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HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE SCIENCE FICTION
OF OCTAVIA ESTELLE BUTLER
A Thesis
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the degree Master of Arts In the
Graduate School of The Ohio State University
by
Ben Davis Jr., B. S. Ed.
* * * * *
The Ohio State University
1992
Master's Examination Committee:
Christian K. Zacher
Patrick B. Mullen
Approved by
~ef~College of English
ACKNOWLEOOEMENTS
My sincerest thanks, appreciation, and gratitude to everyone who
has encouraged me and helped me realize this graduate thesis. To my
very first literature professor, the late Dr. Stanley J. Kahrl, my
mentor and friend who instilled in me the drive for excellence and
love for the written word; Dr. Christian Zacher, who took a chance on
me to guide me through my research and my writing on this project;
Dr. Patrick Mullen, my second reader and guide; my closest friends,
Albert, David, James Daniels and James Moorer, who are always
behind me; my brothers Michael and Thomas, whose love and
admiration I will forever cherish; Viola Newton, who is both a
wonderful colleague and friend; and Octavia Estelle Butler, the
beauty and magic of whose words have inspired me with the means
to do my work.
iii
VITA
April 28, 1962 Born - Cleveland, Ohio
1990 - 1991 Graduate Research Associateship,Ohio State University,Columbus, Ohio
FIELDS0 FSTUDY
Major Field: English
Studies in: Twentieth Century American Literature,African American Literature, and Science Fiction
iv
TABLEOFCONTENTS
DEDiCATION ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii
ViTA iv
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER IN THE SCIENCEFICTION OF OCTAVIA BUTLER 1
II. SLAVE HISTORY AND TIME TRAVEL IN KINDRED 9
III. RACE, GENDER AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN WILDSEED 28
IV. KINSHIP AND RACE IN MINDOFMYMIND 55
V. CONCLUSION: BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN OCTAVIA BUTLER'SSCIENCEFICTION 68
LISTOFREFERENCES 77
v
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCllON:
HISTORY, RACE AND GENDER
IN THE SCIENCE FICTION OF OCTAVIA BUTLER
Octavia Estelle Butler's pathbreaking novels offer a new
perspective on the dimensions of science fiction by focusing on
important themes in Black history and culture and also on issues of
race and gender. Butler addresses many controversial questions
concerning Black people in a modern world, and does so by creating a
world peopled with superhuman telepaths, psychic vampires,
telekinetics, mutant humanoids, and alien beings. Responding to
various theories about Black life, Butler creates characters who
represent a radical alternative to learning and understanding Black
culture. In Contemporary Authors, Butler addresses her purpose for
choosing a genre almost "alien" to the Black literary tradition:
When I first began writing science fiction,
I was disappointed at how little creativity and
freedom was used to portray the many racial,
ethnic and class variations. Also, I could not
1
2help noticing how few significant woman
characters there were in science 'fiction.
Fortunately, this has been changing over the
past few years. I intend my writing to
contribute to the change. (73-74)
For these reasons, Butler creates significantly strong Black
science fiction/fantasy characters that are anything but
stereotypical. Robert Crossley notes that during the 1940s and
1950s science fiction offered no Black writers (male or female) and
focused on very few Black characters. Crossley also posits that
many science 'fiction stories were "provocatively racist, including
Robert Heinlein's The Sixth Column (1949), whose heroic protagonist
was unsubtly named Whitey" (Kindred xiv); additionally, Crossley
notes:
The highest tribute paid to a character of color in such
novels was for the author to have him sacrifice hls life
for his white comrades, as an Asian soldier named Franklin
Roosevelt Matsui does in Tile Sixth Column, as does the one
black character in Leigh Brackett's story "The Vanishing
Venusians" (1944). (xiv)
Equally interesting, Crossley states that many science fiction works
tried to be "colorblind...imagining a future in which race no longer
3
was a factor...embodying the White liberal fantasy of a single black
character functioning amiably in a predominantly White society"
(xv). An example of this is Jan Rodricks, earth's last survivor in
Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), whose race, as Crossley
notes, supposedly does not matter. Thus, science fiction readers did
not have (or perhaps were not interested in having) a non
stereotypical or non-underrepresented perspective on Black
characters whether they were heroic or not.
What is distinctive about Butler is that she makes the presence
of her Black characters known, especially her female characters.
Furthermore, some of her critics have labeled the women characters
in her stories as heroines. Ruth Salvaggio in her article "Octavia
Butler and the Black Science Fiction Heroine" says that the "female
protagonists. . .shape the course of social events" (78). Salvaggio
calls this "changing the typical scenario" (78). Butler states that
during the 1940s and 1950s (and even into the early 1960s) an
"insidious problem with science fiction is that it has always been
nearly all white, just as until recently, it's been nearly all male"
(Transm ission 17-18). Thus, Butler's science fiction heroines usurp
the masculine world. Also, Salvaggio recognizes that Butler's
concern with racism and sexism is "a conscious part of her vision"
(78) but she defines Butler's works only through her science fiction
4
heroines. Indeed, most of Butler's critics examine only the
characteristics of the modern "liberated" woman that typify the
heroines of her stories. In fact, the only importance seen in her
work is that it offers entertainment with some "historical and
contemporary truth" (Friend 55). However, Butler's fiction is
important for much more than its presentation of strong female
figures, and it is in the series of stories she calls the Patternist and
Non-Patternist forms that her strength as a science fiction writer
is revealed. The elements of science fiction, speculative fiction,
and science fantasy are used as vehicles to deal with racial and
social themes to create a consciousness of Black culture and
and history in the genre. Mixing normal and mutant human beings,
Butler explores stories that speak directly to contemporary racial,
sexual, historical, political and economic issues.
In the Non-Patternist novels Kindred (1979), Clay's Ark
(1984), Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989),
Butler's characters are psychics and storytellers who unearth facts
about the Black race by traveling into the past to learn about the
conflicts of miscegenation, and the male and black female
characters reveal critical, revolutionary views of the life and
society of black people during the period of slavery. The women
characters in the Non-Patternist novels triumph over the white male
5
characters to establish the strength of the black woman within their
race. In Butler's novel Wild Seed, two mutants, Doro and Anyanwu,
are concerned with the negative forces that control them during the
Slave Trade. Doro is a ruthless 4000-year-old Nubian mutant who
has the terrifying ability to steal bodies of other beings; out of
pride, he prefers the form of a strong black male. His name means
lithe east, the direction from which the sun rises. II During his search
for one of his people's villages, he encounters the woman Anyanwu,
who appears in the form of an ancient crone and is worshiped by her
people as an African (Onitsha) goddess; her form is only a disguise
meant to discourage any young male suitors. She is a shape-shifter,
a healer, and a kindred spirit to Doro. Anyanwu is virtually immortal
and her name means lithe sun." Butler's aim in her works is not to
patronize an image of Black assimilation on White terms" (Crossley
xv) as Clarke does with the Rodricks character in Childhood's End,
but to acknowledge and portray, as realistically as possible, her
characters' blackness, for race is a crucial fact for Butler, as a
presence in science fiction/fantasy through the framework of the
culture and history of Black people. How her stories address racism
and sexism as the Black characters of her Non-Patternist and
Patternist works speak to and deal with, in ways that real people do,
issues of race, gender, relationships, feelings and historical truths
6
is what is important in this thesis.
This study will focus on the characters in Butler's Patternist
and Non-Patternist works remarkable both for their variety and for
the realism of details that suggest, in the combination of humans
and mutants, relationships strongly relevant to the history of Black
people. This study will also be developed around several questions:
1. How do the characters help to focus attention on continuity
between past and present?
2. What lessons do the characters reveal about historical
realities?
3. How do the characters provide a kinship with others and
events in history?
4. How do the characters enrich the reader's understanding
of history?
Chapter one will address the first question by showing how
Butler's Non-Patternist novel, Kindred, the basic elements of
science fantasy are at work in her characters. Butler's main
character in the novel, Dana Franklin, travels back and forth from
her present time of 1976 in Los Angeles, California, to the past of
1824 in Talbot County, Maryland. In the past, she encounters and
comes to the aid of Rufus Weylin, the son of a plantation owner, and
saves him from drowning. Dana is unwillingly drawn into the past
7
whenever Rufus is in danger and she comes back to the future of the
late seventies whenever she herself is imperiled. She comes to
realize why: Rufus is destined to rape Alice Greenwood, a slave and
also Dana's great-grandmother, thus creating Dana's existence in the
twentieth century. Dana must, reluctantly, ensure the survival of
Rufus, who grows to be a very cruel and ruthless slave owner, so
that her family will come to be. Butler creates Dana as a vehicle to
delve into the past and uncover some startling truths not only about
her family history but about slavery and its cruelties. Dana is a
fixture that bridges the paradox of her own present, she is married
to a white man named Kevin, and that of her cruel ancestor Rufus.
An analysis of Butler's narrative strategy, which blends
science fantasy with the literary form of first-person slave
narrative, is necessary to answer question one. In fact, Robert
Crossley states that this novel is possibly "a hybrid of both the
autobiographical narrative and scienti'fic fantasy" (Kindred ix). This
thesis will show how Dana and the other prominent characters focus
our attention on the continuity between the past and the present.
Chapter two of this thesis will analyze what lessons the
characters in the Patternist novel Wild Seed reveal about historical
realities. My focus will be on the novel's two most prominent
characters, the mutants Doro and Anyanwu, and certain other
8
supporting characters. The novel deals with the tumultuous
relationship of Doro and Anyanwu within the historical backdrop of
the Slave Trade of the seventeenth century and up through the
present period. Butler employs a different narrative scheme than in
Kindred and the characters function more within the comparatively
realistic expectations of science fiction than than within the
marvelous guidelines of scientific fantasy; unlike Dana, these
characters are super beings of great psychic power and mutant
abilities--though no explanation of the origin of their powers is
provided by Butler--yet they are created to function as real
individuals who must master their own foibles as well as deal with
their abilities and the forces in the universe.
An analysis of the way characters provide a kinship with other
characters and events in history in Mind of My Mind, another of
Butler's Patternist novels, will be the concern of chapter three.
This novel has been considered by most of Butler's critics as a
further treatment of Doro's story, yet it is the emergence of Mary,
Doro's psychic and telepathic daughter/lover as the novel's
protagonist that dominates our attention. The novel's plot begins
during the late twentieth century and chronicles Mary's attainment
of power over the Patternists, the society of thriving superhuman
telepaths and telekinetics also dubbed Homo Superior, through her
9
weaving of the mental network of the "Pattern" that binds these
super men and women. In effect, the novel explains the birth of a
new society, of Homo Superior, that will soon have dominion over
the predominating non-mutant communities in the world; in fact,
Butler uses the theme of mankind's genetic and psychic evolution
which is common in science fiction and is very much along the same
lines as Clarke's Childhood's End and Theodore Sturgeon's More
Than Human.
Lastly, this thesis will analyze in the fourth and final chapter
the way Butler's characters enrich the reader's understanding of
history. This chapter will largely focus on the Patternist and Non
Patternist novels discussed in the early chapters to provide an
answer to how the characters and her narrative techniques function
within the conventions of science fantasy, speculative fiction, and
science 'fiction.
CHAPTER II
SLAVE HISTORY AND TIME TRAVEL IN KINDRED
The im portance of Butler's science fiction novels and short
stories lies in their suggestion of new ways of understanding
culture central to the history and artistic development of American
society. Octavia Butler combines science fiction--more specifically
the theme of time travel--and the slave narrative in order to
investigate the history of nineteenth-century American society in
general and a portion of Black history in particular. Taken together,
time travel and slave narratives call into question a host of
assumptions about that period of Black history, implicitly revealing
views of miscegenation that underlay many nineteenth-century
social practices among Blacks and Whites. Butler places slave
history and time travel in perspective along with other cultural
factors in Black slave women's lives; her insight recovers not
merely tile events in their lives, dramatic as they were, but major
themes, movements and connecting threads. Chapter one of this
study asserts that the characters in Butler's novels, historicized by
10
11
her, to focus attention on the continuity of redressed and recreated
elements of Black culture of both the past and the present.
Kindred is Butler's non-Patternist work that most of her
critics say is primarily historical fiction rather than science
fiction. Even Butler herself has admitted that the novel is not
science fiction since there is "absolutely no science in it" (Black
Scholar 14). Other critics, such as Robert Crossley, however, say
that Kindred is a hybrid of science fantasy and autobiographical
narrative; more specifically, in acknowledging her characters'
blackness in her works as a presence in the genre--a presence that
is virgin to science fiction and fantasy, little known and as yet to
be known by her readers--time travel and the literary form of the
slave narrative are blended together so that the novel, as Crossley
says all good works of fiction do, "lies like the truth" (viiii).
Indeed, the novel does this without ever inundating the reader with
blatant explanations of the complexities of any theoretical science
involving time travel.
The focus of Kindred is nonetheless on the time-traveling
escapades of the novel's main protagonist, Edana Franklin. She is a
black woman who, unexplainedly, is whisked away from her present
of 1976 in suburban Los Angeles back into the past of nineteenth
century Talbot County, Maryland. Dana soon discovers that time and
12
time again she will be drawn into the past of the Antebellum era of
slavery in Maryland by a boy, named Rufus Weylin, who is the son of
a ruthless slave owner. She becomes a both witness to and an
unwilling participant in, as Rufus' slave herself, a particular past
history which covers perhaps the darkest era for black people in
America. What is even more compelling for Dana Franklin is that the
visitations into the past reveal many twists for her. The young boy
whom she saves is--and/or will be--her grandfather several times
removed, and it will be her task, mostly alone, to ensure his survival
so that he will rape a black freewoman who will bear a child named
Hagar, who is and/or will be Dana's great-grandmother, and create
Dana's family line. Dana ultimately and quite reluctantly serves as
Rufus' guardian to ultimately ensure her own future existence in the
past where black people are only considered property. After each
trip back to her present time and many times during her visit in the
past, Dana presents a recollection of her experiences both to her
husband Kevin and simultaneously to Butler's readers. Thus, Dana's
adventures become "a form of fantastic travelogue to a restoration
of the genre of the slave memoir" (Crossley xii).
The Prologue
Dana's narrative begins with an account of the events of her
13
trips into the past. In fact, the prologue gives a re-account of her
last trip into Antebellum Maryland:
I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm. And I
lost about a year of my life and much of the comfort
and serenity I had not valued until it was gone. When
the police released Kevin, he came to the hospital and
stayed with me so that I would know I hadn't lost him
too. (9)
Dana's narrative foreshadows what is to come and what is to be.
The novel's prologue functions well as a retrospective "teaser" to
capture the reader's attention and the set the pace of a
recapitulation of the events in the novel that are soon to follow.
Chapter One: The Fire
In this chapter, the recapitulation of the events begins as Dana
begins her first odyssey across tim e and geography. She recollects
her experience of nausea and dizziness as she and her husband Kevin,
a W~lite writer, begin to unpack their belongings after moving into
their home in Altadena, California. The day is Dana's birthday and
the year is 1976. As the nausea deepens, Dana soon discovers
herself to be in unfamiliar surroundings. Her home disappears and is
replaced by a wooded area and a river. She hears in the distance
14
screams for help and discovers a small boy drowning in the raging
waters. She rescues nlrn and, after being nearly attacked by a White
woman, who is apparently the boy's mother, she nonetheless applies
respiration and saves the child. Afterwards, Dana is threatened by
the sudden presence of the barrel of a musket rifle pointed directly
into her face. As a consequence, she returns, wet, muddy safely
within the confines of her llvinq room. Her husband stands aghast at
her mysterious disappearance and reappearance.
For many readers of science fiction and fantasy and
specifically time travel 'fiction, "The River" chapter presents a
pertinent convention. A river is transient, and many believe that
time is much like a river full of the unknown with its myriad eddies
and currents. The chapter establishes several things for Butler's
readers. The river is the locale that represents Dana's being
inexplicably displaced in time, for she is not aware at first of
where she is but only "when" she is. The river itself has been a
location of healing as well as of time. One can think, for instance,
of the river locale in Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River".
The river in this short story is the site of Nick Adams' recovery
from the psychological wounds of war. In her doctoral dissertation,
"The Patterning of History in Old English Literature, Margaret
Monteverde has offered a useful general explanation of the
15
metaphoric relevance of the river:
The analogy of history being like a river is a valuable
one. A river derives its existence not so rn uch from
the volume of water contained within it as from the
shape of the bed which holds that water in place.
Without the bed, the water would spread out in a form
so nebulous and chaotic that the human eye could not
perceive it, a form so lacking in permanence that the
mind could not fix it in memory. Similarly, the sheer
volume of moment-to-moment incident. .. is so vast and
amorphous that without the form placed upon it by
general, culturally significant ideas, we could neither
establish any points of reference by which to fix our
own positions nor see any markers on which to focus
recollections of past events. Our past quite literally
would slip through our fingers like water. (59)
Assurn ing that we view history as both the events of the past and
the concurrent meaning we derive from them, then Monteverde's
river analogy is a correct and effective one. Yet, It is not Butler's
purpose to use this same analogy to drive the narrative in Kindred.
The novel's river scene is simply the location of Dana's first trip
into the past, and readers are given a glimpse of when Dana is as she
16
informs us how out of place the clothing of the woman and her
husband whom she encounters at the river bank after saving the boy
are (16). As Dana's revelation of this serves to intensify the
mystery of her trip and its circumstances, the presence of the river
and the boy itself in the novel each have the "river bed"
characteristics of Monteverde's analogy; in fact, it can be argued
that Butler's river and Rufus both serve as sources or "markers"
through and for which Dana can establish her position to focus her
own recollections of the past.
Nonetheless, as history in this novel is juxtaposed with Butler's
renovation of the slave autobiography, details of Dana's adventures
into the past establish her in the novel as Butler's "reporter," and
we gain a subjective view about the nineteenth century's events. The
next passage foreshadows what is to follow as she suspects that her
first trip will not be her last:
Maybe I'm just like a victim of robbery or rape or
something--a victim who survives, but doesn't feel
safe anymore. I shrugged. I don't have a name for the
thing that happened to me, but I don't feel safe any
more. (17)
Dana expresses not only her own trepidations but also a sense of the
pattern of the things she experiences. Strangely enough her memory
17
of her brief visitation seems to wane. Much like a drying river, Dana
says that the memory "begins to recede from me somehow... becoming
like something I saw on television or read about--Iike something I
got second hand" (17). With the river as one of her "markers," Dana
can now begin to travel a path along time's river to uncover the
mysteries of her heritage and the cause of her being in the past in
the first place.
Chapter Two: The Fire
In this chapter, many things become evident for Dana as she
again makes her second trip into a strange place--specifically to the
bedroom of the boy whom she saved earlier and who sets it on fire.
She learns that the boy, Rufus, has the ability in times of his own
peril to inexplicably "call" Dana into the past; thus, a link between
her and the boy is established. Through a dim recollection of some of
her own family history, she also discovers that Rufus is destined to
rape her great-grandmother Alice Greenwood, who she remembers is
mentioned in her family's bible, and thus he will be Dana's
grandfather several times removed. She also learns that Rufus is
the son of Tom Weylin, who is a ruthless slave owner. The boy also
reveals that the year and place in which Dana finds herselt is 1815
Maryland. The reason why Dana is in the past is because Rufus
18
inexplicably "calls" for her whenever he is in grave danger.
As the plot develops, Dana's narrative voice becomes
increasingly polemical concerning relationships between black
people and white people; moreover, Dana is becoming, unknowingly,
a witness to the indignity of slavery and to the fundamental
attitudes expressed and behaviors exhibited by this era's people.
This is most noticeable during Dana's second trip into the past.
Rufus tells Dana of his mother's reaction to her administering
mouth-to-m outh resuscitation after she rescued him the river:
Mama said what you did for me after you got me out of
the water was like the Second Book of Kings...
The what? (Dana asks)...
Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy's mouth, and the
boy came back to life. Mama said she tried to stop
you when she saw you doing that to me because you
were just some nigger she had never seen before.
Then she remembered Second Kings. (24)
This passage reveals an historical constant, for it shows the
reader the lack of respect that was accorded black people (whether
they were slaves or not). More specifically, as far as Rufus'
mother, Margaret Weylin, is concerned, even though Dana saves the
boy's life she is given the accolade of being "a strange nigger";
19
consequently, Dana begins to learn firsthand of the personal impact
of slavery in racist terms. This notion, Sandra Govan states, is one
of the "recurrent patterns" (81) in slave narratives, and Dana is at
first a witness to it. She attempts to educate the boy via use of her
own twentieth-century values on equality and respect so that he
may treat the black people his father owns with respect and dignity;
moreover, when Dana strongly urges him to not use tile term
"nigger," she tells Rufus "I'm a black woman, Rufe. If you have to
call me something other than my name, that's it" (25), and she tells
the boy to "say blacks anyway" (25). Thus, the inherent values of a
liberal-minded and nationalistic Black woman from the late
twentieth century challenge those of Maryland's Antebellum slave
era. Dana exhibits, quite ironically, the very same feelings, beliefs
and pride most notably cherished and fought for by the forbearers of
modern Black culture and history such as Sojourner Truth and
Frederick Douglass.
Next, "The Fire" chapter reveals the extent of Rufus' father's
brutality, for he not only whips his horses and slaves but he also
beats Rufus and establishes other recurrent patterns of slave
narratives: "the punishment factor, the resistance motif, and the
glim pse of life-in-the-quarters" (Govan 81). As Dana materializes
into the past for the second time, she prevents the boy from setting
20
fire to the house; Rufus claims that his goal was to destroy the one
thing he says his father values the most, his money profits from
sales of his slaves. Moreover, Tom Weylin's cruelty and subsequent
abuse of his son create in Rufus the very fire of hatred and contempt
he will later feel for his father and for other people.
Equally important, the plot takes a decided turn as Dana
witnesses firsthand the brutality of slavery. While seeking out the
Greenwoods, the people on Weylin's plantation whom Dana suspects
are her ancestors, to seek shelter and to remain hidden from the
elder Weylin, she watches several slave patrollers beat a runaway
slave who is visiting the Greenwoods:
One of the whites went to hls horse to get what proved
to be a whip. He cracked it in the air. ..then brought it
down across the back of the black man...he took several
more blows with no outcry...then the man's resolve broke.
I shut my eyes and tensed my muscles against an urge
to vomit. I had seen people beaten on television and in
the movies. I had seen the too-red blood substitute
streaked across their backs and heard their well-rehearsed
screams. But I hadn't lain nearby and smelled their sweat
or heard their pleading and praying, shamed before their
families and themselves. I was probably less prepared
21
for the reality than the child crying not far from me. In
fact, she and I were reacting very much alike. My face
too was wet with tears. And my mind was darting from
one thought to another, trying to tune out the whipping. (36)
Not only is the indignant nature of a slave's life revealed here, but a
connection is made between Dana and the weeping child who
witnessed the whipping. The child is (and will be) Dana's ancestor
Alice Greenwood, and it had been established earlier in "The Fire"
chapter that she is indeed Rufus's friend. Incidentally, Dana notices
how strikingly similar she and Alice's mother, a freewoman, are;
Dana notes "she was fine-boned, probably not as strong as she
needed to be to survive in this era. But she was surviving, however
painfully. Maybe she would help me learn how" (38). Dana indeed
discovers her other ancestors to be "the bed which is formed by the
characteristics both of the land through which it flows and the
water which it contains" (Monteverde 59). Nonetheless, Dana
recognizes the necessity of blood-ties in this era. She must seek
out the knowledge of her resident ancestors if she is to survive such
a brutal time period, and consequently Dana must learn in the past or
she will be doomed to die in it.
"The Fire" chapter also symbolizes the inflammably raw hatred
which the White characters express towards the Black characters,
22
especially where it concerns Tom Weylin and the slave patrollers,
but also the terrible sexual lust exerted upon black people--more
specifically upon black women. This notion expresses yet another of
Govan's recurrent patterns, that of "abusive sexual misconduct and
immoral behavior"(82) toward black females in the slave era. An
exam pie of this is evident when Dana is attacked by one of the
returning patrollers. Mistaking Dana for Alice's mother, he attempts
to rape her. Dana's account of the attempted rape and subsequent
beating sickens her physically and she is whisked back to the future
before the attack becomes much more grave for her. She tells her
husband Kevin of the experience and, in effect, does what Sandra
Govan says that slave memoirs do, "to arouse moral indignation"
(91). This is exactly the reaction her husband has concerning Dana's
predicament.
Chapter Three: The Fall
In this chapter, Dana returns to the past for the third time
because of a terrible fall Rufus has out a tree while playing with one
of the slave children. However, because he embraces her before the
time trip, Kevin accompanies her. They masquerade not as man and
wife, because miscegenation in the Antebellum was quite unpopular
and very dangerous, but as master and slave when they meet Tom
23
Weylin. After being invited to stay at the plantation for saving
Rufus' life, Dana again witnesses, now as an unwilling participant,
the life of a slave as a much broader view of life on the plantation
enfolds. As the life-in-the-quarters pattern is even more evident in
this chapter, the reality of the way of life for the master in the Big
House and the lifestyles within the slaves' cabins hits Dana with a
sorrowful and stark profundity; for instance, the house slaves eat
the leftovers of their masters while field slaves must live off even
less though they are supposed to toil even harder than the house
slaves. When she meets Sarah, the house slave/cook, and her mute
daughter Carrie, she is told that Carrie is "my fourth baby... the only
one Marse Tom let me keep ... Marse Tom took my children, all but
Carrie. And, bless God, Carrie ain't worth much as the others 'cause
she can't talk. People think she ain't got good sense" (76). Thus,
Sarah's dialogue reveals to Dana and the reader "the theme of family
separation ... that almost every slave narrative dramatizes" (Govan
90) as Carrie is deemed "defective" and is valueless for the
profiteering slave owner Weylin.
Not only is the life-in-the-quarters slave narrative pattern
relevant to this study of Butler's work, but so is the motif of the
slave's quest for forbidden education (Govan 82-83). For example,
Dana also discovers the contempt Weylin has for her because she is
24
an educated black, and she experiences the same contempt from her
fellow blacks.
When she explains that she taught school in New York, she is
called a "nigger teacher" by Sarah's husband Nigel. Later she is
brutally beaten by Tom Weylin when she is caught teaching Nigel
how to read and write (107). Dana also discovers how plantation
life affects the wife of the slave master; consequently, Margaret
Weylin has "no viable authority" (Govan 90) and is only typically
accorded the respect of being put on a pedestal by her husband.
Regarding Butler's handling of the slave memoir as a narrative
device to describe the slaves'--and ultimately Dana's--experiences
of life in Antebellum Maryland, Govan asserts:
The large, panoramic slice-of-plantation life we see
in this segment of the novel is deftly handled "faction,"
that blend of authentic verifiable historical fact and
well-rendered fiction. Butler treats the recurring themes
of casual brutality, forceable separation of families, the
quest for knowledge, the desire to escape, the tremendous
work loads expected of slaves as effectively as any of the
narratives or documentary histories discussing the slavery
experience. (Melus 90)
25
Chapter Four: The Fight
Dana endures the woes of miscegenation as she recalls her
relationship with Kevin before they were married. The plot shifts to
a scene where Dana has evidently survived a whipping at the hands
of Tom Weylin, for she finds herself on the floor of her apartment,
bruised and bloodied, in the present and without Kevin.
On her fourth trip into the past, she discovers that Rufus has
grown into something much worse than she feared. He is beaten
senseless in a fight with a black man whose wife Rufus sexually
assaulted; the woman is revealed to be her yet-to-be ancestor Alice
Greenwood.
Dana views her family's history in the making. Butler's
polemical voice in the following passage emerges as Dana gives
Rufus a lesson in history concerning slavery and White-to
White/White-to-Black relations that will have repercussions in a
future yet unmade:
You're reading history, Rufe. Turn a few pages and you'll
find a white man named J. D. B. DeBow claiming that slavery
is good because, among other things, it gives poor whites
someone to look down on. That's history. It happened
whether it offends you or not. (140)
26
Furthermore, Dana's "history lesson" reveals that the institution of
slavery has created class conflicts not only between whites and
blacks but also between the rich plantation owners and poor lower
class whites. As C. Vann Woodward has explained, "Slave
commentary on white society provides insights on antebellum social
history. Black observers were capable of shrewd perceptions of
lower class deference or subservience that punctured the myth of
Herrenvolk democracy--the equality of all whites" (The Slave's
Narrative 57). Dana tries to make Rufus understand how the complex
aspects of slavery--"perpetual class warfare" (Woodward 57)-
affect all who are involved.
Dana is reunited with her husband Kevin later but only after
she is beaten again and nearly sold into slavery to Rufus; Rufus is
rejected by Dana in much the same fashion as Alice rejected him.
Thus, "The Fight" chapter ends with both Kevin and Dana being
transported back into the future after a near-death encounter with a
rifle-toting Rufus who desires Dana for more than a mentor and
teacher; he now lusts for her as he did for her ancestor-to-be Alice.
Chapter Five: The Storm
Dana finds herself once again transported into the past, in the
midst of a rainstorm, and discovers a drunken and older-vthouqh
27
still foolish--Rufus Weylin beneath her feet. Dana witnesses not
only the slaves' appreciation of their plight but their acceptance of
who and what they are despite any deprecation by their masters.
Carrie reveals this truth to her:
Carrie made quick waving aside gestures, her expression
annoyed. She came over to me and wiped one side of my
face with her fingers--wiped hard. I drew back, and she
held her fingers in front of me, showed me both sides. But
for once, I didn't understand. Frustrated, she took me by
the hand, and led me out to where Nigel was chopping
firewood. There, before him, she repeated the face-
rubbing gesture, and he nodded 'She means it doesn't
come off, Dana,' he said quietly 'The black. She means
the devil with people who say you're anything but what
you are.' (224)
What is even more monumental for Dana is the birth of Alice's
daughter--and Dana's great-grandmother--Hagar. The end of the
chapter is a tragic one in that Rufus threatens to sell the rest of
her children if she--and Dana--will not be his concubines. After
being blamed for the selling of a black woman slave's husband, Dana
cuts her wrists and instantly and rather painfully returns back to
1976.
28
Chapter SiX: The Rope
As Dana reappears for the sixth and final time into the past,
she finds in a barn the lifeless body of Alice at the end of a noose.
Her ancestor has committed suicide because Rufus tricked her into
believing that he had sold her children into slavery. Now he turns
his lustful desire toward Dana, for he wants to keep her in the past
to replace Alice as his concubine and tells her "You're so much like
her, I can hardly stand it. ..You were one woman...you and her. One
woman. Two halves of a wholel" (257). To save herself, she kills
Rufus, and for the "final time she is whisked back to the future-
without her left arm, because Rufus held on to it during his death
throes.
The Prologue brings us full circle as Dana and Kevin make their
journey to modern-day Talbot County, Maryland. Dana discovers that
all of Rufus' slaves, with exceptions of Nigel, Carrie and Sarah and
his daughter Hagar and son Joe, were sold into slavery. Her great
grandmother Hagar had remained in Baltimore lived long enough "for
the Fourteenth Amendment to free her" (263). Dana herself has
come full circle and she has come to grips with her heritage. As
George Lukacs, in The Historical Novel, has said in stressing the
importance of the "dramatic character of action," Dana's vivid
depiction of her own personal experience in the life as a slave and
29
Butler's rendering of Kindred create a splendid blend of action,
drama, fantastic literature and slave autobiography. While many of
her critics, many of whom are science fiction and science fantasy
purists, argue that the novel functions more as historical fiction in
that it "increases the historical awareness of the decisive role
played in human progress by the struggles of classes in history is
specifically historical and not mere costumery" (Lukacs 19, 27-28),
this is not necessarily an inaccurate or even unfair appraisal of
Kindred because it reveals these elements of concern to Lukacs. Yet,
the novel should also be viewed as a work of the fantastic even
though Butler chooses not to offer technical explanations of Dana's
time traveling. Dana does witness, though rather sorrowfully, the
progress of her ancestors, Wl10 were both Black and White. By her
odyssey into her family's past, readers are made aware of the racial,
social, sexual and political issues, exemplified within Govan's
recurring historical patterns of slaves and their narratives, in a
manner characteristic of a slave's narrative through Butler's use of
imagery, diction and polemical voice. Butler may be telling us that
by evoking and examining our pasts we can best examine ourselves in
the present and gain enlightenment and put the past into a better
perspective. As Monteverde's river analogy holds, we do not want
history to "literally slip through our 'fingers like water" (59), for
CHAPTER III
RACE, GENDER, AND POWER RELATIONSHIPS IN WILDSEED
As Kindred conveys the continuity of past and present created
in the form of a slave narrative combined with science fantasy in
order to focus attention on the history and culture of Black people,
Wild Seed, Butler's Patternist novel, informs readers that science
fiction does not so conventionally have to begin in some far-flung
future time nor take place on an alien world in a distant galaxy. The
novel's setting is in the not-too-distant past and it still maintains a
focus on Black history and culture. What is significant about Wild
Seed is that it is more a work of science fiction than Kindred. Wild
Seed is a novel that is 'filled with characters possessing nearly
unlimited superhuman psychic powers; they are mutants, or members
of a group that is technically called Homo Superior. Sandra Govan
describes them as " people with nascent or lateral mutant abilities
who know things or hear things or see things others cannot" (Melus
83); they are also beings who interact with each other and normal
human beings, and their interactions are placed wlthln the historical
31
32
setting of the seventeenth-century slave trade; furthermore, a
specific relatlonshlp between the novel's two main characters, Doro
and Anyanwu, frames the plot. The wilderness of West Africa and
the colonial frontier of America during the slave era are the settings
Butler uses for "history and cultural anthropology do more than
simply illuminate the text or serve as mere coloration" (Mel us 82).
Additionally, Butler utilizes the historical and cultural texts of
Black people's relationships with each other and with White people,
whether superhuman or not, to permit her "to employ a more original
approach to the old theme of the trials of immortality, the theme of
the spiritual disintegration of the man who cannot die" (82). It is
these relationships and the author's use of science fiction themes,
action and character that best reveal the lessons about historical
realities to readers.
Book One: Covenant 1690 :
Wild Seed deals with loneliness, alienation, power and love.
As the novel opens with "Covenant 1690", one of the novel's two
main characters, Doro, is introduced. He is a four-thousand-year old
Nubian mutant who searches for hls people in the wilds of the West
African wilderness and encounters Anyanwu. Doro has the uncanny
ability to use his senses to "track" any and all of his people. He has
33
searched for many months to find hls people, only to discover that
slavers had ravaged his village and taken many of them into bondage.
Doro is immortal but his immortality is based on one deadly
precedent; he has the ability to change bodies as people change
clothes by reflexively killing the hosts in the process whenever the
body he presently inhabits is exposed to life-threatening danger. He
searches for the genetic "wild seed," those poor souls who are
tormented, sometimes to a point of insanity, by their mutant psychic
abilities. Furthermore, Doro's abilities make him not only a
form idable threat but also feared and hated by those whom he seeks;
nevertheless, Doro himself fears no one. His goal is to use the
genetic seeds, "people too valuable to be casually killed" (Wild Seed
13), to create a race of Homo Superior; and, once he has bred them,
he will rule them all. "Eugenics", tile science and methodology of
improving the quality of the human race through selective breeding,
is a topic in many science fiction stories, and Butler uses it (though
she offers no scientific explanations) in conjunction with the theme
of miscegenation; incidentally, Doro's goals, as Sandra Govan posits,
are far 'from altruistic for he needs his people in a
very special way. He enjoys their company and, sadly,
they provide his most satisfying "ki lis" ... he transfers
his psychic essence to any human host; thus he he kills
34
to live... he literally feeds off the spirit of the host body
and gains more sustenance from the host body of one of
his own people than from ordinary non-mutant human
beings. (Melus 83)
Doro is also not necessarily interested in the specific racial
heritage of the genetic seeds but only in their mutant potential
necessary to create his new race of Homo Superior. Nonetheless,
Doro and people like him are treated "in their home communities... as
misfits or outcasts or "witches" because of their abilities" (Govan
83).
The novel's opening sequence effectively conveys Doro's
character and his "subtle awareness" (Govan 83) of the kindred
spirit he finds in Anyanwu as well as the place and setting:
He wandered southwest toward the forest, leaving as
he had arrived--alone, unarmed, without supplies,
accepting the savanna and later the forest as easily
as he accepted any terrain. He was killed several
times--by disease, by animals, by hostile people.
This was a harsh land. Yet he continued to move
southwest, unthinkingly veering away from the section
of the coast where his ship awaited him. After a while,
he realized it was no longer his anger at the loss of his
35
seed village that drove him. It was something new--an
impulse, a feeling, a kind of mental undertow pulling at
him. (3)
As Doro is made more and more aware of her presence, readers are
also subtly informed about powers:
Anyanwu's ears and eyes were far sharper than those of
other people. She had increased their sensitivity deliber
ately after the 'first time men cam e stalking her,
their machetes ready, their intentions clear. She
had to kill seven times that terrible day--seven
frightened men who could have been spared--and
she had nearly died herself, all because she let
people come upon her unnoticed. Never again. (4)
Using the ancient myths of the "Earth Mother Goddess", Butler also
makes readers aware of Anyanwu's other abilities in subtle fashion:
Giving no outward sign, she went on tending her garden.
There were weeds among her coco yams and her herbs.
The herbs were not traditional ones grown or gathered
by her people. Only she grew them as medicines for
healing, used them when people brought their sick to her.
Often she needed no medicines, but she kept that to her
self. She served her people by giving them relief from
36
pain and sickness. Also, she enriched them by allowing
them to spread word of her abilities to neighboring
people. She was an oracle. A woman through whom a
god spoke. (4)
Characteristically, Anyanwu is the Earth/Mother Goddess of her
people; furthermore, Butler employs the African mythology of the
Onitsha/lbo culture. Richard Henderson, an ethnologist, explains, in
The King in Every Man: Evolutionary Trends in Onitsha and Ibo Society
and Culture, that Onitsha society was "a community strongly
concerned with maintaining oral accounts of the past and they lacked
an elaborate mythology as its cultural charter, and instead
emphasized a quasi-historical ideology based on stories tracing the
founding of its villages to prehistoric migrations and political
fusions" (31). This notion is made particularly evident in Wild Seed
when, after they meet, Doro and Anyanwu discuss each other's
origins and historical roots. After he reveals that he is immensely
old, Anyanwu inquires about who Doro's people were. Doro replies:
They were called Kush in my time. I was born to them,
but they have not been my people for perhaps twelve
times as long as you have been alive. When I was thirteen
years old, I was separated from them. Now my people are
those who give me their loyalty. (7)
· 37
He also informs Anyanwu of her people's origins as he knew them
during antiquity:
Your people have crossed the Niger--he hesitated,
frowning, then gave the river its proper name--the
Orimuli. When I first saw them last, they lived on
the other side in Benin. (8)
Anyanwu replies:
We crossed long ago...children born in that time have
grown old and died. We were Ado and Idu, subject
to Benin before the crossing. Then we fought the
Benin and crossed the river to Onitsha to becom e
free people, our own masters. (8-9)
Thus, Butler's narrative here reveals "the embedded signs of
heritage and culture" (Govan 84) and Doro's immortality. Equally
im portant, Anyanwu's reply to Doro "com presses years of African
history, years of tribal warfare and tribal development, years of
gradual adaptation to change" (84).
The historical and sociological aspects which support the
notions of tribal--and also cultural--development, especially where
it concerns the Black female's interactions in African society, are
explained by Robert Staples, in The Black Woman in America. and
they are related to Anyanwu's and Doro's origins. He states his
38
position:
The roles of women in African societies--many of
which were male-dom inated--were im portant. Many
females helped to politically organize various tribal
societies and this fact has been recorded by early
travelers to the West African regions. (11)
Consequently, the roles of women in ancient Africa foreshadowed
the roles of women in America "from the very moment they were
brought to the shores of America. Anyanwu, because of her
unexplained inbred power as a "goddess" (she has the amazing
mutant ability to change her shape into any form male or female-
human or animal), has the wherewithal to contribute to and
participate in the development and survival of the Onitsha people in
Wild Seed. Also, I would argue that she best exemplifies a kind of
model, though somewhat mythic and superior, for the roles assumed
by Black women, roles which were "fashioned out of the racial and
sexual oppression they endured and the need to assume the task of
Black survival" (Staples 11); she reflects the historical reality of
the nature of the treatment of Black women speclflcally and of Black
people generally in American society. Anyanwu is not a typical
Earth/Mother Goddess because she is more than an oracle, a healer
and protectress of the Onitsha; she is also a willing participant in
39
tile survival of her own culture; she shares the same kind of self
reliant attributes as the real-life women who were reputed to have
founded the Ashanti, Wenchi, Mampong and Nigerian societies.
Nevertheless, like Doro, Anyanwu suffers from loneliness and
alienation, for she is also long-lived--she reveals to Doro that she
is several centuries old--and that on many occasions she has
endured the fear and hatred her people express towards her.
Doro, on the other hand, represents something even more than
human. He is ruthless and often fatally dispassionate in his dealings
with either mutants or normal human beings. While he asserts his
role as the so-called progenitor of the mutants and seeks to raise
them as hls "children", he is not morally capable of adhering
consistently to tile African credo ("children are worth") which
Anyanwu lives by. Furthermore, Doro states in Wild Seed that
"som etimes a child must be sacrificed" (36), and he punishes one of
his people who made the mistake of crossing him by stealing the
body of an innocent child (35); thus, Doro's statement reveals his
inherent ruthlessness. Margaret A. O'Connor characterizes Doro as
"the powerful masculine hunter whose survival is based on his
predatory instincts, his capacity to kill not only enemies but all
whose deaths can best serve the dynasty he dreams of founding"
(pictionary of Literary Biography 36, 40). Anyanwu calls him an
40
"abomination" (14) as Doro exercises his deadly powers and deems
her abilities as gentle. Anyanwu nonetheless tells him "you are a
spirit!" (12), and her statem ent echoes Butler's em ploym ent of the
changeling theme that is extant within both African and Western
cultures:
He was like an obanje, an evil child spirit born to one
woman again and again, only to die and give the mother
pain. A woman tormented by an obanje could give birth
many times and still have no living child. But Doro was
an adult. he did not enter and re-enter his mother's
womb. He did not want the bodies of children. He
preferred to steal the souls of men. This man was
far more unusual than she was. This man was not
not a man. (12 -13)
Butler's blend of African myths and ethos with the science fiction
them e of psychic mutation and selective breeding best establishes
Doro's and Anyanwu's character. Furthermore, this blend reveals
that the notions of African mythology also express the im portance of
children and family as "Anyanwu's sense of protection and concern
for her people is part of the African ethos which pervades the text"
(Govan 85). Henderson also asserts,
41
The Onitsha are rooted in the notions of filiation and
descent. When Onitsha people assess the career of a
person, their primary criterion is the number of children
he has raised to support and survive him. Children are
extolled in proverbs above any other good, even above the
accumulation of wealth; 'children first, wealth follows'
is a proverb affirm ing the route to success. (Henderson 10)
Notwithstanding, Doro threatens the very traditions he knows
Anyanwu strongly embodies; thus, he has a psychological advantage
over her. He desires to take her away with him from her native
Africa to the New World. Doro's proposition to Anyanwu is a
terrifying one: he will not kill any of her descendant children if she
agrees to help him create offspring that will be as long-lived and
powerful as he and Anyanwu. Doro appeals to her "innate sense of
isolation and loneliness, proclaiming her place is among her own
kind" and also to her "maternity spirit" (Govan 85). The Nubian tells
her:
A mother should not have to watch her children grow old
and die. If you live, they should live. It is the fault of
their fathers that they die. Let me give you chlldren who
will live! (26)
42
Readers will discover that Doro is a character who is "totally devoid
of scruples ... but possesses a keen insight into Anyanwu's
psychological makeup" as he employs "a time-encrusted masculine
ploy" when he decides to take her to one of his seed villages in
America and thus control her fate once she is brought there:
She had already assumed he wanted her for his wife.
This was a natural assumption to take make. He had
been asking himself which of his people she should be
mated with first, but now he knew he would take her
himself--for a while at least. He often kept the most
powerful of his people with him for a few months...if
they were children, they learned to accept him as a
father. If they were men, they learned to accept him
as master. If they were women, they accepted him best
as lover or husband. (20)
In Doro's view, Anyanwu's best role in his new society will be
primarily that of a concubine; he seeks, therefore, to impregnate her.
Anyanwu would like to serve him as lover and mistress but never be
on equal terms with him:
Her independence would vanish without a struggle. She
would do whatever he asked then to keep her child safe.
She was too valuable to kill, and if he abducted any of her
43
descendants, she would no doubt goad him into killing her.
But once she was isolated in America with an infant to care
for, she would learn submissiveness. (27)
Anyanwu, who in her native land was worshiped as a goddess, will
not be accorded that same respect by the psychically vampiric Doro
for he only expects from her total subservience to him shown by
other people, both human or mutant and men or women, who fear him.
As a consequence, an underlying insecurity on Doro's part begins to
grow the more he gets to know about the Sun woman and her
incredible powers. As Anyanwu stands firm and resilient in her
regard for the "historical legacy of appropriate manners" (Govan
86), it can be argued that Doro's growing anxiety rests in the
distinctions that her shape-shifting and healing abilities are most
formidable and, most importantly, that she is not predatory.
Anyanwu only kills when absolutely necessary; thus, her instinct
for--and actions of--self-preservation are justifiable:
I took shapes to frighten people when they wanted to
kill me... 1became a leopard and spat at them ...then I
became a sacred python, and no one dared to harm me.
The python brought me luck. We were needing rain
then to save the yam crop, and while I was a python,
the rains came. The people decided the magic was good
44
and it took them a long time to want to kill me again. (15)
This passage also echoes her estranged people's fear and reverence
of her. Anyanwu and Doro indeed share this, and nevertheless she is
not the typical Earth Mother Goddess of Onitsha myth. When faced
with the possibility of her descendant children's, namely Nweke's
and Okoye's, destruction at Doro's hands and being unaware of his
plans for her, Anyanwu risks her personal welfare and freedom for
her people and she negotiates with the Nubian immortal for their
right to existence in the New World; Anyanwu also bargains for the
lives of the "defective stock" that Doro finds to be the most
satisfying kills.
According to Dorothy Allison in "The Future Female," Anyanwu
represents a type of character like so many of Butler's superwomen
who "are always in some form of bondage, captives of domineering
male mutants or religious fanatics who want to im pregnate them"
(Village Voice 67-68), and thus we see here a historical parallel
with the slave era concerning the interactions between Black men
and women. Doro assumes the role of an ultimate "slave master" in
much the same fashion as his white counterparts in seventeenth
century America. He raises seed villages on plantations, to conceal
his eugenics program from the prying eyes of any potential enemies,
and he uses his deadly powers to threaten the existence of those he
45
dom inates. He also uses Anyanwu's steadfast beliefs in the social
and cultural tenets of Onitsha society to hls advantage when he
threatens to destroy her Homo Superior kinsmen, and he seeks to
make her his concubine her once she is in America. This nation also
parallels the historical precedent Angela Davis cites in her article
"Reflections of the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves"
in that Black females were "subjected to the most elemental form
of terrorism distinctly suited for the female: rape" (13). Granted,
Doro does not attempt to rape Anyanwu in the sexual sense and he
fears that she will make him destroy her as she suspects that she is
an enormous asset to his selective breeding program, yet the
program's very existence in Wild Seed reflects the historical reality
in which tile slave master purchased breeders to raise the population
of his slaves for both his economic needs and for his own lustful
desires. Many white slave owners often employed illicit sex to
punish female slaves who resisted their power; thus,
"unacknowledged miscegenation" (Govan 91) was a reality during the
slave era. While rape of the Black female was a constant during the
period; so too was the master's selling of the children she had borne
and the disrespect he had for the maintenance of the Black family
unit; many slave children were sold for the masters's profit to keep
the slaves in check and also to maintain his authority and power over
46
them. To a certain extent, Doro uses the same tactics on Anyanwu:
he demands that she mate with his son, Isaac, a mutant telekinetic
he created when he was in the body of one of his former white
associates that he had taken. She must also mate with Doro's other
"children" within his seed community in Wheatley, Maryland--and
his other thralls. Consequently, his power and authority make him
"master" in the most pejorative sense.
Notwithstanding, this reality in the novel does not invalidate
the kind of heroism Anyanwu represents, nor is she in any way
defeated by the Nubian, for "Butler's women are forced painfully to
confront the difference between surrender and adjustment" (Allison
67); death becom es the fate of those who give up while the
resistors "struggle, adjust and live by their own ethical standards
and survive to mother the next generation--Iiterally to make the
next world" (68). Anyanwu wants to spare the mutant children
whom Doro considers to be defective stock. Thus, it is her elemental
love and compassion for life that will save them from him; Anyanwu
is the "embodiment of the feminist ideal and compassionate
exercise of power. Her capacity for love is both her strength and
greatest point of vulnerability" (O'Connor 40).
As "Covenant 1641" closes, Isaac, who loves Doro in his own
way, beckons to Anyanwu to humanize the Nubian, for he feels that
47
his ruthless father is not totally incapable of humanity:
It is not yet real to him. Don't you see? He has lived
for thirty-seven hundred years. When Christ, the son
of God of most white people in the colonies, was born,
Doro was already impossibly old. Everyone has always
been temporary for him--wives, children, friends, even
tribes and nations, gods and devils. Everything dies but
him. And maybe you, Sun Woman, and maybe you. Make
him know you're not like everyone else--make him feel
it. Prove it to him for a while... reach out to him ...make
him know he's not alone anymore! (129)
Isaac also asks her to submit to Doro to keep him from "ever making
animals out of us"; furthermore, he tells her "When I hear you speak
of him, I think you love him more than he loves you ... he might turn
out to be what you need as I think you're what he needs" (130). Yet,
Anyanwu comes to this conclusion during her trip to America:
She knew how slaves felt as they lay chained on the
bench, the slaver's hot iron burning into their flesh. In
her pride, she had denied that she was a slave. She could
no longer deny it. Doro's mark had been on her from the
day they met. She could break free of him only by dying and
sacrificing her children and leaving him loose upon the
48
world to become even more of an animal. So much of what
Isaac said seemed to be right. Or was it her cowardice, her
fear of Doro's terrible way of killing that made his words
seem so reasonable? How could she know? Whatever she
did would result in evil. (130-131)
Butler again makes it evident that Anyanwu is not the typical
Onitsha/lbo Earth Mother Goddess suggested by tile lore and legend.
Because of her choices, Anyanwu's is one of many of Butler's strong
and complex Black women.
It is important to note that Butler does not suggest Doro only
enthralls Black females. He enslaves other individuals, especially
those who are not Homo Superior, along with those who have very
limited or even any uncontrollable psychic abilities, in order to
raise his mutant children.
Book Two: Lot's Children 1741 :
This section begins the middle of Wild Seed; more than one
hundred years has passed. As Doro checks on tile care of one of his
mutant daughters, readers are introduced to Lann Sloane and his
wife, who are both suggested to be Doro's "children" and he
considers them to be his newest "wild seed" because they are both
unstable telepaths. Lann's wife, incidentally, mirrors Margaret
49
Weylin's character in Kindred for she, in much the same fashion as
Margaret felt for Dana Franklin, fears and hates Anyanwu's
"blackness and power" (137) and is allowed no viable authority or
power in Doro's plantation households. In fact, no mutant, whether
psychically stable or not, are expected to obey Doro even if they have
any economic power. Thus, the Sioanes' usefulness in life on the
plantation is quite limited; Doro even considers Lann to be good prey.
They are charged only with raising Doro's other mutant offspring and
obeying Anyanwu's wishes and authority. Many characters in the
novel are more or less sympathetic and child-like as well as heroic
and admirable. Isaac and Anyanwu are mated together, and through
such a liaison he comes to respect and to a certain extent supports
her admonition against Doro. Francis Smith Foster notes "one way in
which Butler's women will compensate for their physical
limitations is by forming liaisons with persons of power"
(Extrapolation 43). These liaisons are formed in much the same way,
for example, that abolitionists, many of whom were White and
affluent, allied themselves with people such as Sojourner Truth or
Frederick Douglass to fight against slavery in the Old South during
the Civil War. Further, the activity is analogous to the manner in
which the liberal community in America, which was predominately
White, added its polemical voice in allegiance with many Blacks who
50
were involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960's.
The novel's middle section reveals how Anyanwu's and Doro's
feelings have changed for one another. She hates the Nubian and he
tries to fathom the root of her hatred:
She had made herself the nearest thing he had to an
enemy. She obeyed. She was civil. But she could
hold a grudge as no one Doro had ever known. She was
alive because of Isaac...now and then Doro tried to
penetrate her polite, aloof hostility, tried to break her,
bring her back to what she was when he took her from
her people. He was not accustomed to people resisting
him, not accustomed to their hating him. The woman was
a puzzle he had not yet solved. (139).
The passage dramatically reveals the deterioration of Doro's and
Anyanwu's relationship and the growing enmity they mutually feel.
The middle section also reveals another, though short-lived,
alliance between Anyanwu and one of Doro's other mutant sons,
Thomas. Apparently, in Doro's new society, when mutants undergo
tile "transition" phase of their psychic growth and development, they
become violently and psychically intolerable to their parents--and
to those in particular with "latent" genetic potential who are.
powerless to bring their own offspring through the phase. In fact,
51
many latent parents suffer psychic abuse themselves or abuse their
own offspring. Thomas, who hates both Doro and Black people, is an
individual with latent telepathic powers whom Doro charges
Anyanwu to mate with while simultaneously and purposely
disregarding her marriage to Isaac and the family that they have
raised; incidentally, this notion also reflects the historical truth in
which White slave-owners disregarded and disrespected the Black
family. "Lot's Children" offers a bleak mosaic of the social realities
of hatred and racial prejudice between Whites and Blacks in
eighteenth-century America:
Race prejudice was growing deeply in the colonies-
even in this formerly Dutch colony things had once been
so casual. Earlier in the year, there had been mass
mass executions at New York city. Someone had been
setting fires and the whites decided it must be the
blacks. On little or no evidence, thirty-one blacks
were killed--thirteen of them were burned at the
stake. Doro was beginning to worry about this upriver
town. Of all his English colonial settlements, only in
this one did his Blacks not have the protection of
powerful White owners. (143)
52
At first, like the Sioanes, Thomas feared and hated Anyanwu, not
only because of her powers but also because of her race. However,
he adjusts to the idea of what Anyanwu is and, after she displays her
shape-changing abilities, he respects her. Thomas shares the same
feelings toward Doro with one exception: he does not resist Doro as
willfully as she does. Tragically, nevertheless, Doro takes Thomas'
body to punish her for her disobedience and defiance. As Thomas
heroically stood up to his ruthless father before he was killed, he
"bought Anyanwu's life" (174) with his own, and thus Thomas is
redeemed even as Doro cruelly inquires of Anyanwu "What will I have
to do next to teach you to obey?" (175).
Book Two ends with Isaac's death of old age; Anyanwu flees
Doro's seed community and becomes a dolphin to live among the
creatures in the ocean. It is her hope to never return to the world of
humans. She also never wants to be found by Doro ever again lest he
destroy any more mutually-beneficent relationships. Doro seeks
Anyanwu not to enslave her but to destroy her.
Book Three: Canaan 1840 :
In 1840, the starting point of the final section of Wild Seed, it is
revealed that another hundred years have passed and that Anyanwu's
and Doro's children have all perished due to the Revolutionary War
53
and the War of 1812. Doro senses Anyanwu, who is at present in the
guise of an elderly White man named Edward Warrick, in the
Avoyelles Parish in the state of Louisiana. Doro later discovers
Warrick's true identity when he visits a Louisiana plantation run by
mutants and, before he decides to kill Anyanwu for her flight, he
discovers that the mutants running her own plantation are racially
diverse "superior human children" (203). Anyanwu has created her
own version of a seed village run benignly and without Doro's
sadism. Sadly, however, while America has gained its independence
the presence of servile oppression and racism is much stronger.
This historical reality is best revealed in Anyanwu's conversation
with Doro after they meet again:
Haven't you seen the men slaves in this country
who are used for breeding? They are never permit
ted to learn what it means to be a man. They are
not permitted to care for their children. Among my
people, children are wealth they are better than
money, better than anything. But to these men,
warped and twisted by their masters, children
are almost nothing. They are to boast of to other
men. One thinks he is greater than another because
he has more children. Both exaggerate the number
54
of women Wl10 have borne them children. neither is
doing anything a father should for his children, and
the master who is indifferently selling off his own
brown children is laughing and saying, 'You see?
Niggers are animals!' (215)
Anyanwu's narrative stands as Butler's commentary on the
issues of racism and power. She asserts pol em ically that Black
people, especially Black men, had no viable social or economic
authority and power even in their own households--since Blacks
were deemed only servile property--during slavery. Black men's
responsibilities were limited to working the land, or toiling in some
other menial capacity for their masters and breeding more slaves;
incidentally, Black women, on the other hand, were allowed more
freedom than their male counterparts on the plantation in much the
same fashion depicted in Kindred and more particularly in many
historic slave narratives. While many of the recorded slave
narratives presented views of what life on the plantation was like,
they also revealed the multiple roles of Black women: they were
either wives, mothers, or sexual consorts (to either Black males or
their White masters). Additionally, many were also charged with
raising the slave master's own children as well as their own.
Anyanwu's statement speaks not only to the issue of racism, and the
55
underlying sexism, but also to the issue of the power struggle
between Black patriarchy and matriarchy still prevalent within the
modern American family structure. The institution of slavery in the
Old South created the effect whereby Black male slaves could only
delight in their professed sexual prowess, another allusion Butler
makes is to the Black male sexual myths, but nothing more because
they had no power. The effects of slavery are far-reaching even
later as Black women suffered 'from a racist and sexist ideology
which sought to ascribe their "place" in society imposed on them by
both Black and White males.
Butler challenges her readers with a romanticized and
gripping blend of the racial memories of African and American
history, culture, and even myth with science fiction, and it is clear
that the strength of the human spirit and determination can
neutralize slavery and dominance. Nearly one-hundred and fifty
years have passed before the novel's two most strong-willed and
powerful characters come to terms about each other and the forces
at work about them. Doro must "salvage what humanity remains to
him" if he is to ever regain and maintain the Sun Woman's
companionship (Govan 88). He relinquishes his desire to destroy her
for her willfulness and defiance of him as she demands that he stop
his predation of his children and hers and allow her to be free from
56
his dominance or she will simply lie down and die. Anyanwu informs
Doro that Isaac was foolish in believing that she could save Doro's
humanity. She admits "I cannot save it. It's already dead" (276);
nevertheless, readers are made aware that Doro needs Anyanwu more
than she needs him. This is most evident when he tells her "I tried
hard to make myself kill you ... it would be easier than trying to
change you" (253). The two later psychically meld with each other,
and Anyanwu is made aware of Doro's "hunger" for her, not out the
need to kill but out of the need for her love and com panionship and
the need to have "allies not rivals" (258). The price for such things
is Doro's respect for her autonomy and her children, as she tells Doro
that as a thrlvlnq super society "they should learn to help
themselves" (268) and strength of will, and perhaps more
importantly, a reciprocation of his love. They rebuild their old
alliance based on mutual respect and compromise instead of mutual
brutality and destruction. At the novel's end, Doro concedes to
Anyanwu's wishes and cooperates with her to threaten her mutant
children, defective or not, no more. On this basis, they both ensure
the survival of the new society and thus the struggle for power is
abated. Doro is pleased that Anyanwu will remain at his side as co
overseer of the ascendance of the race of Homo Superior alive and as
equals.
57
Butler attributes a great deal of real, effervescent human
substance to the characters and their interactions with one another
in Wild Seed. Her characters are individuals of depth and wonder.
The themes she employs challenge readers with a unique exarnlnation
of the lessons of historical realities that reaches from the past into
the present period by juxtaposing Black history and culture with
mainstream history and culture in America.
CHAPTER IV
KINSHIP AND RACE IN MINDOFMYMIND
As Wild Seed begins the saga of the origin of Doro and
Anyanwu's new society of psychically superior men and women
during the era of slavery on both the African and the American
continents, the next novel, Mind of My Mind. continues the saga of
Homo Superior into the latter half of the late twentieth century. An
even more appropriate name is given to this new society, for they
are called "Patternists", due to the fact that these mentally
superior humans are enmeshed within the mental network called the
"Pattern"; furthermore, many of this novel's characters are in the
network not by choice but because they were drawn into it like
moths to flame by the novel's protagonist Mary. Two of the principal
characters from Wild Seed are also present. Nearly one hundred
years after the events in Wild Seed, the Nubian mutant Doro is still
selectively breeding the new society covertly. Anyanwu, whose
name has been changed to Emma--which means "grandmother"-
reappears in the novel as well to ensure the safety and protection of
her descendants and Doro's. Readers will learn that many of the
58
59
characters in this novel, especially tile women, are llhealers,
teachers, and artists," as noted by Francis Smith Foster
(Extrapolation 47); this Patternist saga is set in Forsyth, California
and focuses on the emergence of not only Patternist society but also
the growth of the super-telepathic character Mary Larkin, who links
the new society by weaving and ensnaring it within the psychic
Pattern. Readers are given a panoramic view of life in suburban Los
Angeles and the life of a diverse group of superior beings who are
either Black or White; the themes of miscegenation, racism and
power are integral to theme, character, action and the setting of
Mind of My Mind. creating "a serious confrontation between
conflicting manifestations of power ... and the resolution of basic
questions concerning race that are vital to the overall theme"
(Foster 43). The relationships between the mutant characters-
particularly within the First Family of psychically superior beings-
and also their actions in the novel are important in the examination
of power and race issues. They best provide a klnshlp with the
"mutes" (the normal non-telepathic Homo Sapiens who represent the
old values of American mainstream society) and the events in
history to satisfy Butler's need to create a form of multi-cultural
society in her science fiction.
60
The novel, sectioned into three parts, begins with a prologue as
Doro seeks out Rina, once his wife, now an alcoholic and a
prostitute, to appraise Mary's growth and development. Doro, who
presently inhabits the body of a White man, promptly kills her
"guest" and steals his body. Doro is angered because he learns that
Rina has been beating Mary. Butler employs the theme of child abuse
and alcoholism in the novel, but with a twist. Rina not only beats
Mary because of her drunkeness but also because of Rina's psychic
intolerance to Mary's presence; her daughter's genetic and Psi,
telepathic and telekinetic, powers makes this impossible. Rina is
oblivious to the actual reason for this fact and Doro is not. Rina's
intolerance and Mary's emerging powers of telepathy are
foreshadowed as Doro states:
She (Mary) is part of my latest attempt to bring
my active telepaths together. I'm going to try to
mate her with another telepath without killing
either of them. And I'm hoping that she and the
boy I have in mind are stable enough to stay
together without killing each other. That will be
a beginning. (17)
Doro asserts that Mary's role in the new society will be to create
the psychic web to hold them all together. Thus, Doro sees Mary--in
61
much the same fashion as the Onitsha credo--as something of great
worth, but it is the power that she will bring him and not any
altruistic reasons for her growth and development that motivates
Doro. He also wishes to "keep her in line" (19) in much the same
way he tried with Emma when she was Anyanwu in Wild Seed. As a
consequence, Emma, who is the novel's second near-godlike figure
next to Doro, is charged with raising Doro's daughter instead of
having Mary's own abusive mother do so.
Part One:
Butler gives a view of life in the city of Forsyth in Mary's
narrative, and we learn that Mary lives her life as a "ghetto" child
of the streets. Here is how she surveys the city's setting:
Forsyth was a dead town. Rich people, old people,
mostly white. Even the southwest side, where we
lived, wasn't a ghetto--or at least not a racial ghetto.
It was full of poor bastards from any race you want
to name --all working like hell to get out of there.
Except us. Rina had been out, Doro told me, but she
had come back. I never thought my mother was very
bright. (25)
62
It can be said that Butler is also suggesting the need or desire for
Black people to leave the ghetto, which in American society is
usually considered a racial one and predom inately Black, to seek
fame and fortune (this is reminiscent of the "promised land" of the
"American Dream") and assimilate into mainstream White society.
Also, Mary's sentiments concerning statements speak to the failures
many Blacks have made in the attempt. Another theme--Doro's
denial of his humanity--echoes a historical precedent whereby many
members in the Black bourgeoisie on occasion denied any "inside"
ties to their own racial identity in an attempt to preserve their
status and find acceptance in mainstream White society. Doro's
denial is particularly evident in his conversation with Mary, who
inquires about his origins:
[Mary]: Who were your people?
[Doro]: They had another name then, but you would call
them Nubians.
[Mary]: Black people!
[Doro]: Yes
[Mary]: God! You're white so much of the time, I never
thought you might have been born black.
[Doro]: It doesn't matter.
[Mary]: What do you mean 'It doesn't matter'? It matters
63
to me.
[Doro]: It doesn't matter because I haven't been any color
for about four thousand years. Or you could say I've been
every color. But either way, I don't have anything more
in common with black people--Nubian or otherwise--than
I do with whites or Asians.
[Mary]: You mean you don't want to admit you have anything
in common with us. But if you were born black, you are
black. Still black, no matter what color you take on.
Mary is forced to marry a White telepath named Karl Larkin,
who is also not sure of Mary's or his own future. Karl reluctantly
accepts his father's demands, for he, like Mary, is given no choice in
the matter and is directed to monitor Mary's transition. The
mentally superior mutants are called "Iatents," who Margaret
O'Connor says are "gifted in telepathic or healing powers" (DLB 37).
When they approach transition, a very painful psychic process, they
become " 'actives' who can exercise their psionic powers
effectively" (37), and unfortunately for many of them, Doro awaits
to prey on any who may be physically more suited for his vampiric
tastes. Thus Butler treats this activity as a psychic rite of passage.
After Mary is married off to Karl and subsequently moves into
his manor, readers are confronted with the issue of race relations
64
between the Black and White characters. Mary is violently opposed
to her being mated with Karl, and Karl is as equally opposed to such
a union despite the fact that Mary is "kind of light-coffee
skinned ... with eyes that are traffic-light green" (30). Nevertheless,
Karl informs Mary that "you shouldn't get the idea that I dislike you
because you're black ... 1wouldn't want you here no matter what color
you werel" (44), and their relationship as two highly developed
telepaths does not begin under the best of circumstances. Despite
their mutual animosity for each other, they are inextricably drawn
together into a psi-link when Mary enters the final stages of her
psychic transition phase, evidenced in the following passage:
Staying with her mentally, Karl opened his eyes
and moved away from her body. Something was
happening that he did not understand. She had not
been able to learn from him, but she was using him
somehow. She had ceased to protest his mental
presence. In fact, her attention seemed on something
else entirely. Her body was relaxed. Her thoughts were
her own, but they were not coherent. He could make
no sense of them. He sensed other people with her
mentally, but he could not reach them even clearly
enough to identify them ...Mary noticed him then, and
65
somehow drew him closer to her. He seemed to see
her arms reaching out, her hands grasping him, though
her body did not move. SUddenly suspicious, he tried
to break contact with her. Before he could com plete
the attempt, his universe exploded. (60)
This passage, near the end of the Part One in the novel, reveals the
emergence of the Pattern. The psychic gestalt links all other
Patternists who, like Karl, are neither as powerful telepaths as Mary
nor as able to break the psi-link with her. The Patternists become a
psychic unit as Mary draws in other mutants who are scattered
throughout most of America. This section of the novel foreshadows
the upcoming confrontation between Doro and Mary as she becomes a
"madonna-like" Patternmaster. It is she who will guide the destiny
of Homo Superior instead of her mutant father. Francis S. Foster
states her position on the view of Mary's newly-emerged persona:
She is a "figure of courage, strength, and endurance."
As mother of the Pattern, she does give "birth and
sustenance to positive growth and advancem ent
among her people". But her people, Mary decides,
are of every race. Nor is she a stereotypical Madonna
in other ways. As a child, she would steal anything
that caught her fancy, particularly books, for she
66
declared, "If I didn't have anything to read, I'd go
really crazy" [25]. Throughout her life, Mary is
impetuous and often fights anyone who offends her,
including Doro, her father, and Karl, her husband.
Though she matures, her pugnacity remains. (45)
Part Two:
Mary inexorably reaches five other telepaths across the
countryside and then draws them to her. In this section of the novel,
the Patternist community grows as readers confront Seth Dana, a
mutant telepath, who attempts to help his ailing, psychically-inert
and latent brother, Clay, find peace from the mutant genes which
wrack him with pain.
Rachel Davidson is also introduced as a Black woman character
who uses her psychic abilities as a healer in a church congregation
for a price (75-80). Rachel is characteristic of the kind of females
Butler says do not "struggle to make ends meet" (Conjuring 203) but
exercise personal power. In Rachel's case, she does so behind the
trappings of religion. Further, when we are introduced to the
character Jesse Bernarr, we learn that the psychic super men and
women take advantage of their abilities only at the expense of
normal humans. Jesse also misuses the minds and bodies of the
67
normal human beings sexually and emotionally in the town of
Donaldton, Pennsylvania (80-85). Ada Dragan and Jan Sholto are the
last of the first set of mutants who are drawn into Mary's psychic
web. Both are powerful actives, and while Ada lives with an abusive
husband, Jan, who is also White, has a very strong prejudice
towards Black people. Consequently, she psychically attacks a Black
family charged with watching the child she and Doro produced.
Butler reminds us of this unfortunate weakness present at the
threshold of the growth of the thriving new society. Furthermore,
Butler handles a unique perspective on the subject of 'race' where it
concerns the interactions between "mutes," normal Homo Sapiens
without psychic powers of any kind, and the growing mutant society.
Doro's conversation with Emma on the the issue of the growth of the
Patternist society and Mary's power subtly reveals Butler's new use
of the racial term "nigger":
[Doro]:They've completely taken over the best section
of town. They did it quietly, but still Mary thought it
safest for them to control key mutes in city hall, in the
police department, in-
[Emma]: Mutes!
[Doro]: It's a convenient term. People without telepathic
voices. Ordinary people.
68
[Emma]: I know what it means, Doro. I knew the 'first
time I heard Mary use it. It means nigger! (161)
Dorothy Allison posits that both Emma's and Butler's use of the term
"nigger" is
as deliberate as her matter-of-fact handling of racism
in the everyday lives of her characters. By portraying
the "ordinary" ones as lesser people who are treated
with contempt, bred like animals (or slaves) for desirable
genetic material, and murdered as if they were not fully
human, Butler is commenting on the underlying structure
of racism. But those on top are also on the bottom. The
telepaths cannot function in normal human society; they
are prone to violence, madness, and unreasoning hatred.
Many are also black. In the early novels they are enslaved,
victimized, assaulted, and killed. In the later novels they
enslave, victimize, and kill normal humans. The nigger,
Butler suggests, is the one who's made slave/child/victim.
It is the concept of nigger, the need for a victim, and the
desire to profit by the abuse and misuse of others that
corrupts and destroys. (474)
As weaver of the Pattern, Mary draws in many more "pain-crazed
people" with mutant, superior minds, and she begins to discover her
69
purpose, much to Doro's mixed feelings of delight and envy; Mary was
his "experiment" created to unite his "children," and he surveys her
work "with the interest of both parent and predator" (O'Connor 37).
Mary is more than Doro had hoped for:
She was a symbiont, a being living in partnership with
her people. She gave them unity, they fed her, and both
thrived. She was not a parasite, though he [Doro] had
encouraged her to think of herself as one. And though she
had great power, she was not naturally, instinctively,
a killer. He was. (217)
As Mary begins her evolution into a being of immense telepathic and
psionic abilities due largely to the Pattern's growth and power, she
realizes that soon she must confront Doro and possibly be destroyed
by him who indeed sees her as "a complete version of him" (210).
However, as Thelma Shinn states, Butler's women "transform
personal power into social power by teaching others", and Mary
takes advantage of this fact. From Rachel Davidson, who is a healer
and somewhat of a psychic vampire simultaneously since her powers
drain off som e of the life force of her "recipients", she learns how
to both heal and use the skill as a deadly weapon to prepare her for
her confrontation with Doro. In much the same way "mothers are
likely to teach their daughters about survival as they have been
70
taught, and daughters are likely to learn" {Veronica Mixon (Essence
13)}, Mary learns from her fellow telepaths many new skills and also
augments her own psychic powers. Importantly, she also
incorporates what she learns into the Pattern and dispatches that
knowledge to educate and train the ever-growing population of Homo
Superior, and thus "personal power becomes social power" (Shinn
203) in Mary's gestalt. Mary is the Patternmaster of her people; she
"in one sense embodies both the aggressive strength of 001'0 and the
nurturing concern of Emma" (O'Connor 38). Mary's character is a
mixture of many of Butler's characters, particularly the female
ones. She discovers that she can run the new society as benignly as
Anyanwu did her plantation in the Avoyelles Parish in southern
Louisiana.
Mary is representative of the novel's "perfect use of power,
but not a future female monopoly nor a world of strong women
alone" (47). Until 001'0 arrives to take her and Rina from this
environment, readers are made aware that Mary is without the
advantages that Karl Larkin has. Karl, as an affluent telepath,
symbolizes the upper class, status, the ideals of wealth and
prosperity though created by his own telepathic powers and the
Doro's economic influences; in addition, we are made aware that
001'0 established many businesses for his people to run as sources of
71
money (51). As Doro's son, Karl is brought up rich and powerful.
Until Mary marries Karl, survives her transition, and weaves the
Pattern, the scales of power psychically tip in her favor. Mary allies
herself with Karl and other powerful male Patternists, such as
Jesse" Bernarr and Seth Dana; in fact, such alliances are evident in
many of Butler's Patternist, and her non-Patternist, works. Also,
just as mutual cooperation is the key to companionship and the
avoidance of mutual destruction in Wild Seed. so too can the same be
said for the relationships in Mind of My Mind; the men and women
characters reconcile their differences with each other and work to
share in the power they create to function as a new society.
Part Three:
The Patternists, who now form a powerful gestalt, decide to
stand against Doro, who becomes both envious and fearful of his
daughter's power; the man-god has become afraid of his child
because he can no longer command the respect and fear of his people;
Mary becomes the head of the "First Family", the six actives who
were brought in to form tile Pattern, and gives the Patternists the
autonomy and the peace that Doro would never allow them to have.
Mary exercises her authority as a born leader; she does so without
malice or fear, but with maturity and discipline as she subsumes the
72
credo of "qreat power means great responsibility" as well as great
strength in great numbers. Again, Mary is not the ophidiophobe that
Doro is.
Soon Mary's Pattern grows, as she continuously brings other
latent telepaths through transition, and Doro orders her to cease her
actions as his envy reaches a climax. To her dismay, Mary discovers
that Doro's true purpose is to take her body and thus gain untold
power and total control of the Patternist gestalt. She believes this
to be a confrontation that she will ultimately lose, for Doro has
always been the most proficient predator of all his people. Her
alliance with Karl has since transmuted to love and respect as he
offers to assist her in killing Doro. His aspirations are soon shared
by the other mem bers of the First Fam ily, thus setting the stage for
Mary's showdown with her Father. Mary is not wholly a Madonna but
a "touqh-talklnq, hard-fighting woman who can be physically
overpowered but not defeated" (Foster 45); in fact, the following
scene during Mary's confrontation with Doro makes Foster's point all
the more evident:
She was power J strength concentrated as Doro had
never felt it before--the strength of dozens, perhaps
hundreds of Patternists. For a moment Doro was
intoxicated with it. It filled him, blotted out all
73
thought. The fiery threads of her Pattern surrounded
him. And before... before him was a slightly smaller
replica of himself as he perceived himself through the
fading senses of his thousands of victims over the years.
Before him, where all the threads of fire met in tangle
of brilliance, was a sm all sun. (217)
Mary fights Doro to the death and uses every ounce of her being along
with her "competitiveness and aggression tempered by a fine
compassion" (45). Thus, Doro becomes a "Patternist and Mary's
property" (220) as she consumes his soul and ancient essence.
Power and love work in unison to defeat the Nubian man-god. It is
Mary's power along with her love for Karl and all of her people which
allow her to defeat, survive, and supplant Doro, and a new race
stands triumphant at the threshold of its own destiny.
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
BLACK CONSCIOUSNESS IN OCTAVIA BUTLER'S SCIENCE FICTION
Octavia Butler's works of science fantasy and science fiction,
Kindred. Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, are
enriched by a historical consciousness that shapes the
depiction of enslavement both in the present and in the
real past and in imaginary pasts and futures, and enacts
struggles for personal freedom and cultural pluralism
which redraws science fiction's cultural boundaries ...
attracts new Black readers--and perhaps writers--as
Butler deploys the genre's conventions to tell stories
that speak to issues, feelings and historical truths
arising out of Afro American experience. (Crossley xviii)
Indeed, the novels discussed in this study reveal a consciousness
that attracts not only followers of science fantasy and science
fiction but also mainstream readers. This consciousness is not
entirely or necessarily created by Butler exclusively for the
enlightenment or pleasure of Black readers. General readers are
74
75
captivated by something that is considered somewhat "alien":
science fiction characters who are non-stereotypical and not mostly
male and White. Butler's unique blend of Afro American slave
memoir coupled with the theme of time travel in Kindred is a new
vehicle for presenting a focus on the experiences and the history of
Black people. Attention to Black history and culture is based on the
historical continuities Butler calls to mind with characterization,
action, and theme shifting between the past and the present. Dana's
observations of how slavery affects everyone, including White
people, and later on through her participation as a slave gives a
twentieth-century Black female's slave memoir its force in Kindred.
Perhaps Dana's discovery of her familial roots and her understanding
of the strictest term of "blood ties" is taken to extremes, yet this
is how science fiction functions best. As John W. Campbell, Jr
asserts, science fiction is "the literature of speculation as to what
changes may come, and which changes will be improvements, which
destructive, which merely pointless" (Critical Terms for Science
Fiction and Fantasy 109).
Butler employs the issues of race, gender, power along with the
themes of eugenics, mutation, immortality, loneliness and alienation
in Wild Seed. which are all set within the context of American
slavery. Her science fiction characters thrive in the past and not
76
the present or some future world. They nonetheless convey the
lessons of historical realities and the author's awareness of the
im portance of history and transcendence via her characters'
thoughts, motives, choices and actions.
Mind of My Mind depicts life in a present-day California within
a covertly thriving new society of psychically superior human
beings. Equally important, the novel chronicles the new society's
power, personal autonomy and growth needed for it to survive.
Butler's characters provide among themselves and with readers as it
is revealed that the Patternists are historically not as superior as
they presume to be; they have to deal with their own foibles within
their individual selves and within their growing collectivity. The
characters' motives and actions provide an enriching and affective
experience that allows Butler's readers to understand the Afro
American historical and cultural consciousness. Her use of mutants
with nearly unlimited psychic powers, who are either Black or White
in the novel, expresses a "mutant nationalism" rather than just a
"Black" nationalistic movement. This new idea is paradigmatic of
the reality of the turbulent sixties that witnessed change in the
attitudes toward and treatment of America's racial minorities and
their strivings for power and self-reliance. It is by the author's
choice that readers witness this movement through the experiences
77
of the novel's main Black protagonists, Mary and her father Doro.
Robert Crossley defines Kindred as "a fantastic travelogue"
which blends uniquely time travel and the literary form of the
autobiographical slave narrative. It is science fantasy which Gene
Wolf, in "What Do They Mean SF?", defines generically as "fantasy
which uses the methodology of science fiction to show that these
things are not only possible but probable." Also, Gary K. Wolfe
denotes the term as "a generic categorization of science fiction as a
branch of fantasy" (Critical Terms for Science Fiction And Fantasy
107). Her work is not considered "hard" science fiction, for Butler
has openly adm itted she does not rely on the technical conventions
of science in Kindred. The main character, Dana Franklin, is
inexplicably "called" into the past by a ruthless White ancestor, and
she guides readers through it as both observer and slave. Butler
enlightens her readers by a depiction of the world Dana surveys and
participates in; this past world conveys "historical and
psychological realities" (Crossley, xiv) of nineteenth-century
American slavery and its effect on the people of the era. Dana
enriches our consciousness and perhaps even our consciences since
many of the novel's covert images are didactic on race issues about
slave life. She and we are made aware of the resilience of slaves,
who have "complex social and psychological relationships" with her.
78
We also learn, as Dana does, that the culture of Black slaves
"constitutes a rich human society" (Crossley xviii). Although they
are enslaved, beaten and deprived of their right to history and
culture, Dana's kindred such as freewoman Alice Greenwood, whom
Rufus must rape to create Dana's family's existence, and her husband
Isaac, who escapes slavery temporarily and is caught and mutilated,
mute Carrie who understands that blackness is a thing to be proud of
in Black people, Sarah and Nigel, who Dana educates, all draw their
"common strengths from its common suffering and anger" (Crossley
xviii-xix). Butler "deepens and enriches readers' understanding of
history" in that she has "designed her own underground railroad
between past and present whose terminus is the reawakened
imagination of the reader" (Crossley xxiii).
In her Patternist works, Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Butler's
readers witness the development of the psychically powerful
"Patternists." Although many of the author's characters are
predom inantly Black and/or fem ale, she "celebrates racial
difference" as many of Mind of My Mind's, and also Wild Seed's,
characters are racially diverse; Butler's Black characters are
essential to the novel's plot and themes and her choice of
predominating her novel with these characters is "a matter of
course" (Crossley xviii), for race and gender as issues are
79
apparently important for the author who is herself both Black and
female. Quite a few of her characters are not necessarily stock or
simplistic, particularly such characters as Doro and Anyanwu in
Wild Seed. They are both complex and emotional, and they share at
least one interesting quality: they persevere in their endeavors,
whether for power, life or love. Doro, though he is a very powerful
mutant with a deadly body-stealing ability, is capable of human
feelings and desires. In fact, his presence is humanized to a certain
extent by the Sun Woman Anyanwu, a mutant healer and shape
changer, who becomes Doro's significant other. She also reveals
Doro's flaws as he fails to recognize that being human and clinging
to humanity is important; this keeps us, as Doro's son Isaac says
"from truly being animals." Perhaps Doro is not wholly a monster,
because he is ever drawn to Anyanwu and her strong will and
compassion for all people; the trite phrase "opposites attract" is
applicable here. Doro's character is generally and historically
reminiscent of the Black Nationalists--Black men and women in
America who took a stand, militantly most of the time, to alleviate
racist, economic and educational oppression of the 1960's and
1970's and pushed to gain social and economic autonomy, equality
and power in order to make their own destiny. The same argument
for Doro's character can be made, for he seeks the very same thing
80
for his people he has fathered in the New World during an historical
period when it was dangerous to be different and Black people, or
any other racial or ethnic minority, were considered both property
and outcasts. The novel's subplot focuses on the turbulent
relationship between Doro and Anyanwu, and readers learn that as
love, power and alienation collide, the need for mutual
reconciliation and compromise with respect and compassion are the
most im portant aspects life has to offer; otherwise, the
consequences are death and mutual destruction. Abuse of power and
social relationships between men and women (especially those of
diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds) is neither necessary or
desirable.
Mary Larkin, the emerging protagonist in Mind of My Mind,
becomes the "mother" of Patternist society when she weaves the
mental web of the Pattern. She also in turn ends the tyranny of her
father/lover Doro and she supplants him in his seat of power over
the community of psychic mutants. However, what separates Mary
from her father Doro is the fact that she is not the psychic vampire
or parasite her father is. Mary assists her people as a sym biont, and
her exercise of power is derived from inner strength--her own as
well as that of the multitudes of minds which are intricately linked
to her in the psychic Pattern--mercy and compassion, and most of
81
all from love. She fulfills Doro's goal of establishing the Patternists
without him. Mary's love for her people of this new society--in
much the same fashion as Anyanwu's love for both her own
descendant children and Doro's defective and inferior breeding
stock--is the force that vanquishes her father. Butler's strange
expression of love conquering all in this sense is both unique and
ironic. The Patternists' kinship with one another becomes, in effect,
as strong as the Pattern which binds them itself. A new society, and
perhaps the next step in human evolution, stands at the threshold of
mankind's future destiny. The events in Mind of My Mind sets up the
plot and action in the next three Patternist works, Clay's Ark,
Survivor and Patternm aster.
By her use of history and culture, particularly of the Black
American aspects and portions of African and American history,
mythos and culture, Octavia Butler has become the most challenging
author of the genre. In 1951, science fiction writer Theodore
Sturgeon defined science fiction as "a story built around human
beings with a human problem and a human solution," and so too do
Butler's stories function in this same manner. Indeed, as a teenager
Butler read many science fiction stories by Ray Bradbury, Leigh
Brackett, and Sturgeon, and her Patternist novels are loosely based
on Sturgeon's More Than Human, which deals with "the coming
82
together of and growing to maturity of a group of misfit individuals
with parapsychological talents into a gestalt entity with the
potential not only to transcend but also to assist the human race in
its survival and progress" (Masterplots 1453). What separates
Sturgeon's work from Butler's is that while her Patternist works
are derived basically from the Gestalt's adventures of Sturgeon's
story, the Patternists are not out to assist normal "mute" humans'
survival but rather the continued growth and survival of its own
(mutant)kind. Nevertheless, it is important to note that within
Butler's Patternist novels this very point becomes evident: survival
depends a great deal on mutual cooperation and human compassion if
a society of any kind is to continue to progress. While Sturgeon's
Gestalt evolves into a powerful and amoral entity, Butler's
characters, Patternist or even non-Patternist, must still deal with
their own human foibles.
It is Butler's artistry and imaginative magic as a storyteller
which make her a fascinating and fresh writer in science fantasy
and science fiction. Her writing creates a "Black presence"
(Crossley xvll) in the genre. Octavia Estelle Butler is placed
alongside Samuel R. Delany, who is considered the first male Afro
American writer of science fiction, because she can contribute to
the enhancement of her readers' awareness and understanding of
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