留學生dissertation網提供美國留學生英語語言學dissertation定制。Octavia Butler:A Retrospective
Stephanie A. Smith
T H E ONLY SCIENCE FICTION WRITER to have received a prestigious"genius" grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,acclaimed author Octavia E. Butler is often described as havingwritten stories about "racial and sexual and cultural diversity" and, as theprotagonist, Dana, in her novel Kindred says, about "strange relationships."Butler had, indeed, an extraordinarily "strange" literary vision for hertime; she said of herself that she was "comfortably asocial... a pessimist if
I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and anoil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, anddrive." Butler's father, who shined shoes for a living, died when she was achild, and her mother supported the family by being a maid. Given suchearly hard times, her eminence as one of the country's leading sciencefiction writers is both extraordinary and rare, for to date Butler is the onlyprominent, popular, female African American and decidedly feministvoice in an historically white male domain called science fiction andfantasy or SF/F.'
Sadly for those of us who have followed the emergence of feministSF/F since back in the heady days of the late 1960s, the shy but powerful
Butler died too young, at only fifty-eight, in February of 2006. Her work
Feminist Studies 33, no. 2 (Summer 2007). © 2007 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
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386 Stephanie A. Smith
remains with us, not only as the proverbial "good read" but also as aninvaluable fictional resource for feminist studies: indeed, she was avowedlyfeminist, but more importantly, her work brings together rich considerationsof science, history, race, gender, and class—rich and strange and fascinatingrelationships. Her works have already made her a central figure infeminist SF, alongside such legendary and beloved voices as Joanna Russ,Ursula K. Le Guin, Vonda N. Mclntyre, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Wilhelm,to name only a few.
The subgenre of feminist science fiction deals with issues of particularconcern to feminism(s), engaging questions about gender and queer studies,family and social structures, individual autonomy, and the individual'sability to control her body and sexuality. Two key early texts that specificallyengage gender and reproductive biology are Le Guin's The Left Hand of
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLEKindred. By Octavia E. Butler. Boston: Beacon Press, 1979.
Parable ofthe Sower. By Octavia E. Butler. New York: Time/Warner, 1993.Fledgling: A Novel. By Octavia E. Butler. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005."Bloodchild": Bloodchild and Other Stories. By Octavia E. Butler. New York: Seven
Stories Press, 2005.Darkness (1969) and Russ's The Female Man (1975), although some critics have#p#分頁標題#e#
argued that the genre arrived long before the contemporary feministpolitical movement, as is evident in such novels as Mary Shelley'sFrankenstein in 1818. Throughout the 1970s, an increasing number of writers
engaged feminist ideas or questions, either as self-identified feminists suchas Suzy McKee Charnas (author of Walk to the End ofthe World [1974] and
Motherlines [1978]) or as writers who didn't identify as feminists but neverthelessshared many ofthe same concerns and goals.^
However, neither science fiction nor fantasy is yet accorded as muchin the way of critical weight or seriousness as they should garner as part ofcontemporary U.S. fictional production. In fact, many critics and creative
writers dismiss these genres entirely as junk or pulp. In many MFA
Stephanie A. Smith 387
programs, including my own, students are actively discouraged from
writing anything remotely like SF/F.
As critic Jeffrey Allen Tucker writes, the widely shared idea that SF/F isnot serious literature is tied to ongoing debates about race, gender, identity,and authority. The question about SF/F was and is about a politics ofaesthetics.-^ Good SF/F engages the political realities of its time through theremove of fiction, an aesthetic that flies in the face of the still-popularargument among writers and writing programs that poetry and politicsshould not mingle. Tucker recounts how the rise of identity politics in the
1950s and 1960s changed SF/F, which had been largely written by and for(white) men, although there were some notable exceptions, such as thetalented C.L. Moore. Before the 1960s, which brought into print variousnew voices like Brian Moorcock's British magazine. New Worlds; Harlan
Ellison's multi-volume project. Dangerous Visions; and Damon Knight'sOrbit, the field of SF/F was dominated by men likeIsaac Asimov and RobertHeinlein, whose visions were usually about war and conquest, empire
having yet to acquire quite the same dubious political connotations it nowhas.'' In hindsight, perhaps, it is hardly surprising that the 1960s of politicalupheavals and NASA moon shots would usher into this almost all-whitemale
genre writers who were neither white nor male, like Samuel Delanyand later Butler, and whose concerns had more to do with experiments insocial justice than with planetary conquest. In the late 1950s and early
1960s, Delany was the only published SF/F writer who was a person ofcolor, although writers who shared Delany's concerns, like Le Guin,started to populate their fictional worlds with people who weren't all
white. The protagonist of The Left Hand of Darkness, for example, is a Blackman. But the issue of race in SF/F is often subsumed by the icon of the"alien," although current use of this word to denote all immigrants andforeigners to the United States should be instructive about race in SF/F:
clearly, people of color and ethnic minorities are still regarded by theUnited States—at least in the law and in the language—as Other and otherthan fully human.#p#分頁標題#e#
Butler's fictions—complex, unsettling, interracial—complicate thesimplicity of understanding the alien as Other. The MacArthur Award in1995 brought to Butler, with her focus on the ambiguities of "race" and
388 Stephanie A. Smithgender-and to feminist SF/F more generally-an increased visibility. For
Butler, though, the grant's blessings were mixed: it gave her a hithertounknown financial freedom, but it also came with pressures that led to ahiatus—a serious writer's block of nearly a decade—in her work. The block
finally broke, and not long before she passed away, she published her mostrecent novel. Fledgling, which gives readers one last chance to hear herpowerful and unique voice. Published in 2005, Fledgling is another versionof a very old story, the vampire story, like Jewell Gomez's The Gilda Stories,^and with far less melodrama than Anne Rice's popular takes on that
totemic creature of fantasy.Butler's novel opens by slamming the reader into the mind of an
amnesiac killer, a nameless, roving, and truly scary figure, far more predatory
animal than human:The pain of my hunger won over all my other pain. I discovered that I was
strong in spite of all the things that were wrong with me. I seized theanimal. It fought me, tore at me, struggled to escape, but I had it. I clung
留學生dissertation網提供美國留學生英語語言學dissertation定制to it, rode it, found its throat, tasted its blood, smelled its terror. I tore at its
throat with my teeth until it collapsed. Then, at last, I fed, gorged myself
on the fresh meat that I needed.'
This is Fledgling's heroine, Renee—later Shori, the first (surviving) Blackwoman of the vampiric Ina people. Although this account of her first feedafter being nearly killed is awful enough, it hecomes even worse when thereader finds out that the animal being devoured is not only a man, Hugh
Tang, hut also a friend of his killer. The Ina, as the reader will discovergradually, have been living with and among the human population undetectedfor generations. However, the advent of our heroine, Shori, bringsthe Ina to a crisis of race survival. Hoping to escape their largely nocturnal
existence, the Ina have genetically engineered the child Shori to he
"Black," because melanin protects the skin from sunlight. At the openingof the book, however, neither the reader nor the heroine knows anythingof Ina history. When the young vampire awakes in a cave, amnesiac and
mutilated, she is lost and terrified. Appearing no more than a humaneleven years old, but having already lived fifty-three years as an Ina "child,"Butler's vampire is still more or less a child to her people, although shewill have a long journey back to them and that journey leaves her withStephanie A. Smith 389
permanent scars. What follows Shori's ferocious murder and eating ofHugh Tang is a darkly erotic story of the family and race crisis that led tothe extermination of her family and her near-fatal injuries, a story in#p#分頁標題#e#
which sexual and racial politics are distinctly at hand. Butler uses themurky moral dimensions of feeding upon and yet hecoming sexuallysymbiotic with humans in a sort of queasy, complex, and for some readers
untenable symbiosis. For example, here is Shori "seducing" a lover:When I was calm, I lay down beside tbe woman and covered ber moutbwitb my band as sbe woke. I beld on to ber witb my otber arm and botbmy legs as sbe began to struggle. Once I was sure of my bold on ber, I bitinto ber neck. Sbe struggled wildly at first, tried to bite me, tried to
scream. But after I bad fed for a few seconds sbe stopped struggling.'
The way in which the Ina initially attack the people with whom they willeventually hond is unsettling at best, more frequently reminiscent of rape:this crossing of sexual hunger, domination across difference, and violenceis truly Butler's territory. Her acclaimed Hugo and Nebula' awardwinningstory, "Bloodchild," of 1984 shows how an alien race, here called
the T'lic, has made use of humanity, breeding their alien children's eggs inthe fertile flesh of human "partners," who are more or less owned by the
aliens, enslaved and raised specifically for the purpose of forced breeding.
And yet, as the story shows, a complexity of passion and tenderness, ofviolence and loyalty attends the alien/human relation, a strange andcompelling exploration of the emotional and social consequences ofenslavement. The child Gan truly loves his T'lic "owner" and eventually
chooses to allow her to implant her eggs in bis flesh: in other words, themaster/slave dialectic is truly a dialectic. Gan, as a human and a child, hasno real power in tbe T'lic world, but the tenderness and respect that hisT'lic offers him gives him some measure of power. However, although"Bloodchild" faces the questions of enslavement and symbiosis from thissympathetic perspective of a human child. Fledgling, two decades later,attempts to capture an alien psychology, the mind and feelings of a creature
who is partly human but mostly Ina, that is, mostly vampiric, predatory,violent, sexually voracious—and an amnesiac. The result is morethan a little problematic. Because Shori remembers nothing about herself.390 Stephanie A. Smith
her family, her history, the Ina, humanity—nothing—Butler weighs thenovel down with ponderous historical narrative and pages of explanationdesigned to teach Shori about herself but which slow down the story andbecome either unbelievable or outright boring. Another troubling point is
that Shori's depiction both plays with and yet also may be seen as reinforcingthe nineteenth-century U.S. racial stereotype of the Black woman as
more animal, exotic, or erotic than white women, so that whenever Shoritalks about sinking her teeth into someone or about her scent or her needfor meat, although it makes sense for the situation Butler has created, itcan also make a reader wince at the way in which the image resurrects aracist fantasy. On the one hand, the fact that sex and violence are deeplyintertwined in U.S. culture should be examined, and that fact is madeonly too clear when stories of sexual predation on the very young emergein the daily news. Fledgling engages in a fictional analysis of such#p#分頁標題#e#
behavior—Shori is described as looking like an eleven-year-old, whichcould land her first lover Wright in jail. On the other hand, Shori's resemblanceto a literal black panther is disturbing.
But this kind of quasi-violent, bloody, and at times unbelievablesymbiosis, which often borders on the parasitic, is always at work in Butler'sstories and novels because of the history of race relations in the UnitedStates—a history rooted in the violence of raced slavery, in which abducted
African and U.S.-born enslaved women bore their white masters' children,who were, in turn, kept or sold as slaves. Similarly, many of Butler's characters
suffer catastrophic losses of identity, family, community, or evenspecies, just as enslaved Africans and many Native Americans lost their
homes, their history, and their heritage to an alien "race."Indeed, Butler's most popular work. Kindred, makes the historical
genesis of this writer's interests clear. Kindred is a time-travel novel inwhich Dana, a modern Black woman of 1976, is celebrating her twentysixth
birthday with her new (white) husband Kevin when she is snatchedabruptly from ber bome in California and transported to tbe antebellum
South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Danahas been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back again and againfrom the present time to serve Rufus, yet each visit grows longer andmore dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end inStephanie A. Smith 39i
slavery, long before it has even, historically, begun. As with many a timetravelstory, a question of genesis is at issue in Kindred. If the transported
Black woman Dana does not keep the white boy she meets in the pastalive, "she" will not exist because Rufus's bloodline will have failed toproduce Dana's ancestor, Hagar. But Rufus grows into a violent slavemaster who uses a combination of seduction and rape to control female
slaves—a moral and finally physical conundrum for his descendent, Dana,who will be forced to kill Rufus to keep herself alive and whole:
I could feel tbe knife in my band, still slippery witb perspiration. A slavewas a slave. Anytbing could be done to ber. And Rufus was Rufus—erratic,alternately generous and vicious. I could accept bim as my ancestor, my
younger brotber, my friend, but not as my master, and not as my lover.'
This 1979 novel became a staple of school and college courses and nowhas more than a quarter million copies in print, but Kindred was initially
rejected by most publisbers, who simply could not understand how ascience fiction novel—even if Butler herself never called this novel SF—
could be set on a plantation in the antebellum South rather than on afaraway planet in the future.'" By having a limited definition ofthe genreof science fiction/fantasy, these publishers originally ignored Butler's fineexploration through sucb a (science) fiction of U.S. history and socialjustice.#p#分頁標題#e#
In all of her work, then, Butler casts an unflinching eye on racism,sexism, poverty, and ignorance and on their often unsettling results forboth their victims and their oppressors, who may not always be easilydistinguished. Butler's most effective fictions include Kindred and the
Xenogenesis series—three novels from the 1980s, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, andImago, which feminist critic Donna Haraway singled out as particularlyfruitful fictions about hybridity." I've analyzed the trilogy elsewhere asnovels that explore the rich metaphoric ground of genetics as opposed to
the techno-inspired primarily masculine cyberspace fiction of the sametime period.'^ From her first Patternist series (1976-1984) to her last Parableseries (1994-1998), Butler wrote cautionary tales about race, ignorance,fascism, and global warming. In every single one of her novels, she reimaginedhumanity in order to examine how the political and social prob392
Stephanie A. Smithlems we face today might be worked through but at the imaginativeremove that SF/F allows. Such imaginative re-creation is one of SF/F's chief
strengths, which makes her novels especially useful in the classroom, asthe wide adoption of Butler's Kindred suggests. A teacher can have herstudents reading a story engaging enough to keep even inexperiencedreaders involved until the ending and so lead them to Butler's explorations
of the uneasy politics of slavery, science, the uses of fiction, thequestions of power and gender, and of course "race," As Dana in Kindredtells us about her slave-holding ancestor,
Rufus came out to play hero for providing sucb a good meal, and tbepeople [bis slaves] gave bim tbe praise be wanted. Tben tbey made gross
jokes about bim behind bis back. Strangely tbey seemed to like bim, boldbim in contempt, and fear bim all at tbe same time. Tbis confused me
because I felt just about tbe same mixture of emotions for bim myself. I badtbougbt my feelings were complicated because be and I bad sucb a strangerelationsbip. But tben, slavery of any kind fostered strange relationsbips.'-*
N O T E S
1. Robert Crossley, introduction to Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Boston: Beacon Press,
1979), xviii; Butler, Kindred, 230; Butler, "Author's Statement," Parable ofthe Sower (NewYork: Time/Warner, 1993), 296.
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (New York: Ace, 1969); Joanna Russ, TheFemale Man (New York: Bantam Books, 1975); Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (London:
Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818); Suzy McKee Charnas, Walk to theEnd ofthe World (New York: Ballantine, 1974); and her Motherlines (New York: Berkeley,
1978).
3. Jeffrey Allen Tucker, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference(Weslyan, Conn.: Weslyan University Press, 2004).
4. Stephanie A. Smith, "'A Most Ambiguous Citizen': Samuel R. 'Chip' Delany,"American Literary History, 19, no. 2 (2007): 560.
5. Jewel Gomez, The Cilda Stories (New York: Firebrand Books, 1991); Anne Rice, TheVampire Lestat (New York: Ballantine, 1986).#p#分頁標題#e#
6. Octavia E. Butler, Fledgling: A Novel (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 8.
7. Ibid., 31.
8. The Hugo award, named after Hugo Gernshack, "Father of the Science Fiction
Magazine," is also called the Science Fiction Achievement Award (1960-present). The
Stephanie A . Smith 393
http://www.400190.com/dissertation_writing/linguistic/Nebula award is presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America to the novel or
other work voted as best by the membership.
9. Butler, Kindred, 260.
10. Crossley, introduction, xi.
11. Donna Haraway, "The Promises of Monsters," Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
1992).
12. Stephanie A. Smith, "Morphing, Materialism, and the Marketing of Xenogenesis,"
留學生dissertation網提供美國留學生英語語言學dissertation定制Genders 18 (Winter 1993): 67-86.
13. Butler, Kindred, 229-30.