Bill Goodridge
AP English IV
Ms. Barnes-Parkins
9/10/14
The novel Kindred by Octavia Butler is a powerful piece of literature that transcend the mindset of the modern day African American woman. Butler incorporates violence in her novel to show how the power struggle was so real.
In the novel the reader is confronted with a scene where Tom Weylin is whipping a slave who dared to talk back to him. He displayed this whipping in front of all the other slaves that he own. The main reason he did this was not just to show what happens to a slave that is disobey him but to show to Dana what will happen to her if she don’t know her place. Butler uses this violence scene to depict the punishment that a slave receive in the time period of the novel.
Dana was forced to watch the scene of the whipping of the slave. Butler puts a lot of detail into the scene “The slave’s body jerked and strained against its ropes” so reader can truly relive the brutality of slave owners like Tom Weylin. Characters in the novel must confront the idea of keeping control over others such as Tom Weylin having to keep all the people in his life under his rule. Just like father Rufus also tried to keep others under his control as well.
He does this when he tries to force Alice to accept the fact that she now belongs to him and that he can do whatever he wants to her. You can see this when Dana describes the abuse that showed on Alice face when she spend the night in Rufus room. The novel has a great quote