Time Travel in Kindred

Themes of Time Travel in Kindred

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Kindred takes an interesting yet not unheard of pretense of looking at the racially motivated culture in the southern united states during the early 19^th century through the eyes of a modern day character of colour. What truly distinguishes it from other works along this theme is the author, Octavia Butler, uses the idea of time travel as a plot device to physically transport the primary characters, who happen to be a mixed raced couple, to this period of time. The idea of time travel comes into play in several key ways in the telling of the story. Most outwardly, looking at the entirety of the text as a cohesive work, the periods of time travel establish natural distinctions between sections of the book, stages in the lives of the individuals, and separate realms of reality between past and present. Most importantly, is established the difference between “reality” and “a distant time and place.” Interestingly enough, whether or not California of the 1970s or Maryland of the 1800s represented the most real “reality” to the main characters actually changed thorough the story. This is perhaps one of the most powerful effects of the use of time travel in the story.

Time travel likewise is not an uncommon theme in fiction, however rather than taking a science fiction like take on an occurrence that is definitely of that realm, Butler completely or nearly completely ignores the practical or scientific examination as to how the event occurs. It is almost as if Dana just accepts it from the very beginning of the work. This is an idea that is further reinforced by the fact that the reader is introduced to the plot at its end, and then brought back ‘round to the start of the duo’s time traveling ways. The ability for the characters to easily come to grips with the idea of time travel is paralleled by the same ease in their ability to integrate themselves into their assigned racial roles of the 1800s, and by doing so accepting the injustices of slavery. Thus, the reader is clearly clued in to just how quickly a modern socially and racially accustomed individual can become jaded by the racial conditions into which they are thrown. Further, the fact that the characters’ time travel cannot be readily controlled parallels their own inability to change or exist outside of the racial barriers established in this period of time.

The No Rape Culture

In the short story, “No Name Woman” by Maxine Hong Kingston, the author is trying to understand her family’s secret past concerning an aunt that had committed suicide. Her family had completely erased her from the family history because the aunt became pregnant while her husband was out of the country. The author presents three possible reasons for why the aunt took her and her baby’s life. Option number one was that she was raped. Option number two was that she had an affair by choice. Option number three was that she was simply interested in having a one-night stand. It is interesting that the author gives the reader these options because it allows the reader to make their own decision about what happened. Assuming the aunt was raped or coerced into a sexual relationship this story symbolizing modern day rape culture. It is seriously so upsetting that there is a such thing as rape culture but it is there, much like a big elephant in the room.

            The predicament of the aunt resembles the situation of a modern day college rape victim in many startling ways. First is that the blame is immediately placed on the victim. The way the village reacted to the aunt’s pregnancy was much worse than how society today would react but nonetheless there are similarities. Automatically the villagers assume that the aunt is guilty of cheating on her husband and begin ravaging everything that could be related to the aunt, “They ripped up her clothes and shoes and broke her combs, grinding them underfoot,” (Kingston 5). The villages vandalize the house, kill livestock, and ruin everything in the kitchen. When the villagers come into the family home and destroy everything, it was like reenacting the rape all over again. A reaction so extreme as this would not happen in our society but it is definitely safe to assume that the victim could be considered guilty of her own rape. When a woman reports a rape she will probably be asked many questions that seem to have nothing to do with her perpetrator. Such as, “were you drinking that night? What were you wearing? How late did you stay out?” By asking these kinds of questions, the victim becomes just as guilty as her abuser, which is ridiculous. In both the story and in modern day rape culture, the victims are automatically assumed to be guilty for another man’s crime.

            Another way that the “No Name Woman” connects to modern day rape culture is through the victim’s rapists. The author suggests that the aunt’s rapist was most likely someone she knew, “Perhaps he worked an adjoining field, or he sold her the cloth for the dress she sowed and wore. His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She obeyed him; she always did as she was told,”(Kingston 5). The author also suggests that he could have even organized the raid to attack the aunt’s home. If this is true it could explain why the aunt had felt so trapped and humiliated that she would kill herself and her baby. On college campuses a victim’s rapist is almost always somebody they knew and thought they were safe around. Because of this the victim is less likely to report her rape. In this regard, both the aunt’s rapist and the rapists of college girls across the nation are able to go free. There are no consequences for the rapists even if the victim decides to speak up later on because the evidence that it even occurred goes away. Even here on our beautiful campus, the rapists that knew their victims do not face as much punishment as rapists who are outsiders. You know those emails you get from Public Safety that inform you of any criminal activity that comes from people that are not affiliated with the University of Redlands? Have you noticed that they are never concerned with within campus conflicts? The University of Redlands wants to be presented as a safe campus and it absolutely is, however there are a few policies that could be improved upon. They don’t even have to use students’ names but if reports were sent out about how a student that had raped another student was suspended for a semester, other students that participate in these awful crimes might realize that there are real consequences. Now if villagers knew who the aunt’s rapist was or if he had even been an outsider, I think that the aunt’s fate may have been very different. Also because she probably did know her perpetrator, she was not able to speak up for herself.

            As I said before, rape culture is much like a big fat elephant in the room that nobody wants to see. I don’t think we want to admit that there is a serious problem because it makes people uncomfortable. This is also how the family sees the aunt’s pregnancy, “She could not have been pregnant, you see, because her husband had been gone for years. No one said anything. We did not discuss it,” (Kingston 3). The family’s avoidance to talk about what was happening may be because once the silence is broken it makes the situation much more involved and real. Kingston is the only person in her family who is willing to share family scandals with an audience. By being open about her family’s past, Kingston is creating a way to talk about the big elephant in the room. By bringing up the issues with rape; she is forcing people to be more open to hearing about it. Then the more exposed they become the more unacceptable rape becomes. But first, people must be able to fully understand the problem before it can be fixed.

The Power of Fear

Anyone and everyone has one fear or another. For me, the simple thought of a spider can send my heart rate through the roof and make me running faster the fastest person on the planet. Others fear falling, reptiles, war, enclosed spaces, and so on. What is it about these thoughts that have the capability of driving someone into madness and paranoia? Fear is a product of the mind that takes into account all of the experiences you have had and attempts to deter you from each respective thing or object. Fear is a complex idea that can be defined in a million different ways, however, it manifests itself in times of warning and danger.

The No Name Woman, written by Maxine Kingston, is about injecting fear into the narrator. The mother of the narrator is fearful that her daughter, the narrator, may be heading down the same path as her aunt. The aunt was written out of the family's history due to her being accused of adultery, and bearing a child as the result. The story makes it a point to illustrate that cheating will not be tolerated in the Chinese culture. The narrator recognizes this and is attempting to make sense of everything the story means and why her mother chose to tell her it. At the end of the story, the narrator is essentially having a battle within herself to determine whether she accepts the aunt, or denies her like the rest of her family. This is when the idea of fear comes into play.

The narrator believes that "The real punishment was not the raid swiftly indicted by the villagers, but the family's deliberately forgetting her." In the statement, the narrator seems bitter trying to understand why someone could possibly forget a family member. However, now the narrator's aunt "haunts" her and she believes that the ghost doesn't "always mean well." The narrator treks back and forth in between whether this haunting is going to turn into a fear or if she is going to honor her aunt by remembering her although she was specifically told not to utter a word by her mother.

At the very end of the story, the narrator states that "the Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute." From this concluding sentence, I believe that the narrator has developed a new fear. That is, she now fears that if she travels along the same path as her aunt that she will too be ostracized by her community and family. From an American point of view, it is hard for me to understand how a culture can threaten others with the fear of being written out of the communities history.

What do you think? Do your fears deter you from doing things?

Brandon Rominger

The Cloth of Life

The Cloth of Life

From: http://cache.lionbrand.com/origpics/70372ada.jpg

Given the vast expanse of subject area and effected people the Holocaust encompasses, it was in some ways refreshing to see a more narrowed yet no less powerful take on the event. Ozick takes the opposite position as most when discussing this event, ascribing an infinite expanse of sorrow and pain to the smallest objects and briefest experiences.

Told from the perspective of a young Jewish mother, Rosa, The Shawl takes the pain and loss that the event has created for her family, and distills it down into a reduction of a family unit to its most basic needs. These needs are not met by captors represented only as “…a helmet, a black body, and a pair of black boots” (Ozick, 9). This description is telling in that it distils those who have control over Rosa into their most basic, robotic format. There are not soft edges, no leniency, and no chance for escape or return to normal. Instead, the only thought going through her head constantly that if she does anything, she will be unequivocally shot. In this way she and her two charges, Stella and baby Magda, are forced to become much the same as their captors-robotic, uncaring, and looking after themselves first, and others second. Clearly baby Magda is unable to do this forced censorship for herself, even the simple act of remaining quiet in the face of captors seems impossible for an infant. Yet Ozick introduces the element of the Shawl, and through this the improbability of life where it by all means should have long been snuffed out exists, in the form of inextricably surviving baby Magda.

Clearly the most prominent and overarching object in the story is the shawl itself. Ozick devotes more description of it or having to do with it than anything else in the text. Not to say that this is saying a tremendous amount due to the brevity of the story alone, but the entirety of the plot does seem to revolve around this one object. For Thus, it should be argued that the shawl in this story is meant to represent this culture, this family, and these individuals most basic humanity in the form of an otherwise common object. However in this place and at this time the shelter that it has to offer, the smells, the textures, are all anything but commonplace. It represents the difference between life and death. With it, even a newborn can miraculously survive, yet without it they may die. This seems to be an allusion to the power and importance of maintaining one’s own culture and who they are despite the current surroundings. The idea of shawl could have been represented by any number of objects; the point is that without it, or by giving in to the soul crushing environment, you are as good as dead

This point is clearly illustrated by the variety of forms that death takes when Stella at long last steals the life giving shell that is the shawl from Magda. Magda immediately wanders directly to her doom on the electric fence, powerfully illustrated by Ozick “her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling” (Ozick 10). Thus the “steel voices” of uniform robotic doom have claimed the first of the family. Rosa looses her voice, her will to cry out, to collect the remains of her child our of fear, fear for the same fate and the end of what remains of life at this point. Thus she suffers another form of death. Finally Stella, taking away her kin’s shawl suffered a form of death. She took the cloth not have been due to her own situation, but out of sheer jealousy for the situation of Magda. She realized that Magda's relative imperiousness to the conditions in concentration camp were directly relating to the fact that she possessed the shawl. Thus taking it would give her an escape physically (cold) and mentally (happiness or remembrance of a time before the war. However, by finally succumbing to an act that she knew would kill her own family member out of selfish disregard due to the dehumanizing situation she was put in, she lost touch with her humanity, and suffered a form of death as well.

The Shawl

As I was re-reading Cynthia Ozick's short story "The Shawl," I couldn't help but think of how the author may have subtly shown the differences of the amount of suffering each character was facing. For instance, Magda was represented with the least amount of suffering, Stella was represented with the most amount of suffering, and Rosa wasn't really characterized as suffering- maybe because it was like she was already dead.
Though, this is just a thought, maybe the author really was trying to characterize the characters with different amounts of suffering. There are a few quotes that show that Magda may have had the least amount of suffering. One being: "She looked into Magda's face through a gap in the shawl: a squirrel in a nest, safe, no one could reach her inside the little house of the shale's windings." Another quote that shows she may have suffered the least is, "Magda laughed at the shawl when the wind blew its corners." There could be many reasons why Magda suffered the least, but what I thought of was that she might be suffering the least because her life has always been this way; she was growing up in the time of the holocaust, and that's all she knew life to be. "Sometimes she laughed, but how could it be? Magda had never seen anyone laugh."
Stella may have suffered the most because she was old enough to potentially remember what life was like before the holocaust. Or maybe she was suffering more because Magda had the shawl, and the shawl protected Magda from the Nazis. Stella seems to be the most bitter about it all, "Rosa saw that Stella's heart was cold." And there's the one quote in the story that perhaps is the most significant quote in the whole story, "Then Stella took the shawl away and made Magda die."
To me, Rosa was not a very significant part of the story, and I think that maybe it's because Rosa did not seem afraid or sad, she seemed like she knew life was over. "Rosa knew Magda was going to die very soon; she should have been dead already..." Another quote that shows Rosa knew that they would die is, "Rosa saw that today Magda was going to die, and at the same time a fearful joy ran in Rosa's two palms..."

The Yellow Wallpaper Ending

        I think I have finally understood the ending of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. At a first look, this story seems like it’s simply about a crazy woman that absolutely loses it at the end. However, once you reread and go into a deeper analysis, you see that is not the case at all. The ending of this story was very perplexing because it seems like it leaves the reader hanging, wondering why John has fainted or if maybe his wife killed him. It’s all very confusing, but to understand the ending you have to go back to the beginning.

         The narrator’s tone in the story is completely different compared to how she speaks to other characters. When she is writing her private thoughts, she has a lot of discontentment with how she is being treated and there is a sarcastic tone in her writing. “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency-what is one to do?”(Gilman, pg. 1). She places emphasis on the fact that her husband is also a physician because it gives him more power and control over her. It justifies why she can’t make her own decisions of how she wants to deal with her condition. Its also important to note that she puts dashes around “a slight hysterical tendency” because it creates more of a sudden cut in the flow of the language compared to if she had just put commas there. The dashes create an annoyed tone and illustrate her frustration and anger with how she is being diagnosed.

         When she is interacting with other characters she does not have this sassiness and succumbs to the rules that John and Jennie set up for her. “But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished,”(Gilman, pg. 7). She has ambitions to do something other than stay in the house and when she asks to fulfill them she cannot even keep herself together long enough to ask for it. Which is completely contradictory to how she writes in private thoughts in her journal. Up until the end of the story it seems there are two different versions of the narrator. The one that writes and has opinions and goals and the one that sleeps all day staring at a wall.

         In the end, she finally is able to keep her cool around John when she is not doing what he wants. “It is no use, young man, you can’t open it! How he does call and pound! Now he is crying for an axe. It would be a shame to break down that beautiful door! ‘John dear!’ said I in the gentlest voice, ‘the key is down by the front steps, under a plantain leaf!’”(Gilman, pg. 15).  In this scene, the narrator has locked herself in the room and John is frantically trying to get in. John and the narrator seem to have almost switched personalities. The narrator is thinking very rationally and has a calm head, while John is making an absolute scene to get into the room. She even calls him a young man, which lowers his authority over her. This is a critical moment because after she tells him where the key is, eventually he listens to what she says and follows her instructions, which is something he has yet to have done in the entire 3 months that they are in the house. When he finally gets into the room and sees that she is simply rubbing herself against the wall while crawling he faints. “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!”(Gilman, pg.15). John had probably assumed the worst, that his wife was trying to kill herself in the room, but discovers that she was simply tearing the wallpaper down. He had made such a fuss to get into the room only to discover that what she was doing wasn’t even that bad. Yet he was still shocked enough to faint. This is probably from the shock that his wife would do anything that would disobey what he said. Then when she ends the story saying that she had to crawl over him every time, that symbolizes how he was always in the way of her wants and needs even after he has no control over her.

            This entire story symbolizes the fight for woman’s rights especially for the time period that this story was written. By writing how a man is in charge of every little detail of her life when he barely understands her, shows how men can’t be the ones that make all the decisions for all women because they do not understand what it is to be a woman. Most men don't even realize that there is an issue with women’s rights until they themselves see it and experience it. Just as John is in the way of the narrator’s path even when he has lost his control over her, men are a hurdle that women must always get through to get what they want. The narrator’s continuous failing attempts throughout the story to gain some control over her life symbolize the difficulty that comes with fighting for your rights. How it is not only difficult to argue with others, but also with yourself. There can be the part of you that wants to have wishful thinking and be taken care of, but there is also the part that says enough is enough, it is time to be independent.

Sylvia Plath

In her poem, “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia Plath invokes frightening images of the holocaust in order to illustrate her feelings of turmoil and acceptance of death. This poem’s main goal is to illustrate the speaker’s comfortability with death, displayed not only by her holocaust metaphors, but also by the fact that she gloats about her ability to not only die, but to do it well. The poem’s speaker first calls up the great tragedy when she states that her skin is “bright as a Nazi lampshade”. This use of holocaust imagery immediately conjures images of death and despair. The fact that the despair belongs to the speaker becomes evident when she refers to her face as a “Jew linen” in the next stanza. The speaker as identified the fact that in the metaphor of the holocaust, she plays the part of the victim. Throughout the poem, she refers to figures often associated with death (God, Lucifer) as “Herr”, which is German for Mister. The speaker furthers the metaphor that she is a holocaust victim by using the same language and titles that holocaust victims would have to use when they met their captors. The speaker goes on to welcome death saying that she’s got “nine lives”, and that she’s already used up two of them. The language refers to one near death experience when the speaker was only a child that was an “accident”, but also to a purposeful attempt on her life in which she tried to “last it out and not come back at all,”. The speaker not only has experience with dying, but welcomes death as a personal talent. She states that she “[dies] exceptionally well,” indicating the fact that she does not meet death with fear, but rather with eagerness. The speaker of this poem is not only comfortable with death, but she welcomes it. Not only does this poem’s speaker welcome death, but she believes there are certain degrees of difficulty to the act of taking one’s own life. She states that “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell,” and then goes on to make a point that it’s the “theatrical” type of death that she prefers.

In “Daddy” the speaker takes up a similar position as she once again relates herself to the part of a holocaust victim. Her father is at first compared to a black shoe in which she’s been forced to live, and then his massive size, from the California coast all the way to the Atlantic, is alluded to before the speaker finally comes out and begins speaking German again. She conjures up images of conquered Poland, and then lists the concentration camps in which she feels like she’s been imprisoned by the presence of her father. She brings forward the image of Adolf Hitler as she refers to her father’s “neat mustache”, and then to his “luftwaffe,” the Nazi air force and Hitler’s most powerful weapon. Her father’s long-lasting effect on her becomes evident when she states that she “though every German was [him]”. The speaker’s relationship to her father is equated to that of a Jew and a Nazi, and because of that she sees every man as a German. The severity of the speaker’s trauma can be noted when she begins to describe the man she found to take her father’s place as Hitler, as she states that she made a model of him with a “Meinkampf” attitude. Here the speaker alludes to Hitler’s famous literary work which started the Nazi movement in Germany. The speaker wraps up her interpretation of the horribleness that was her father by referring to him as a vampire that she has slain. Her resolution seems to be clear as she states that there is a “stake in [his] fat black heart,” indicating that she has slain the demon’s of her father that had haunted her. The speaker’s final opinion on her “daddy” seems to be that she has overcome whatever power he once held over her as she ends her poem simply with the line “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”