The Bestselling Novel: Currents in American History and Culture

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In Octavia Butler's novel, Kindred, Dana, as a black woman in the early nineteenth-century American south, is physically enslaved to Rufus, a white slaveowner. More importantly, however, Dana is connected almost against her will to Rufus through her emotions and through her role as his saviour and caretaker. Whenever his life is in danger, he pulls her back through time to save him. She is literally enslaved to her past--to Rufus as her distant ancestor. This role creates an attachment towards him, which allows her to look past his immoral behaviour and forgive him for his judgment and morals. It is a form of enslavement because she has no choice in forgiving him.
           
When Rufus wants Alice, an enslaved woman and Dana's other ancestor, to come to him willingly, he seeks Dana’s help. At first, she resists, but as a result of her emotional enslavement and devotion to him, she relents, knowing the consequences: Alice’s rape. In Rufus' viewpoint, the rape was inevitable so Dana merely delivers the message, but she understands that in giving in to Rufus' request, she becomes part of it.
 

Rufus: Help me, Dana.
Dana: I can’t.
…
Dana: I got up and went out to find her. (Butler 164)


It seems almost as if his nagging worked on her and she just relented. As a result, Dana’s enslavement to Rufus toys with her morals. However, this incident does not harm their bond as she still continues to care about and love him.

She does acknowledge the bond between them, even though others fail to understand it, such as her husband Kevin.
 

“Kevin got down quickly and hauled me down. He didn’t understand the kind of relationship Rufus and I had—how dependent we were on each other” (Butler 186)

 
It seems as if Kevin is trying to get her away from Rufus and his influence on her, undoing their bond, but she seems very protective of that bond because they are “dependent…on each other.” This is a result of her emotional enslavement to him through her bond to him as his saviour.
 
Rufus himself becomes possessive of Dana and develops an animosity towards Kevin for sharing any emotional association with Dana.

“That Kevin!”
“Yes.”
“I wish I had shot him.” (Butler 256)

And as Rufus pushes the boundaries of their relationship, culminating in his attempted assault of Dana (Butler 259-160), we can see that the relationship has become borderline oedipal, meaning the desire to kill one’s father (Kevin?) and sleep with the mother.  This development implies that Dana has been enslaved and giving in to his wishes as his caretaker to the point of fulfilling an Oedipal complex. She even comes close to giving in by “[forgiving] him for even this” (Butler 259).
 
This looks a lot like the Oedipal complex in the movie Psycho, where Norman is threatened by his mother being with other men. At the end of the movie, the psychiatrist evaluates Norman's murderous motivations: "For years the two of them lived as if there was no one else in the world. Then she met a man and it seemed to Norman she 'threw him over' for this man. That pushed him over the line" (Hitchcock). This explains Norman and his mother's relationship and correlates to Rufus' emotional entitlement to Dana. This emotional bond builds towards Dana's physical and emotional enslavement.



Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2009.
Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, performance by Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh and Vera Miles, Universal Pictures, 1960.

                                                                                          
 
                                                                                           
 

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