When Dana and Kevin travel back in time together, Dana
explains to Rufus that they are both from the future and are a married couple.
I understand that Dana tells Rufus this to help explain her strange arrivals
and to tell him who Kevin is, however, I think that what she told him might
have later led to a misunderstanding. While back in time together, Dana and
Kevin assume the roles of master and slave to blend in and protect themselves.
This move, however uncomfortable it makes us feel, also makes sense. However,
the combination of these two actions can be misleading from Rufus’s
perspective. He was told that they were a married couple but then sees the
master-slave dynamic between the two. Sure, he knew that Dana was educated and
that mixed-race marriage was a thing in the future but he mainly just saw the
act of master and slave. I know he got to see them sometimes not really acting,
but there was still a lot he didn’t understand about their relationship.
As we have
discussed in class, the relationship between Rufus and Alice is a master and
slave relationship, but it’s somewhat different. Rufus does seem to care about
Alice and wants her to care about him. He doesn’t just want any slave, he wants
Alice. However, he still treats her as a slave and as his property. He has her
come sleep with him each night. This reminded me about how Dana went in Kevin’s
room each night as well because Kevin didn’t want her to sleep in the attic but
it looks different from an outside perspective. I feel like Rufus, even if he
isn’t consciously trying to all the time, is trying to have a relationship like
Dana and Kevin. However, with their acting and his limited knowledge, Rufus and
Alice have a terrible relationship.
The thing is though, I don’t think
that providing Rufus with more or less information about the future and who
they are would change the outcome. With more information, he might just get
even more confused and with less information, he would still reflect his time
period in some way. I don’t see how Dana doing something different would change
it for the better. I feel like there’s only so much she could do with her
occasional influence on Rufus, who was already trapped in the system and
influenced by his time period. I think that the relationship between Rufus and
Alice was bound to be bad in some way and there was little that could be done by Dana to
change it.
I agree that Dana and Kevin are modeling a master-slave relationship to Rufus, but I do not really blame them, since they have to "fit in" with these times to survive. Rufus almost looks up to Dana in some ways and I think he wants to emulate her. However, the fact that his "love" for Alice is not socially accepted without rape and abuse is disturbing. One question I kept wondering about was why Dana did not tell Rufus he is her ancestor. I like how you addressed this, but I think things might have changed because Rufus would be aware of certain time paradoxes. From an end-of-the-novel perspective, this could have saved Dana her arm and much of the emotional and physical suffering she faced. Hopefully, she can move forward after the events of the novel.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't realized until our conversation in class that Dana and Kevin served as Rufus' model for what he wanted in a relationship with Alice and that definitely disturbed me a lot - I also think it disturbs Dana a lot. We know, of course, that Dana and Kevin have a much healthier dynamic than the one that they "acted" with the master-slave one, but to Rufus it looked already different enough compared to the relation his father had with his slaves, and it was definitely something he wanted with Alice. I do agree that Rufus and Alice's relationship was bound to be bad, though, for the reasons you mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought too much about how Dana and Kevin's relationship was a model for Rufus. Rufus had a lot of bad influences around him, so I agree that his relationship with Alice was bound to be awful. It's wierd to think about how what we see of Dana and Kevin's relationship is so different from Rufus's perspective.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very good point: Rufus seems to possess and grasp the abstract information that Kevin and Dana are married, but he doesn't actually see them playing out the more egalitarian kind of relationship we see in 1976 L.A. Instead, they have to act out the charade where she sneaks in and out of his room at night, actually feeling "shame" when Weylin catches Dana leaving the room, essentially taking on the local social construction of the slave as a "favorite" of her master. It at least becomes *thinkable* for him to imagine a white man and black woman married to each other in a mutual relationship, but the only way he can even attempt to manifest it in his 1810s context is to force himself on Alice. There's no context in which a "mutual" relationship can exist between them, and indeed we see a repeat of Dana sneaking off to Kevin's room when Alice goes "willingly" to Rufus (after Dana talks her into it).
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