Summarizing Of Embodied Agency In Kindred By Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a powerful combination of slave narratives and fictional writing. Through the twenty-six-year old Dana Franklin, Butler explores two time periods and two settings. Dana travels back and forth between Los Angeles 1976 and the Maryland plantation of a slave owner in the 19th century in order to save Rufus Weylin, one of her ancestors. To insure her family lineage, and therefore her own existence, the black Dana experiences the life of a slave, witnessing and enduring terror and extreme violence. Butler in her novel touches on different themes including slavery, women’s status, history, and racial dynamics in both times. Dana is hurled into a historically significant moment marked by the submission and the

In that light, certain scholars, such as Bedore in “Slavery and Symbiosis in Octavia Butler's Kindred,” analyze Kindred with a focus on race and gender dynamics. However, others, such as Florian Bast in "'No:' The Narrative Theorizing of Embodied Agency in Octavia Butler's Kindred,” consider Butler’s Kindred to be a contribution to the complex theoretical discussion of agency in the last decades. Bast, in particular, articulates the concept of the body being essential to any discussion of agency. The urgency of my research comes across when connecting these inseparable issues of agency and body control to Dana’s race and gender. Thus, I aim to analyze how the racially dichotomous setting of the “past” affects Dana’s agency by looking at passages from the primary source that interconnect ideas of agency, body possession, gender and race reception. Most importantly, I will argue that claiming her freedom, her agency, and therefore her body, results in her being perceived as monstrous by the white slave-holding community and to another extent the slaves she shares the experience of. Furthermore, I will demonstrate that her agency being perceived as monstrous impacts Dana’s self-representation. Dana’s struggle for survival is a struggle for a monstrously perceived agency that results in an identity

This conversation that Dana has with her husband Kevin foreshadows an important final plot twist. After Alice, who was Rufus’s favorite beloved slave and sexual servant, commits suicide, Rufus turns to Dana, who physically resembles Alice. He acknowledges his sexual attraction toward her by trying to force himself on her. She kills him. As Angelyn Mitchell thoughtfully demonstrates in “Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E. Butler Kindred,” killing Rufus is Dana’s way of maintaining her “psychic wholeness” (59). Indeed, for Dana “to submit to Rufus would be the same as accepting his definition of her as chattel, and this she cannot do.” Instead, she fully implements her decision not to be Rufus’ property. She demonstrates agency by refusing to “relinquish her self-definition” (Mitchell 59). However, Dana did not kill Rufus only to maintain the idea of her agency, the primordial element of her self-definition. In fact, Dana’s struggle to preserve her agency is simultaneously a fight for maintaining control of her body. Bast argues that the body is necessary for any conception of self, and