Nature vs. Nurture and How Dana's Hopes for Rufus are Crushed
The most interesting relationship in Kindred is Dana’s relationship with Rufus. The complexity of Dana’s feelings towards Rufus make it hard for her to completely condemn all of his actions, however repulsive she might find them. While Dana’s care for Rufus’ life and safety is partially because her lineage depends on him and Alice’s kid, she also finds it hard to view him in an unbiased lens because of how their relationship has formed. When Dana meets Rufus, she meets a real life example of the age-old question of nature vs. nurture. She meets this young slave owner’s son, and by reflex begins teaching him not to refer to black people using slurs, telling him that “I’m a black woman, Rufe. If you have to call me something other than my name, that’s it” (Butler 25). While this lesson confuses Rufus, who thus far has only been exposed to the rampant white supremacy of his time period, he treats Dana with respect and helps her leave his property without being caught by his father, a decision that takes Dana by surprise.
Each time Dana visits Rufus, about five years have passed for him. Despite the large effect that Dana has on Rufus’ mindset about race, he still spends a majority of his life without her, and surrounded by the racism of the antebellum south. Because of this, we see how the things that Dana teaches Rufus get twisted by the society that Rufus lives in, and how her retelling of 1970s racial equality gets muddled up in Rufus’ 1800s white supremacy. This is most visible in Rufus’ coercive relationship with Alice, which was directly inspired by Dana’s marriage to Kevin. He tells Dana that “you want Kevin the way that I want Alice. And you had more luck than I did because no matter what happens now, for a while he wanted you too.” (Butler 163). Rufus makes it clear that his desire for Alice is not only sexual, but he is in love with her and would like to be with her. While his motivation is pure, the only way he can conceive of developing a relationship of any kind with Alice is through force, so he sells her husband away, and rapes her in lieu of a real, consentual relationship. Rufus refuses to see a reality where his relationship with Alice can be anything but violent and coercive. This shows how much his society has "poisoned" him, as Dana puts it.
Throughout Kindred, Dana sees moments that she believes to be signs that Rufus could grow away from the white supremacist society he lives in, hoping that he will one day write his slaves into his will, free Alice and his children, and break the cycle of violence that his family has inflicted, but he refuses to do all but letting his children be free. Ultimately, Dana’s lessons are futile, and the racism of the antebellum south prevails. She realizes this once and for all when Rufus tries to rape her, a line that she believed he would never in his life cross. In that moment, she realizes that though he has respected her for most of his life, he believes that as a black woman, she is ultimately his property, so he can do what he wants and she has to bear it. Once she comes to this realization, she finally feels able to kill him without any remorse. Throughout Kindred, Dana struggles to hold Rufus accountable for his actions, believing that under the racism that has been normalized in his mind, there is room for learning and growth, but as Rufus gets older, and as the system of slavery becomes more beneficial for him, she loses that hope. Eventually, the prevailing racism of the south is too strong for Dana to counteract, and it becomes clear to Dana that no amount of reason or intelligence can break Rufus away from the cycle of racism and violence that came with slavery.
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 2003.
