This blog post is expanding on a train of thought I started with in class yesterday, about just how small the world of the novel really is. Throughout the book, we only find ourselves in two locations: Kevin and Dana's apartment, and the plantation. We travel a little bit beyond the edge of the plantation into the woods alongside the plantation, but we never really leave it. Even within the plantation, most of what we see takes place in the house or the adjacent cook yard. Both when Dana is in LA and when she is in Maryland she is in somewhat stifling situations where she is not able to leave either because of her skin color or fear of time travel.
In addition to the close quarters, there are only a small group of characters. In the apartment it's just Kevin and Dana and sometimes not even both of them. At the plantation, the white people and house slaves don't number very many people either. And not only are their not very many people around, the ones who are around are constantly running into each other. With the kind of tensions that exist all around, it gives me a sense of social claustrophobia just reading along. I like to have some personal space and have a hard time being around the same group of people 24/7 even if I really enjoy everyone and the relationships are tension-free. I can't imagine what living like that would be like.
As Chas brought up in class yesterday, perhaps this is part of the point Butler is trying to make. One of the less brutal things that still made life awful for slaves would be this social claustrophobia. It's less obviously cruel than whippings, but might have been even worse. A slave could potentially live his or her entire life on a plantation without a chance to travel or meet new people unless they were sold away from everyone they knew. Of course, the social claustrophobia probably affected white people as well, since we don't see Rufus really interact with anyone besides the same people Dana does. This is partly just a luxury of our time that we have a bigger world and constantly get to know more people. However, the plantation owners were able to travel around more and have company over, so their situation was not nearly as dire as the slaves in that sense.
Even apart from the obvious strictures of slavery, people simply moved around a lot less in the early 19th century in America, because transportation and roads were a lot more sketchy. Most people's lives were indeed lived within relatively small radii--a fact Dana can exploit, as she's pretty sure Rufus would have no idea what a New York accent (19th century version) would even sound like.
ReplyDeleteBut I too would connect this to the novel's themes: slavery was a claustrophobic arrangement. One of the simpler but more poignant moments, for me, is when Dana is longing for some time alone. That seemingly simplest of freedoms, which most of us take for granted, is nearly impossible for her in this context.