When Rufus says he wishes that he was born in (then) modern times, so he could marry Alice because he “loved” her— that was when I really began to look more at the what ifs. Like what if Rufus really had been born in the 1970s, he probably wouldn’t be the raping, violent, racist we see in the book.
ReplyDeleteAlong with Jack's idea, another factor pushing this idea is Kevin. I remember worrying when Dana returned to the present without Kevin, right after that scene with the children mimicking an auction, that when Dana returned to the past again Kevin would be changed for the worse. He would have been brought into the environment and sort of take on the character he was pretending to be. It was reassuring to see him again and also to hear one of the other slaves tell Dana that sometimes Kevin treated black people like white people.
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting Xanthe. I like your point about the difference between being yourself and being someone else pretty muhc boils to context and circumstances. The commentary which Butler makes about this throughout Kindred is all at once fascinating, disheartening, and frightening, and I think your post described that really well.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting post! It's really hard to imagine what living in another time period would be like because, as you said, our identities are largely shaped by our environment. I like that you included the example about Kaufman because I think it draws similarities to how Dana was supposedly acting as a slave, but to some extent she started identifying as a slave more.
ReplyDeleteI think the environment stuff is interesting, I think it's important to not make the claim that the environment is totally responsible for us, because then Rufus can be forgiven as a victim of his environment--which I think Butler would disagree with. I think we can take that there is some environmental stuff, but also that there were people who lived in that time and were abolitionists, and therefore Rufus must be responsible for his actions because not everyone in the environment became like him.
ReplyDeleteI think also about the sympathetic thing, that it's not just that the slave-owners are "sympathetic" but that Rufus clearly sees Alice as a human. And yet he still owns her. It points to one problem with the society which is that Slave-owners would have been incapable of interacting with their slaves and not understanding on some level that they were different from Cattle or some other animal, and yet they still owned them and gave them no rights--which is perhaps more evil.
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