Relationships Between Centuries

In our discussions in class we’ve touched a lot on the parallels between Alice and Dana and Rufus and Kevin. Not just how Alice and Dana are similar to each other and Rufus and Kevin are similar to each other, but how Alice and Rufus’s relationship is like a 19th century version of Kevin and Dana’s relationship. Alice and Dana are quite similar in how they look and wear their hair, which is pointed out several times in the book, but also in the fact that they were both born free and then pushed into a life of slavery. They also both felt the need to escape from this new life they were pushed into, Dana by harming herself to return to the 20th century and Alice by eventually hanging herself. Throughout Dana’s stay in the 1800s, she beings to see similarities between the Weylins and Kevin, the way that they talk or the color of their eyes, these similarities hint to her larger concern that Kevin will become like them if he stays on the plantation for too long.

For Rufus, the only examples he has had of interracial relationships in the 19th century is a slave being forced to sleep with her master. This is something that his own father, Tom Weylin, did quite a bit as we are told by Dana who notices a lot of young children who look like Tom on the plantation. When Dana shows up with Kevin and explains to Rufus that they are married, and that in their time it is legal, Rufus is exposed to a different kind of relationship but he clearly lacks an understanding of it. Rufus says at one point that if he were in the 20th century he would marry Alice, but that shows that he strongly misunderstands that the marriage would have to be consensual. His model that he’s trying to base the relationship off of is Kevin and Dana, but he doesn’t see them acting normally he sees them putting on their slave/ slave-owner act, so even his impression of that kind of relationship is tilted.


Dana and Kevin’s relationship itself in the 20th century has its own problems with inequality. We see some traits in Kevin that almost reflect Rufus, like when Kevin goes to write in his office while Dana does all of the unpacking, or Kevin expecting Dana to type for him even though he knows that she hates it. This sort of brings in the idea of how your environment shapes you, because with these hints of inequality already visible in the 20th century I think that if Dana and Kevin had stayed together on the Weylin plantation for too long that Kevin would have grown more and more like Rufus.

Comments

  1. Jack H.April 6, 2018 at 5:53 PM

    I wonder if the inequality dynamic between Dana and Kevin was strictly a narrative device to parallel the relationship between master and slave, or the author’s way of commenting on the inequalities of 20th century gender roles.

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  2. 羅　理愛　（スミトロ　リア）April 19, 2018 at 7:34 AM

    This is so interesting to analyze, and I start to wonder how/if Dana and Kevin's relationship changed after their last trip to the Antebellum Era. Since she has seen so many similarities between Kevin and Rufus like the ones you mentioned earlier (making Dana write/type for them), does she realize, more often now, when she is treated subordinately by these two men in the owner-slave dynamic? Does that mean that the way she sees Kevin now is different, and has their relationship therefore gone downhill? I guess we'll never know.. but it's fun to ponder.

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  3. SolomiaApril 20, 2018 at 2:29 PM

    This makes me think about how horrible it would have been to be in love with someone who wasn’t of my race in the antebellum South. Even if by some impossible time travel a person were to find out interracial marriage would eventually become accepted and even common, there is absolutely no way of recreating a healthy marriage in that time period. Even if there was some sort of mutual feeling and consent, a relationship would fundamentally be impossible – you couldn’t date, display any affection, or even sleep in the same room without the scrutiny and disapproval of everyone around you, both black and white. If you throw a particularly fiery and passionate person like Rufus into a situation like this, there are no surprises that the outcome was horrible.

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