On Dana's last couple of trips to the past, it seems like she begins to forget that she is from the 20th century. She feels like she is coming home when she sees the Weylin house. This feeling of complacency and belonging upsets her, because she does not want to be comfortable in such a racist and unequal time. The scary thing about her journey is that she is repeatedly lulled into a sense of safety and well-being, only to be dragged out violently by some horrible thing, such as the selling of Tess or Sam. She has a similar relationship with Rufus, in that up until the very end, every time she gets mad at him she forgives him, and forgets how cruelly he can act. She is sadly amazed when he doesn't send her letters to Kevin, and equally surprised when he pulls a gun on her when Kevin returns. Even as Rufus grows up, Dana sill wants to see him as a small, innocent child, who she still can hope will grow up o be reasonable, accepting, and kind to people of all races. What makes it hard for her o adjust to his growing up spoiled and cruel at a whim is that for her only a tiny time has passed between his two ages, while many years have passed for him.
When she doesn't have Kevin there to remind her that she is acting, Dana seems to become more of a slave, even if only in her opinion. If she had been to fully accept being a slave, then and only then would she have become one. However, Dana forces herself out of this complacency and slavery two times, once by cutting her wrists, and the other when she kills Rufus. I believe that if she had not done those, she would have truly become a slave, and become stuck in that state, with little or no hope of escaping. If she had let Rufus rape her, she would have been a slave both in the loss of her physical freedom, but also she would have been a slave to her fear for the outcomes of the other slaves once Rufus was dead. It can be argued that it is good to be a slave to the well being of others, but that is being a slave nonetheless, and that is something that Dana refuses to become.
Just as Dana is lulled into acceptance of her slave status up until the point that she suddenly and violently stops herself, she is drawn into an acceptance of Rufus and all of his flaws, merely because he has a few good traits, such as letting her teach literacy to people, and having bathed for her before he tries o rape her. As with her slavery, Dana violently and suddenly removes herself from this acceptance of Rufus, just as she is beginning to totally accept him. I would note that Alice has the same reaction, but she kills herself instead of Rufus when she finds she is beginning to be okay with him.
As I neared the end of this blogpost, I remembered something interesting. Dana says more than once in the book that if Rufus had ever tried to rape her, either she or he would not live through the experience. With so many similarities between Alice and Dana, it's not shocking that Alice killed herself because of not being able to cope with her and Rufus's relationship and not having the option of killing Rufus.
ReplyDeleteWe like to think of "home" as signifying safety, comfort, family, love, and all manner of good things. It's maybe one of the single most compelling words in the English language, and its associations are almost always positive. (When a home is NOT a warm and welcoming place, we tend to describe it as not being a true home.) But "home" can also refer to the simple fact that this is where Dana keeps returning to; it's familiar, in a way that her new apartment in 1976 is not. It's "home" for the slaves on the plantation, as well. They might hate it in many, many ways, but they have no clear alternative, except in their imaginations--a vague idea of a "north" to which they might perhaps escape, even though to do so would mean leaving behind friends and family and taking enormous personal risk.
ReplyDeleteIn her amazing and devastating novel _Beloved_, Toni Morrison plays with this horrible ambiguity--which reflects so many of the ways slavery perverts people's typical feelings and affections for people and place--by naming the plantation her slaves have escaped from "Sweet Home." They are in the free state of Ohio, after emancipation, and they still have this weird and complex nostalgia for the place they escaped from. It represents "home"--the last place the family was together, for example--even though "home" is the place of pain and nightmares.