Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Marc Steinberg

But Butler's point is not a vilification or denunciation of the institution of marriage, even as she portrays Western marriage as a commitment based on ownership and possession, as thereby reflecting some of the insidious elements of slavery. Oppression strongly contains a rebellious spirit such as Dana; forms of psychological and physical oppression are means of control. Dana struggles valiantly for her survival upon her several returns to the past, but near the novel's end, she wonders whether or not she is becoming acclimated to submissiveness. She begins to understand, as many slaves probably did, the difficulty of resistance. Although Thelma J.

Shinn contends that "Dana is not a victim" (211), Butler illustrates that Dana's repeated victimizations indeed render her victimized. Similarly, while Missy Dehn Kubitschek claims that "Dana has experienced victimization without becoming a victim" (44), perhaps one might view Dana as a victim who, at least on the level of survival, is able to overcome her historical subjugation based on race and gender. The novel, like many slave narratives, can be interpreted as a power struggle, an attempt on Dana's part to wrest control of her body and her psyche. One example of such command is her control over her name--her desire to be called Dana instead of Edana. (3) Govan claims that "the implicit struggle for power revolves around explicit conflicts of will and contests of survival a heroine endures" ("Connections" 83). Part of Dana's power struggle with slavery is coming to an awareness of the ways in which she might be considered an object of possession both in the past and in the present.

Dana's psychological dispossession is mirrored by the actual loss of a body part--an arm--that is relegated forever to another, irretrievable era. While Shinn claims that Dana "never becomes an object [but] maintains control of her life" (211), one might recognize a decided loss of control while she is transmogrified back to the past. What physical and psychological control could she really have? Even for Kevin there is a tacit understanding that as his wife, Dana somehow belongs to him, exists as his possession in both the past and the present. When he is transported back in time with Dana, Kevin must confront the direct query of a slaveholder: "Does Dana belong to you now?" (60) His response equates matrimony with possession: "In a way.... She's my wife" (60). Thus, Butler uses Kevin to extend into the present a classic type of human ownership in western civilization--the marital exchange. Even Kevin's proposal to Dana smacks of a kind of servitude when he remarks, "I'd let you type all of my manuscripts" (109). Whether spoken in jest or seriousness, Kevin essentially assures Dana that in marriage she could work for him, that he might even expect that she would work for him.

Kevin is not, however, a villainous character. Butler implies, nonetheless, that Kevin, along with many men, is quietly guilty of a kind of contemporary enslavement that mirrors the notions of servitude apparent in the antebellum South. The line between slavery and marriage is further blurred in the present when Dana's friends and family, oblivious to her time travel, confuse the markings from her beating by Rufus, her white slave owner with marks she suffers from spousal abuse in her marriage to Kevin. Dana's cousin says, "I never thought you'd be fool enough to let a man beat you" (116). Butler goes so far as to suggest an ideological connection between the supporter Kevin and the oppressor Rufus. In one conversation with Rufus, Dana claims, "The words echoed strangely in my head. Kevin had said something like that to me once. I opened my eyes again to be sure it was Rufus" (213-14). The western marital contract posits woman as possession in terms largely of a man's notion that his wife's body is an extension of his own. Control of one's own or another's body consists, of course, not simply of sexual authority; it consists also of an exertion of psychological power over one or more of a variety of aspects of, for, or over someone else's life. Antebellum slavery was, for bondpeople, by definition the threat if not total loss of personal integrity; Alice, after all, claims that her body is not her own, but Rufus's--"He paid for it, didn't he?" (167). And what he pays for is not only an object for his sexual gratification, but also an outlet for his violence and a living vessel over which he theoretically holds psychic dominance.