Kindred on Interracial Relationships. Do We Support Kevin?
Let's say you have a scale, like typical 1 to 10. On the bottom is that big red frowny face and at the top it gets better, and the game is place the white man. Rufus is somewhat ambiguous, but as the book goes on it just gets worse and worse. He acts out of “love”, but those actions include abuse and sexual assault, yet some are inclined to sympathise with him and his conditions. It feels like we are watching him slowly turn into his father, yet it pulled at my heart meeting the kid who faces abuse from his father “He turned and pulled up his shirt so that I could see the crisscross of long red welts… ‘He said I took money from his desk, and I said I didn’t.’ Rufus shrugged” (20). He’s not a one because that would be somebody evil to their core, but, he might be a three or a two.
I think Kindred draws a really interesting contrast with Kevin. He has his moments, good and bad, and on the scale would be the inverse of Rufus, not perfect but maybe around a seven. No, a ten isn’t some perfect guy (or a ken) but I do think Kindred kind frames it in this rankable way. As a reader, a modern person with more “correct” viewpoints looking back, playing out this hypothetical time-travel, and there are so many points in this novel where you can’t help cringe and go whoops, that was wrong. Every scene is a question of what to and not to do, and leaves readers wondering that for themselves as well.
Octavia E. Butler intentionally but Kevin and Rufus are intentionally placed as inverses on this scale of “correctness” to make a point. A large focus of the novel is interracial romantic relationships, particularly framed around the history and legacy of slavery, and Kindred creates both Kevin + Dana and Rufus + Alice as contrasts to draw, not white and black good or bad but with nuances to propose questions harder to answer.
In Rufus’s slave state, throughout Kindred there are no positive relationships between white and black people, and in that environment anything resembling a modern day relationship, balanced, loving and full of trust, is seen as completely impossible. As Dana put, “There was no shame in raping a black women, but there could be shame in loving one” (134). Later Rufus says, “‘If I lived in your time, I would have married her. Or tried to’” (135). Yet, even if Alice and Rufus were both into each other, and wanted to build a life together, instead of the abusive situation that played off, the power would still always be in Rufus’s hands. Therefore, due to the circumstances, Kindred makes it impossible to ever see it as a good idea.
So, what do we see in Kevin, and interracial relationships in a more modern setting? There are many points in which Dana and Kevin's relationship leaves readers a little bit uncomfortable. His unfunny jokes about Dana typing his manuscripts (an incident recurring in the 19th century slave timeline with Rufus), his little “slavery isn’t that bad” moment, and the disconnection between him and Dana as a result of the separation of experience as a white man vs. a black woman. When I read this novel, I sometimes wonder if Octavia E. Butler wants them together at all. Yet, they do, and he does, have so many good moments, and there is so much good to help put the rest at ease.
Maryland in the 19th century is so clearly an environment impossible for a healthy relationship for a black and white couple. Not to overgeneralize, but that is very clearly the statement made from Kindred. In the end, Rufus takes ownership over Alice, and she ends up dead, unable to live in the abusive circumstances. The late 20th century is so much better in so many ways, but Octavia E. Butler writes in some of these comparisons in Dana and Rufus’s relationship, mostly to make a point about the living legacy of slavery. However, while Rufus does suck sometimes, the argument of Kindred is not at all that in the modern environment interracial couples also can’t exist. Reading Kindred, we all don't want Kevin and Dana to break up—always there for each other to get each other through the hard times. In addition, some of Kevin's moments, where we wonder of some more “correct” path he could’ve taken, is due to our vantage point as readers from 2025, and might be read differently by a 1970s audience. He’s not a Rufus, he’s not perfect, but he’s written perfectly that way to let us bring the messages from the world Octavia E. Butler has put on our table into the one we live in today.
Hi Eve, great blog! Your use of the 1-10 scale is a great visual representation of what Butler is trying to achieve with Kevin. While she intentionally draws parallels between Rufus and Kevin's characters (as you noted with the manuscript typing example), she doesn't make Kevin into some sort of villan character. As you mentioned, he also has many good moments, both in his relationship with Dana and as a character himself. Ultimately, Butler presents Kevin as an extremely nuanced character, not all good but not all bad.
ReplyDeleteHey Eve!! I really enjoyed reading your blog post. I completely agree with you that throughout the novel, Octavia Butler makes it so that us as readers sometimes see Rufus and/or Kevin doing good things and sometimes we question their choices. I really liked your point about how Butler makes it so that if we did like Rufus, his and Dana's relationship would never work because of that power dynamic. I really loved how you added pictures throughout your post; it makes it feel like an actual blog. Good job!!
ReplyDeleteHey Eve! I find this comparison super interesting, like Rufus is kind of the parallel of Kevin in terms of this scale. Rufus as a character is especially problematic in a relationship because of the power he holds at the time. Also as you mention, it’s not written like Kevin and Dana will break up but Kevin clearly has faults and prejudices about women especially because he lives in 1970 and still has the prejudices of that time himself; similar to how Rufus is influenced by his time. Really great job!
ReplyDeleteHi Eve, another great post in an engaging style. I think I would completely agree with your take on Kevin. He's not perfect, but I think he does very well. And, to me, a 7, is doing better than the majority of people. While I don't want to sound too much like a Kevin apologist, I think he does better in his time than most people who are nit picking him. Still, he has his cringeworthy misogynistic and ignorant moments.
ReplyDeleteHey Eve!! Reading Kindred, I was always kinda confused on where Kevin's character was going, and what Butler wanted us to think of him because of his conflicting actions. While I think his character and relationship with Dana has it's flaws, it adds to the realism of the novel, which makes it an interesting part of the book to think about. Great post!
ReplyDeleteHi Eve! I think you make some really interesting points about Kevin and Rufus respectively, and I think that you connect them to a larger narrative that is very interesting. Butler's portrayal of interracial relationships in Kindred is really interesting, and I think the fact that she chose to make Kevin an imperfect yet supportive and overall good character was very interesting. I think it would have been a lot easier to make him all good or all evil, and the route Butler took was much more engaging.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I think those moments where Kevin "slips" actually serve to make him a better, deeper character. Almost nobody is 100% good or 100% evil, with the possible exception of Rufus in "The Rope", and Butler's portrayal of Kevin seems to keep this in mind constantly. These moments are an opportunity for him to change (like Dana) even in his position as an observer (unlike Dana.) Of course, there are also the moments where he is genuinely supportive and kind without ulterior motives, which seem to make up the bulk of his relationship with Dana and hold it together even through terrifying situations like the one they find themselves in. And like you say, despite his flaws, Kevin was overall far ahead of many other men for his time.
ReplyDeleteHi eve! I think you highlighted how Rufus is a highly complicated character very well. Butler does an amazing job portraying the different dynamics of relationships and the hardships that can come with it. No person is perfect, and I think the confliction the reader feels about a character that isn't 100% evil is just the kind of realism to add a whole another level to a novel. I really like your analyzing and the scaling that you did! It was very clear. Great blog!
ReplyDeleteIt's a really good idea to directly contrast Kevin and Rufus in this way, using the hypothetical Alice-Rufus "marriage" as a good measure: even if Alice WERE "into" Rufus (and he certainly doesn't seem worried enough that she's NOT into him), and their relationship were consensual, it would still be fraught with these power dynamics. And there's nothing EITHER of them could do about it--Rufus simply would have the power, and she would not. We DO get these little glimpses where she doesn't seem completely miserable--the brief smile after the baby is born--but none of these moments imply anything like an egalitarian relationship.
ReplyDeleteThe Kevin-Dana counterexample is especially interesting since it is an interracial relationship, but I see gender as much more relevant than race in their negotiations: when Kevin says he'll "let" Dana do his typing (so cute!), he's positioning her as his *secretary*, not a fellow writer. And the valuable role of secretarial work, in the 1970s, was explicitly coded as feminine--Dana can do "her" writing, when she gets a chance, but before that, she can do HIS work FOR him. We see *exactly* this same scenario with Rufus, and in this instance Dana is grateful (because she's fallen so far into the enslaved mentality)--he gets her paper for her own writing, but first she has to write some letters for him. I wouldn't say Butler is suggesting that race is not an issue at all in Kevin and Dana's relationship, but she does seem to suggest that in the 1970s, gender is the more urgent problem.
Hi Eve! I really like your inclusion of images from the TV show, I've been meaning to watch it. I think there is some level of discomfort that Butler adds to all interracial couples in the book, even ones that we are more tempted to support. Kevin is never able to fully understand the depth of slavery and this unawareness leads to somewhat uncomfortable-feeling relationship between the two. I ended the book wondering whether interracial couples are ever possible without some wall of understanding between the two people. I doubt that she meant to lead to that conclusion since all relationships with have some barriers, but it was an interesting connection. Great blog!
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