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Dana Franklin Kindred Sparknotes

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The malpractice of doctors during the 19th century foreshadows the horrific human experimentation conducted by Nazi Germany medical experts during World War Two. The Second World War is distinguished by the mass murder of millions of European Jews. This genocide was conducted by Adolf Hitler, and it is primarily characterized by the utilization of those in concentration camps for medical experiments. Doctors in the 1800s lacked the knowledge of medicine and availability of modern technology to provide beneficial diagnoses and perform the most appropriate treatment. This lack of expertise lead to curiosity and eventually experimentation. The Holocaust marked a period of time in which people within the medical field attempted to ignore moralistic …show more content…

Dana Franklin, the narrator of Kindred, consistently and involuntarily travels back in time from the 1970s to the early 1800s whenever Rufus fears for his life. Because the 1800s mark a period of time in which slavery was very prominent, Dana is treated as and plays the role of the average slave woman whenever she is forced back to Rufus’ time. During “The Storm,” Dana finds Rufus laying face down in a puddle of rain. She is instructed to look after Rufus and treat his illness. Because of her relatively advanced knowledge of medicine, when compared to the knowledge of medical professionals during the 19th century, she has the ability to treat Rufus in a more appropriate and effective manner. She quickly realizes that he has malaria. Nigel, a slave at the Weylin Plantation, informs Dana that Rufus has contracted malaria before, but Tom Weylin, Rufus’ father and current owner of the plantation, refuses to call a doctor because “all the [doctor] knows is bleeding and blistering and purging and puking and making [people] sicker than they [were to begin with]” (Butler 202). Dana manages to help Rufus overcome his illness simply with aspirins and time. While she is taking care of Rufus, she also discovers that Alice Greenwood, a slave who is forced into becoming Rufus’ concubine, has lost two children because of the malpractice of medical professionals during the time. Rufus allows the doctor to bleed and purge the two children in hopes of reducing their fevers; unfortunately, this results in the death of their two children (Butler

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she called him uncle, not because they were blood related, but because the King’s and Shelton’s family were so close. Shelton remembers sitting under the kitchen table and listening to the adults talk loudly and angrily about what was going on and the organizing the third march to protest from Selma to Montgomery. Shelton remembers her father being gone a lot due to the movement and her mom being home to take care of her and her sisters. She remembers her father being beaten sometimes due to the protests or being thrown into jail due to the Jim Crow Laws.

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Did you know that some prisoners in concentration camps during WWII were subjected to serious, and sometimes fatal medical experiments done on them? There are three different categories of medical experiments. These experiments were only done to help the Nazis survive during that time. Hitler was originally the one who gave the german physicians permission to do these horrific experiments on innocent people.

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Both Rufus and his father are products of the environment and the time in which they live. They both conform to survive in an environment that requires little compassion for the slaves they own. Tom Weylin recognizes the threat that Dana’s education poses and punishes her for taking the spelling book and reading (Butler 106).

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Octavia E. Butler's novel Kindred tells the tale of American slavery from a more modern-day perspective through time travel. The novel includes many themes and recurring motifs, but it also includes many different characters with different motivations and personalities that all go through some sort of character development. No one character follows a certain archetype commonly found in a lot of other literary works, and it makes the story engaging and more realistic. First off is Dana, the main character of the story. At the novel's start, Dana has experience with doing hard labor to barely make a living, but her development starts after she travels back to the Weylin plantation.

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Analyzing Character Development: Dana Octavia Butler’s novel, Kindred, provides a unique look into slavery in the antebellum South through the eyes of Edana Franklin, a black woman living in the late 20th century, who is suddenly sent through time to the early 19th century where she is suddenly faced with the task of protecting her ancestor, Rufus, from many dangers in order to ensure her existence in the present. Dana begins her adventure with no knowledge of how or why she has been given this responsibility and, as a result, must adapt to her new and unfamiliar surroundings. As the novel progresses, the reader sees Dana’s internal battle with herself as she decides whether or not Rufus is worth saving, or if she should let Rufus die

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1753 Words | 8 Pages

Let us begin with George, Celia’s understandably treacherous slave lover, and his unreasonable demands that set Celia’s case into motion. George’s actions are an example of the common frustration and desperation of slave men who had no control over the sexual abuse of their loved ones by white masters (McLaurin 139-140). His was a reaction to a smoldering attack upon his masculinity, an attack that was a direct result of the dehumanization upon which slavery rested. Because the South was a slave society, this master-slave relationship structure echoed throughout every other aspect of southern life (Faragher, 204 & 215). In Celia’s case, we see this truth through Virginia and Mary Newsom’s position of powerlessness.

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In Kindred, Dana’s narrative entirely revolves around the slaveholding American narrative of Rufus which illustrates the second fiddle notion of Dana’s identities. The fact that she can only time travel when white man, Rufus, mortally needs her demonstrates that her entire story regardless of time is dictated by the White Man (Butler 12). Furthermore regarding time fragmentation, the imagery of Dana’s body being in a constant state of scars, bruises, and general crisis in 1976 and 1819 while Rufus’ body and life continues in a progressive linear state depicts how the white historical narrative continues to strut along time whereas the black, female, American narrative continues to be an unhealed wound discarded alongside white-American-male chronology. This notion is expressed when Dana puts her bodily pain to the side in order to sexually usher love and welcoming to Kevin’s five year journey in Antebellum south (Butler 190). Essentially Dana’s body politics do not exist in a state of paradox because through Butler’s textual portrayal of embodiment, she was and still remains as an

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The science-fiction novel Kindred, written by Octavia E. Butler, is an extremely dramatic and fascinating novel that revolves around Dana, an African American writer living in California in the year 1976 and her mysterious trips to pre-Civil War Maryland. How she is being sent back to that time are unknown, but after the first few trips, she realizes she is being sent back to ensure that her bloodline continues; and this begins with saving a young, white boy named Rufus. This novel forces to reader to be in Dana’s thoughts and actions all the time, as it is written in first person from her point of view. She encounters terrible and repulsive treatments of African American slaves in her trips back, and she is horrified of it. Her “innocence”

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How does this relate to the Holocaust where almost 8 million Jewish people died? In this essay, you will be informed about the main leader of the Nazis, why saying that Hitler only captured Jews is historically inaccurate, concentration camp treatment, and five atrocious experiments done by the Nazi soldiers to innocent prisoners. Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on April 20, 1889. He’d always been a churlish student who was always the leader of

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Dana was a positive part of Rufus’s environment because she was the one who really helped him through the good and the bad. Dana tried to help Rufe reach a realization that slavery was clearly wrong and tried . But in the end not much changed. “What’s he done to you?” ‘Sent me to a field, had me beaten, made me spend nearly eight months sleeping on the floor of his mother’s room, sold people. . .

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175 Words | 1 Pages

Harming not only slaves but free blacks as well in the novel, when Dana is transported back to the moment right after Rufus rapes Alice: Dana attempts to express how she felt about Alice’s right to refuse Rufus sexual advances and he replied, sarcastically saying “‘She must have thought she was a free woman or something”. In the novel, shows the oppression of black women. Dana asks Rufus: “‘...your father whips black people?’” and he replies “‘when they need it’” (Butler 26).

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1272 Words | 6 Pages

Introduction: During the Holocaust, many people suffered from the despicable actions of others. These actions were influenced by hatred, intolerance, and anti-semitic views of people. The result of such actions were the deaths of millions during the Holocaust, a devastating genocide aimed to eliminate Jews. In this tragic event, people, both initiators and bystanders, played major roles that allowed the Holocaust to continue. Bystanders during this dreadful disaster did not stand up against the Nazis and their collaborators.

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(6.4.140)” Recall the character Rufus who was introduced earlier in this report. Rufus was a character that had power over the slaves. That was until Dana murders him. Dana displays dominance and she takes his power away.

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1400 Words | 6 Pages

The Holocaust is a shining example of Anti-Semitism at its best and it was no secret that the Nazis tried to wipe out the Jews from Europe but the question is why did the Nazis persecute the Jews and how did they try to do it. This essay will show how the momentum, from a negative idea about a group of people to a genocide resulting in the murder of 6 million Jews, is carried from the beginning of the 19th Century, with pseudo-scientific racial theories, throught the 20th century in the forms of applied social darwinism and eugenics(the display of the T4 programme), Nazi ideas regarding the Jews and how discrimination increased in the form of the Nuremberg Laws , Kristallnacht, and last but not least, The Final Solution. Spanning throughout the 19th century, racial theories were seen. Pseudo-Scientific theories such as Craniometry,where the size of one’s skull determines one’s characteristics or could justifies one’s race( this theory was used first by Peter Camper and then Samuel Morton), Karl Vogt’s theory of the Negro race being related to apes and of how Caucasian race is a separate species to the Negro race, Arthur de Gobineau’s theory of how miscegenation(mixing or interbreeding of different races) would lead to the fall of civilisation.

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They would take twins, some as young as five years old,and killed them after their experimentation and their bodies were dissected. Doctors in the death camps would drop chemicals into the child’s eyes to see if they would change color, (“Holocaust-Medical Experiments). More experiments that were done to twins would be when they sewed them together,to make Siamese twins, but their hands would get infected, and they were later gassed. The would perform surgeries without anesthesia.

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