Kindred is by far my favorite selection of reading from the In Search of Lost Time  program thus far. I actually managed to read the entire book in the week before the program started. I was so captivated by the intensity of the subject matter that I had trouble putting it down. The story, which is about a young African American woman living in the 1970s who is repeatedly dragged back in time to the antebellum south to aid her white male ancestor.  Such situation would be horrific enough for a young black man, but as a woman, Dana’s vulnerability is at least doubled. The significance of Dana’s sex as well as her ethnicity in the Kindred novel inspired me to look at the novel in conjunction with the subject matter of our latest ancillary reading, Breaking the Codes: The Sexual Politics of Female Criminality. 

In Kindred, there is an especially traumatic scene in which Dana’s male ancestor, Rufus, has just been beaten in a fight with a run away slave who attacked him for trying to rape his wife. When Dana questions his atrocious behavior he justifies it by saying that he had no other choice and that he would have made her his wife it it weren’t that she refused him (and there for offended his honor). In Breaking the Codes  it is suggested through out that for women to demand equality was an attack on male masculinity, in other words, for women to have the freedom to do as they wish independent of a males authority was offensive to the male ego. This is the case in Kindred for not only Alice (the woman Rufus tried to rape), but for Dana as well. They were challenging the authority of not only men, but of white men. It used to be that any woman who was upset with a man, or claimed she had reverences against them was labeled a hysteric. Similarly, slaves who ran away were said to have drapetomania. Apparently, oppressed individuals who desired freedom, or fair treatment are mentally ill.

When presented with the collection of atrocities against women which history has to offer, I can never help but be baffled: how can white men like Rufus who owned slaves and were clearly racist claim to love women who they quite clearly see as inferior creatures. Breaking the Codes makes it clear that such a phenomena is not isolated to the pre-civil war South, but has been a sad reality throughout history. For instance, during the late 1800s when feminists and some of their male sympathizers were pushing for female equality they were met with fierce resistance. Some insisted that to shelter the woman within the home was a natural practice justified by a long history of holding women captive(187). One lawyer supported this claim by insisting that women naturally preferred to be alone. A French doctor by the name of Broca produced studies concluding that women had an inferior cranial capacity and there for it would be detrimental to society to allow them to participate in higher education or matters of politics(187). So, it would seem that for many hundreds of years men have claimed to love women despite an utter lack of respect for her as an equal allowing him to feel little to no remorse when he pushes his will upon her. Such ill founded feelings of superiority would  only be exasperated  for an African American woman who finds herself in the grip of slavery.

In Breaking Social Codes the feminist was compared to the female criminal, for they both “tested societies established boundaries.” Feminists did this by trying to claim their rightful place in society. The same could be said of black American’s who tried to raise themselves up in society, either by attempting to escape slavery (in which case they were quite literally labeled as criminals), or even well into the 20th century or 21st for that matter if they try to establish themselves in a certain neighborhood or area of society. In both cases, the privileged of society “envision the over turning of all that makes social life familiar.” This irrational fear of losing power by allowing others to have power over themselves is what has allowed the social injustices of sexism and racism to carry on as long as they have.