Sexual Traumas and Identity Formation in "Passing" and "Kindred"

Obligatorisk kvalifiseringsoppgave i ENG4373 – Multicultural American Literature, vår 2012. 

Both in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred – albeit in very different ways – an historical, asymmetrical cross-racial sexual union is an indispensable basic factor for their respective narrative developments: In Passing, a core theme, the possibility of being able to “pass” from being considered black to being considered white, hinges on a sufficient dilution of visible outward signs of blackness; in Kindred, the inception of the hereditary line of the main protagonist depends on a sexual relation between a white slave owner and a black slave – a relation she is transported through time to make sure comes about, whereby to save herself.

The historical reality of the Black female American experience of subjection to sexual violations, and the traumas caused thereby, will be the point of departure for my discussion of these two novels. I will compare and contrast how this reality is represented, and discuss how the respective novels position themselves in relation to this subject – i.e., how they represent and comment on an abhorrent but historically inescapable system of relations. Further, I will discuss how the novels try to negotiate a present black female identity that takes into account this historical reality. Thus, this essay will compare and discuss how the subject of sexual trauma shapes the thematic foci of Kindred and Passing.

Albeit both concerned with the subject matter as I have broadly outlined above, the narrative structures and salient themes of Kindred and Passing are quite different. Kindred oscillates between a more and more bland present day narrative and a conversely more real and realistically described antebellum South. It tackles history heads-on, with a story that explicitly involves a master–slave sexual union. In Passing, the presence of history is only implicit, the focus being rather on factual outcomes of history, and how these in turn impinge on and shape a contemporary story.

According to McDowell (xii), white male slave owners constructed a discourse wherein black female sexuality came to be seen as licentious, and thus in turn having to bear the responsibility for their sexual conduct toward women slaves. Hence, in order to “overcome their heritage of rape and concubinage,” black woman writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century “imitated the ‘purity,’ the sexual morality of the Victorian bourgeoisie” (xiii). Irene Redfield seems to have been given the task of representing this didactic position in Passing – her prudish sexual morality becoming evident in several scenes throughout the novel. She is concerned with her oldest son progressing too fast in school, but only because he is beginning to pick up “queer ideas” (42) (i.e., about sex) from his peers – and is driven to fury when she voices her concerns to her husband, and he considers it a joke (42). And it seems that her marriage at this point is a sexless one – at least, Irene and her husband sleep in separate bedrooms.

But perhaps most tellingly, her moral stance is revealed through the development of her relationship with Clare – both through her overtly signified judgments of her, but also through her repression of their well-camouflaged, but abundantly implied, romantic, perhaps initially sexual, and in the end tragic, relationship. Irene describes Clare as intelligent, but only in a “purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn’t made the mistake of being born a Negro” (61). According to Irene, Clare is sensual, seductive, she has her “‘having’ nature” (59); “catlike … was the word which best described [her]” (6); and in a fight she is ferocious, having “savagely … clawed” (6) an opponent. Taken together, this is a description reminiscent of the hereto dominant discourse of African American women as being animal-like, irrational, and sexually licentious.

Irene’s relationship with Clare is more than anything else ambiguous. She is clearly enamored by her, and has an often sensual or even visceral response to her presence – but she “could never be sure whether [Clare’s] comings were a joy or a vexation” (57). When Clare comes on a surprise visit, Irene first wants avoid her, but when she looks at her, she has a “sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling,” and grasps “Clare’s two hands in her own” (46). Still, her strong reservations are more explicit in the narrative, and she never allows herself to consciously comment on this attraction. Moreover, she is deeply critical to Clare’s life choices, to marry a white and even racist man, and her seemingly unrestricted and nonchalant play with, and transition between, racial identities.

Thus, we could say that Irene is imbued with all the sexual prudishness associated with Victorian ideals – maybe not with ideals concordant with the zeitgeist of the time, this was after all the roaring twenties, and a certain sexual freedom was afforded contemporary women, especially of the urban middle class – but with the counter-narrative to the abovementioned dominant one. Irene thus seems to become an embodiment of the contemporary need to restore the honor of black female sexuality after both the traumas inflicted upon it, but also, and maybe more importantly, in opposition to the discourse with which it was justified by. She is thus both deeply concerned with her own sexual propriety, but also with the contrasting impropriety of Clare’s.

In this respect Irene and Clare could be regarded as opposites, but it might be more to the point to see Clare as having the function of being a scapegoat for Irene’s repressed sexuality, embodying the dark side of the internal contradiction Irene needs to make to conform to the discourse trying to establish a moral high ground for black female sexuality. Politics becomes primary to the subject, with disastrous consequences.

In the end, Clare receives her punishment for her transgressions. Is she pushed by Irene, or is it a more symbolic action, a “perverted alternative discourse” that causes her to fall to her death? Either way, one is tempted to analyze as follows: Clare has broken the rules of how one (both at the time, and to Irene) was supposed to confront the trauma of historical sexual abuse: Instead of helping her middle class black sisters create a strong and sustainable counter narrative, she (i) is both more sexually overt than was her wont, and (ii) – and maybe even more of a transgression –actually uses a traumatic heritage for her own egotistical benefits. Irene’s evident double standards seems then to become a direct comment on the arbitrariness of these rules: not only does Irene herself pass, whenever it is convenient; but her actions also reveal her own real sexual desires, and belie her façade of sexual prudery.

One important crux in the narrative of Kindred is the eventual sexual union between Rufus and Alice: Its offspring will secure the hereditary line of Dana, and without it she will cease to exist in her contemporary life. Whenever her forefather’s life is endangered, she is sent back in time to save it, in order to make sure that he is able to father the child that will start her line. She is faced with the dilemma of having to keep alive a gradually more brutal slave owner, and thus has to keep in check her own inclination to kill him. Moreover, and motivated by what to this reader is a convoluted mixture of necessity and circumstance, Dana becomes an enabler for the sexual relation between Alice and Rufus, by laying down the arguments to Alice in a way that convinces her that submitting is preferable to any other conceivable alternative (166) – Alice even remarking that Dana “gentle[s] him for me” (228). Later, Dana also seems to discourage Alice’s plans to escape, by only reluctantly providing the laudanum she wants in order to mollify her children (234).

So, by having her life depend on, in this respect, a “successful” relationship between Rufus and Alice, Dana is positioned to witness, to become an active participant in, and to understand, not only the horror, brutality and oppression of antebellum slavery, but more importantly the white master/black concubine dynamics and its consequences. The temporal juxtaposition creates the ground for a thorough investigation of its traumatic nature; Butler forcing her readers to “confront repressed anxieties about racial differences and slavery’s traumatic repercussions on the nation as a whole” (Schiff 107).

According to Parham, the threat of rape is “hyperpresent” (1327) in the text, even if it is seldom explicitly mentioned; I would contend that the threat of physical abuse is equally, terrifyingly, present – and that the two often go together. Dana is brutally beaten by a patroller on her second trip to the past, astonished that she could “absorb so much punishment without losing consciousness” (41), and only just escapes being raped (42). Later, she witnesses Tom Weylin whip a slave publicly in order to set an example for the other slaves, something that Dana reflects “served its purpose as far as [she] was concerned” (92). She is later beaten herself by Weylin, to the point where she vomits (107), and later, as a punishment, she is sent out as a field hand (211), a form of hardship akin to extreme physical abuse for a post-industrial American woman. The underlying but highly operative and gradually built-up dual specters of rape and physical abuse become manifest in the novel’s last scene in the past, when Rufus tries to have his way with her, and Dana assumes that at this point the only way to avoid him taking her by force if she resists is to kill him (260).

Moreover, according to Schiff (108), both the two temporal settings, and two of the main characters, Alice and Dana, could be seen as doubles of each other, making this investigation even more salient to a present-day reader, and contemporary society. The initial identification we had with Dana, being a contemporary to the reader, with an identifiable set of modernity’s personality traits, is transferred to Alice: Dana is gradually stripped of all that differs her from her antebellum relative: She initially only “[plays] the slave” (91), but gradually becomes more and more like one. She is gradually feminized – even enabled by Alice when she gives Dana a blue dress (165) to make her, in Alice’s words, “look more like a woman when your man comes for you” (166) and also through her occupation in the farm kitchen – becoming gradually more consistent with antebellum conceptions of feminine ideals. Alice, on the other hand, (and Rufus, to whom initially Dana is more like a big sister) gradually approach Dana’s age. And, at first resistant, but after a while more or less subdued and complacent – evident in the “real smile” without “no sarcasms, no ridicule” (Butler 233) she gives Rufus after her birth – becomes the sexual companion of Rufus. And after Alice’s suicide, even this role is sought transferred onto Dana by Rufus, who recognizes them, in Alice’s words, as “two halves of the same woman” (228).

This doubling enhances the effects of the novel’s representations of physical, sexual and emotional trauma. When Dana’s double commits suicide, we have been conditioned through the gradual characterizational confluence to relate to the suffering of an antebellum black female slave. Importantly, Alice is not driven to suicide because of sexual abuse, but because Rufus sells off her children – Alice’s willingness to do whatever it takes once she has become a mother (and giving up when motherhood is taken away from her) mirroring Dana’s willingness to do whatever it takes to secure her ancestry. Because only when Dana’s life is secured by the conception of Hagar can Dana take her vengeance on Rufus – but maybe at a price: by killing him, she by default kills something of her own self – possibly symbolized by her left arm being left behind in the past?

I will conclude the comparison between the novels in light of the following quote by Schiff (107–8):

The task of undermining the master narrative of American history, one that has repressed the sordid and traumatic memories of the past, and rewriting that narrative into one that can sustain and reincorporate the repressed memories is a curative, or potentially curative, project.

As we can see, the statement assumes a dominant narrative of American history, with a selective memory; the possibility of undermining this narrative, by reincorporating in it the repressed elements; and the possibility that this process, or its results, could have a curative effect. This was written about Kindred, written in the seventies, and may be more to the point for that project; still I believe that, for slightly different reasons, this quote is highly relevant for both novels.

I would argue that at the time of publication, the late twenties, Passing emerges as a direct comment on and investigation of the difficulties of sincerely creating a sustainable counter-memory to the predominant one. The need to balance a fictitious and negative, but still powerful, myth of black female sexuality made black female writers create an alternative discourse of moral superiority, a discourse that proved inconsistent with the reality of their contemporary lives. Thus, the redress of the false and detrimental narration established in itself a false and detrimental narration. The power of this might be seen both in the overt punishment of the violator of proper femininity in Passing, but also Irene’s need to repress an alternative reality to a new alternative story.

In contrast, in Kindred the historical background of present-day Black American experience is explicitly confronted; it is the center of attention, it is described with historical accuracy, and in great detail. When Passing could be seen to deal more implicitly with some of the fallout of the traumas created by oppressive historical sexual relations, Kindred more intensely investigates what those traumas actually amounted to – and, through intense temporal and psychological pairings, maybe for this argument most saliently of a current interracial relationship (Kevin and Dana) with an antebellum one (Rufus and Dana), is able to force us to consider how operative these traumas are today.

In different ways, Kindred and Passing are dealing with contemporary consequences of the same historical traumatic reality. However, an important similarity is this: That in both novels, history seems to have an overwhelming power over the present. In Kindred, it becomes more real than the present, signifying perhaps the power unresolved traumas have over the present life of an entire subgroup of the American population. And in Passing, history suppresses and controls the behavior of its main character to the extent that it becomes a more powerful influence on her actions than her own conscious reflections.

Thus, it is tempting to conclude that what history does with Irene’s subconsciousness, Butler, through Dana, sets out to rectify, by locating “the primal scene, the unprocessed moment of traumatic dissociation” (Schiff 110) – and thereby, through an honest investigation of the realities of the historical Black American experience, confronts the traumas – and, instead of trying to establish an alternative and mimicked discourse with repressive functions, restores history itself, and thus begins the creation of a viable counter-memory that might possibly prove to have a curative effect.    

 

Bibliography

Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. 1979. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Print.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. Ed. Carla Kaplan. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.

McDowell, Deborah E. Introduction. Quicksand and Passing. By Nella Larsen. 1928, 1929. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986. ix–xxxv. Print.

Parham, Marisa. “Saying ‘Yes’ to Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Callaloo 32.4 (2009): 1315–31.

Schiff, Sarah Eden. “Recovering (from) the double: Fiction as Historical Revision in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred.” Arizona Quarterly 65.1 (2009): 107–36.