Throughout Kindred, we
have this recurring character named Rufus who is always seen causing trouble.
He is portrayed as an evil rapist, who isn’t afraid to guilt trip
Dana into doing things that he wants. However, I am not sure that we can call
him pure evil. It seems to me that he is a victim of circumstance. It through
his experiences that he became the dangerous man he is seen as.
At the beginning of the
book, we first meet Rufus as a boy. He a perfectly normal boy by today’s
standards and is very nice to Dana. He has made a friend in Alice, and it seems
that Alice trusts him when she states “mister Rufe won’t tell” when Dana
questions if Rufus will tell his dad about Dana. However, as time passes by,
Rufus gets worse and worse. He goes from being a kind little boy to a literal
rapist. He moves from being very nice and timid around Dana, to yelling and
threatening her when he doesn’t get what he wants. However, I don’t believe
that Rufus was born evil as seen by his portrayal in his earlier years. He was
simply changed as time went on.
There are two very big
factors that changed Rufus. The first one is the time period that he grew up
in. As the white son of a plantation owner pre-civil war, he must have grown up
with beliefs that people of color are inferior to him. He must have seen other
white people yelling and whipping slaves, so he thought that being mean to them
was perfectly normal. As time went on, he started to change his beliefs. Even
Kevin, who is person born in an era where slavery was considered evil
had changed after his five years stuck in the past. It is conceivable that
someone who lived in a period of slavery for their whole life would change.
The second big factor was
Rufus’s father. Early in the book, we learn that Tom Weylin beat his
son for disobeying him. This must have contributed to Rufus’s change. His
father wanted him to be more like him, so whenever Rufus
stepped out of line, he was punished. Because of this, Rufus gradually
became more and more cruel, if only to avoid getting beaten. Eventually this
change became permanent, and became a part of Rufus’s character.
Overall, I think that Rufus
is kind of a victim here. I don’t think that him being the person who
us readers see him as is necessarily his fault. Rufus’s behavior is just the
result of living in an era of slavery, with a very harsh father. It is his
experiences that forced him to become the man we see him as.
Rufus definitely is a product of his time period. I do agree that as Rufus gets older, he becomes more problematic. For example, when he was a kid he was friends with Alice and kind of viewed her as his companion, but as he grows older he treats her as if she's a body that exists to satisfy him. Whether he's a victim of his environment would be an interesting discussion. In comparison to Dana, I'd probably not say he is, but it's sad to see his disgusting behavior grow as he becomes socialized to be a white man in the south.
ReplyDeleteI think this is just the point that Butler is trying to make. We can't look back at white men in the antebellum south and categorize them as evil necessarily. Some of them may have been, but others were just doing what they felt they had to do and didn't even realize that it was wrong. I think Butler wants us to consider how Rufus gets acclimated to the violence, and consider also how Kevin is. She wants us to see ourselves as not that different and consider what we need to do to realize that we haven't become perfect people since then. Some of these things are still pervasive and she is asking us to understand that and to figure out how to change that since we aren't evil people either.
ReplyDeleteI'd add that not only is Rufus exposed to slave oppression as "normal", especially by his father, but he is shown that slavery is the backbone of business in the Antebellum Era. His father sees his whippings and total degradation of the slaves as rule-following in that period. If he didn't threaten and hurt his slaves, he would be seen as a weak businessman of his time, and also wouldn't be showing his masculinity and control over his estate. Therefore, Rufus is shown that the cruelty performed by his father and other white slaveowners is simply how business works and how the estate thrives. This is why he had to sell Tess near the end of the novel because that's just part of how his father was planning on keeping his business running before he died.
ReplyDeleteI would agree that Rufus has problems and most of them were cultivated by the way he grew up, but I don't think he's a victim. His time period in which he grew up in definitely affected him and so did his father, which if you don't have anything to compare it to, is hard to change your way of thinking or acting.
ReplyDeleteRufus's transformation is definitely a reflection that he is a product of his environment. As you mentioned when Dana saves him the second time he is thoughtful and listens to her remarks, but as he gets older the more he changes, molding into the typical slavemaster.
ReplyDeleteWe also see Rufus longing to live the in society that Dana and Kevin live in so that he could marry Alice, but clearly he acts in accordance to Antebellum south society in order to get what he wants which is still wrong. I would say for Dana, Rufus is not evil until he tries to rape her which is something (that is to her) completely uncalled for and out of the ordinary even by Antebellum south standards.
ReplyDeleteRufus is evil, but also a product of his environment. Unlike Dana, he is unable to change a lot about who he will grow up to be. Dana's parents wanted her to be a secretary or nurse. She wanted to be a writer, so that's what she did. For Rufus, his dad wanted him to run a plantation, and even after Tom dies, he still follows in those steps.
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ReplyDeleteGood post! Rufus is definitely a product of his upbringing. The fact that his parents are slave owners and not very good parents in general, make it incredibly hard for him to turn out any other way.
ReplyDeleteIf one were to subscribe to the moral relativist point of view (which I do not), then Rufus would be evil by the standards of our current society, and not evil by the standards of the time he lives in.
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