Kindred Literary Analysis

Black people were born as slaves, worked their entire lives as slaves, were beaten as slaves, and eventually died as slaves. Black persons in the eighteen hundreds were considered property. Tom Weylin is a white plantation and slave owner, who has a son named Rufus in Maryland off the coast of Baltimore. Dana Franklin, a black women in the present time, 1976, lives in California with her white husband. History ran its course in a way that Rufus and Dana were related, and their connecting depended on each other.Throughout the novel Kindred, by Octavia E. Butler, the author uses Dana to introduce the theme of misery and abuse, as she travels back to the antebellum south and struggles to keep Rufus and herself alive. The power struggle between white plantation owners and black slaves would be seen though beatings and suffering to assert their power over one group of people. In the eighteen hundreds, slavery has not been abolished. Whites, who had power, could do as they pleased over enslaved blacks. When Dana first visits the past, she is greeted with a scene with a white patroller beating a black man in front of his family for not have a free pass(36). After she runs inside with a girl …show more content…
Once, Rufus took Alice from her husband, and used her. From then on, he said he loved her and would make her do anything to fulfill him. Dana was always Rufus’s protector, and this made him want her as a wife- or in that time, and possession. Together, Dana and Alice are Rufus’s ideal woman, and even though Rufus would never sleep with Dana, he sees them as “two halves of the same woman”(228). Once, when Rufus comes home drunk, he says, while looking at Dana and Alice “ Behold the woman ... You really are only one woman.’’ (INSERT PG). This shows they are both inferior to him, since they are women who are black and hold no power over a white