Butler & Woolf

Butler creates a distinctive experience of temporality in Kindred– moving her main characters between present and past, providing the reader with a unique, and ultimately impossible, account of each historical period. Relating Kindred to Mrs. Dalloway, I began by questioning this formal element- how does the addition of time travel further Butler’s work?  Since a fluctuating temporality is imperative to each novel, I had a sense that investigating this idea could lead to a meaningful dialogue between the two.

To me, this question in Kindred seems inextricable from Kevin’s role in the narrative. It appears that the story line could remain almost entirely intact without his presence, indicating that he must play an important part in the narrative beyond strictly serving as a device of the plot. If Dana had been traveling between her present and Rufus’s present alone, would any of the significance of her travels be lost? Kevin surely complicates Dana’s transition between 1976 and the antebellum South more than he is presented as a source of comfort or ease, this is especially so when they exist apart and in different times. As a black woman and a white man, there is an inherent disparity between the experiences of each in slave-times that is a source of tension for the couple. Dana explicitly expresses her unease at their ability to assimilate to slave culture so easily, committing to her role as slave and taking upon herself responsibility to others, while Kevin exists within it with much less apprehension and preoccupation, focusing most of his concern on his and Dana’s well-being. One wonders how subsumed by her life in the past Dana may have been if not for Kevin’s presence- how much does he serve for her as an anchor to her present, a point of affixation of her self that is 1976 Dana- wife and writer?

Considering these same questions within Mrs. Dalloway, we can come to some conclusions about the transition between the past and present in conjunction with relationships. Woolf’s characters are subjected to the force of the past in a completely different sense than Butler’s, yet it is not unreasonable to draw parallels between the two. Rather than physical transportations, Clarissa undergoes mental voyages into her memories that are depicted as “overpowering the solitary traveller” (p.56) akin to the way Dana was confronted with the past. Woolf writes the past as vividly as the present and, though incomparable to the vividness with which Dana and Kevin experience it, the past is as eminent in the lives of Woolf’s characters as it is for Butler’s; they trace and retrace their existence within it, mentally mapping new paths that will never be forged, travelling impossible distances. Yet, their expected relation to others continually recalls them to the present. Illustrating this, Clarissa’s public persona is the most permanent life she has forged for herself; its dictates author her mindfulness, conducting her consciousness between times in her life. Like a lure on a fishing rod she is flung out into the waters of her memory and nibbled at by the ghosts of herself that lurk there, only to be reeled back in by the hand of the present, the tolling of a bell, the backfire of a car engine, the call to be somebody’s Clarissa.

Reading the two novels this way creates an image of relationships as fixtures of our present selves, attaching us to reality, mooring us in the moment. Their expectations (as we see in Mrs. Dalloway) and our attachment to them (as we see in Kindred) protect us from being subsumed by the past, if not as literally as in the latter, than at least as a, perhaps resigned, rescuing from the reveries of the former.

-Hannah S