I'm still not really sure how to answer that question. Sometimes I feel like Rufus must be totally wrong, even if to him it seems excusable. Other times I want to think he can't help but be a product of his time.
But what I find interesting in Kindred is that Dana seems to almost shift her position on this issue as time goes on.
For example, on her second trip back when Dana is almost raped by the patroller. Her response is immediately to defend herself, running and wrestling and eventually clubbing him (of course, minus the important first opportunity when she chooses not to gouge out his eyes). She believes rape is totally and completely wrong, a normal viewpoint in 1976 America, and so she flares up against it with a lot of anger and desperation.
She says:
He reached out and ripped my blouse open. Buttons flew everywhere, but I didn't move. I understood what the man was going to do. He was going to display some stupidity of his own. He was going to give me another chance to destroy him. I was almost relieved.
He tore loose my bra and I prepared to move. Just one quick lunge. (42-43)On her last trip, Dana is also almost raped.
He pushed me back on the pallet, and for a few moments, we lay there, still. What was he waiting for? What was I waiting for?
He lay with his head on my shoulder, his left arm around me, his right hand still holding my hand, and slowly, I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this. So easy, in spite of all my talk. (259-260)Dana realizes that she has become so accustomed to 19th century ideas about rape and a man's right to do things to his slave women that she is in danger of silently accepting a rape. She had told Alice that she wouldn't go to Rufus, but she is right on the verge of giving in.
Dana of course then kills Rufus for trying, so at the last second it appears that her 20th century ideas about rape and what is acceptable behavior kick in and she physically defends herself. But it is dangerously close. Life in her ancestors' world almost took her from willing to defend herself from rape to silently accepting it. Almost.
1 comment:
While Rufus's father (and, by extension, his society more generally) might not condemn his rape of Alice (other than to question his absurd devotion to one particular woman), *Alice* certainly doesn't take this kind of relativist view. She *feels* its wrongness in her bones, just as all of the slaves on the plantation feel the wrongness of slavery itself. She makes a calculated decision to take the course of least resistance to avoid further physical punishment, which is an extension of the logic many slaves employ day to day. But this isn't the same as accepting it as "right." Her suicide, in this light, can be seen as a moral judgment on Rufus--her only way to assert control over her own body.
Post a Comment