Blog Assignment 5

Octavia Butler’s Kindred is a story about relationships – familial, romantic, platonic, and completely messed up. The setting of the novel highlights the interracial relationships in particular, and weaves together the lives of those who were treated like different species in the southern American 1800’s. While Dana and Kevin had a successful and loving marriage as an interracial couple from 1976, Rufus and Alice, though they had children together, were a wretched case of loneliness and despair. The relationship between Rufus and Alice and their relationship with Dana interested me in particular because of the way they all reflected each other, particularly Alice and Rufus. Alice and her plight seemed to foreshadow much of Rufus’ life right up to his death in an accelerated and direct fashion.
                Dana, as we discussed in class, was much like a motherly figure to Rufus. She was a caretaker and a positive influence when he had none in his own parents, and her main purpose through this adventure was to save Rufus from life threatening harm. This responsibility spilled over when Alice was caught and attacked until she was barely hanging on to life, and it was up to Dana to restore her health and mental well-being. Throughout the chapter “The Fight,” Dana watches Alice grow from an infantile state to her normal mentality once again. Alice’s growth took only a few pages to describe, while the entirety of the book is meant to follow Rufus’ growth literally from childhood to his death. One of the main things that connected the two was the description Dana gave of them being similar when they were angry, such as when Alice screams at Dana “’Doctor-nigger,’ she said with contempt. ‘Think you know so much. Reading-nigger. White nigger!” and just a few pages later Rufus  says to Dana as well “you think you’re white! You don’t know your place any better than a wild animal” (Butler 160, 164). Dana says of Alice “she was like Rufus. When she hurt, she struck out to hurt others” (Butler 165). This comparison comes up several other times in the novel, and draws a line connecting two characters from entirely different backgrounds with extremely different emotions toward each other. Rufus’ love for Alice was desperate and obsessive while Alice’s hatred for him was oppressed and justified, and somehow these two were forced to coexist in a fiercely destructive environment for both of them.
                That destruction was seen when Alice finally committed suicide, shortly followed by Rufus’ indirect suicide. Two of the most awkward relationships in the story – between Alice and Rufus along with Rufus and Dana – come together as the unstable couple dies. The types of relationships these characters have are rarely or never encountered in our lives today, and this novel illustrates them brilliantly as Rufus breaks apart upon his strange counterpart’s death. Alice’s suicide was not only a suicide, but an indirect murder as she knew it would completely destroy Rufus to discover her hanging, while Dana committing the actual murder of Rufus was not truly murdering him but simply carrying out his own suicide. This indirect sense of murder and suicide both Alice and Rufus exude ties them together even in death, despite the hatred and violence that passed between them in their lives.


Works Cited: Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston : Beacon Pr, 2009. Print.

Blog Four (Quiz #6)

The catharsis as I see it happens in the hotel scene between Bob and Madge. It was manifested physically in their little wrestling match, followed by Bob running away with the urge to puke. Their past or future interactions were made irrelevant by this defining scene, because that was the point at which Madge claimed total power over Bob - she could have screamed at any moment, but she did not. This leads to Bob's anagnorisis, where essentially he admits that Alice's ideal lifestyle is right and it would be easy to go on living with the knowledge that he must be a sub-par human being. Yet in his discussion with Alice he also admits that he cannot accept that into his life. Though he becomes aware of the futility of his hostile attitude toward white people, he refuses to change his ideology for the sake of comfort. I personally have a hard time seeing the peripeteia, because Madge wins in the end, just as she was meant to since the catharsis. Perhaps the fact that Bob should have run away with Alice and lived happily ever after but instead found himself running straight into Madge can be seen as the tragic but necessary twist.

Blog Assignment Two

A section of the novel Ruth Hall that we had not looked at very closely in class was Ruth's visit to Katy in chapter 63, where Katy remains at her grandparents' house in a miserable state. Though a very brief chapter, there are several points raised here such as Katy's mistreatment and Ruth's unending perseverance, however the one that caught my eye was at the very end of the chapter, when the doctor remarks about Ruth "she's fit for nothing but a parlor ornament, never was. No more business talent in Ruth Ellet, than there is in that chany image of yours on the mantel-tree, Mis. Hall. That tells the whole story" (166).
                The reason I liked that particular statement was because it not only illustrated a generational misogyny regardless of kinship as the doctor manages to not only mistreat Katy in the same scene, but also insult Ruth and his own wife in one go. The doctor is always teasing Mrs. Hall, pointing out that her hair is false or generally telling her she is mistaken. While he doesn't seem to be particularly cruel most of the time, in this part he compares her to Ruth, whom they have made out to be the ultimate bane of their existence. It is completely tasteless and derogatory to his wife to compare her talent to Ruth's, and he makes the comment casually and definitively. Despite the power Mrs. Hall tries to establish over Harry, over Ruth, over Katy and anyone she can get her hands on, her husband can easily put her back in her place with a few words of discouragement. His unkindly-spirited but not necessarily actively evil character actually offsets Mrs. Hall's active destruction to her environment by creating a completely unquestionable power greater than her. This adds to the idea that no matter how much power a woman might try to attain, in that society and especially in that particular home, there will always be a man who can take away that power in an instant if he sees fit. 

Blog Assignment One

As far as my reading of Linda Grasso's "Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's 'Ruth Hall' and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America goes, I found the lack of the author's input and ideas rather unattractive, but Grasso uses Elizabeth Cady Stanton's analysis of Ruth Hall to make several interesting connections. The most outstanding of these is the relationship of the women's rights movement to the abolitionist movement. Grasso explains that women used the abolitionist arguments to organize their own outcry of activism, and that Stanton directly related the plight of women to that of the slave. Grasso also provides Caroline Dall as a contrasting opinion, mentioning that Dall not only believes that Fanny Fern is disrespecting her male family members in her writing but also lacks talent. This idea of respect and a “ladylike” resistance to oppression strongly contradicts Stanton’s idea that a woman’s anger is key in expressing her need for liberty, in writing and in protest.

One part that stood out to me in stark contrast to the points Grasso’s essay was in Chapter 47 of Ruth Hall, when Mr. Skiddy’s wife walks out on him, leaving Mr. Skiddy with their nursing baby. There are plenty of examples of perfectly kind and generous men in Ruth Hall and of course the odious mother-in-law Mis. Hall to give a perfect example of a wretched woman – therefore in my interpretation the novel is not quite as extremely feminist or activist as the essay suggests. The reason the scene with Mr. Skiddy caught my attention was because of the phrase at the end of the chapter that calls him “the victimized man” (Fern 177). In a way, this could be seen as ironic and almost sarcastic in making out the man’s life to have taken a tragic turn just because he now has to care for an infant. Because of the tone of the rest of the story however, I chose to see this part more as an equalizer, showing that a man could just as easily as a woman be left in utter distress with the loss of a partner. The parallel to Ruth’s situation drew more of a relationship to the destructive results of corruption within a family unit rather than an allusion to the struggle of women in particular.

Anger in the House: Fanny Fern's "Ruth Hall" and the Redrawing of Emotional Boundaries in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Linda Grasso

Studies in the American Renaissance , (1995), pp. 251-261

Published by: Joel Myerson

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30227673

Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall. Mason Brothers 1855. Harvard University. Sep 23, 2005.

http://books.google.com/books/reader?id=R2R5cJtXkxAC&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA178.w.1.1.0

Hello! I'm Huma Sayiida, this is going to be my ENG 260 blog page. Testing, testing, ready for liftoff.