In “Bloodchild” Octavia Butler creates a world where humans live cohesively with an alien species where humans are not the dominant creatures. Butler masterfully crafts her new world in such a way that it keeps readers confused yet hungry to figure out how it came to be. The author uses in-depth descriptions, strong pacing, compelling perspective, and revealing character dialogue to make the situation seem relatable and human when the planet and creatures are alien and act strangely compared to what the reader is accustomed to.
When readers enter the peculiar world of “Bloodchild” they are exposed to gruesome descriptions of a “birthing” process that includes cutting open a man to remove live maggots from his flesh. The descriptions change
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At the beginning of the story the reader follows Gan’s thoughts and confusion toward his family members and their distrust of T’Gatoi. The idea of distrust is shown when Gan’s mother laid with T’Gatoi, “T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way, but no one else in the family liked it,” (Butler 6). This establishes Gan’s opinions of the Tlic and how they are not affected by his family’s apprehension. Although, Gan’s opinions are challenged when he witnesses the gory and traumatizing experience that is the birthing process of the Tlic. Gan first starts to doubt the love he feels for T’Gatoi when he holds down Bram and thinks, “I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him,” (Butler 15). By introducing this doubt to the protagonist the reader also starts to doubt the intentions of T’Gatoi and the species of the Tlic. This makes Gan vulnerable to criticism that he would have normally dismissed, which is shown when Gan confronts his brother. “‘To provide the next generation of host animals,’ he said, ‘It’s more than that!’ I countered. Was it?” (Butler 21). The readers’ and Gan’s trust for T’Gatoi and the Tlic slowly deteriorates because of how quickly love could change into apprehension and confusion. While the perspective can show the reader how someone could change within a short amount of time the dialogue shows how Tlic and humans interact within this new
Moving forward into chapter seventeen of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”, Glanton’s crew rode on as the Apaches they drank with held back, as they refused to ride through the night. The next night Glanton’s men made a fire and discussed what’s happened in their group, the members who’d been killed. Then brought up there possibly being life on other planets. The Judge immediately disagreed though and did a trick, as if that was being the proof to his point or something.
Butler plays out a scenario where she pushes the limits of what a human can love if we will be willing to make sacrifices for it. In “Bloodchild”, the protagonist, Gan, is partially raised by T’Gatoi and expresses his love by allowing her to use him as a host for her young. Through Gan’s actions, we are able to explore the idea that love has no boundaries; humans posses the capability to love even a parasitic alien life form. He is able to love T’Gatoi deeply enough to put his life at risk to bear her offspring. Love is also explored as a driving factor for self-sacrifice. In “Bloodchild”, Gan is faced with the decision to choose whether he will be a host body or allow T’Gatoi to lay her eggs into Gan’s older sister. While Gan’s older sister has always wanted to be a host body and would gladly agree, Gan knows the burden of the responsibility and will not let her go through the suffering. Out of love, Gan is willing to sacrifice his own wellbeing to ensure the safety of his family. Although the story may be gruesome, Butler is able to express her ideas of what love could look like as well as allow the reader to question their definition of
Conclusion: In all, racial oppression and identification is a concurrent theme in Butler’s works that have been discussed. Butler’s examinations involving the sense of pride and passion towards uniqueness and individualism are evident in many different perspectives. In Butler’s works, the passion the main characters have towards themselves in an alien world teach the reader important values and lessons against negativity and racial discrimination.
“A maid accidentally pulled the countess’ hair while combing it; Countess Elizabeth Bathory instinctively slapped the girl on the ear, but so hard she drew blood. The servant girl’s blood spurted onto Elizabeth’s hands...the countess noticed that as the blood dried, her own skin seemed to take the whiteness and the youthful quality of the young girl’s skin.” (Rodrigues 15).
Olivia Butler writes in the afterword of “Bloodchild” that it’s not a story of slavery, and evidence from close reading can be used to support this statement. Butler uses the human form as a vehicle for defamiliarization to show the mechanical functions readers serve themselves and others. Furthermore, this process is able to reveal their passive nature and ultimately highlight the human allowance for manipulation. She brings light to these behaviors by showing a lack of respect for human life, an unbalanced power relationship between the Tlic and the humans, and Gan’s stripped cognitive process.
Octavia Butler’s trilogy Lilith’s Brood contains a myriad of characters who would be marked as “different” in contemporary American society, whether it is because of their race, gender, sex, or species. Their differences are often the catalyst for conflict between others who see themselves as more normal and, therefore, better and higher ranked in the human hierarchy. Butler’s disdain for human hierarchical tendencies is clear in Lilith’s Brood as she often calls human intelligence and hierarchy “the human contradiction”. Using the protagonists Lilith, Akin, and Jodahs, Butler criticizes the misconceptions formulated about race, sex, and gender and, through their interactions with others, underlines the illogical harassment that often derives from the fear of what we do not yet understand.
The book follows Dana who is thrown back in time to live in a plantation during the height of slavery. The story in part explores slavery through the eye of an observer. Dana and even Kevin may have been living in the past, but they were not active members. Initially, they were just strangers who seemed to have just landed in to an ongoing play. As Dana puts it, they "were observers watching a show. We were watching history happen around us. And we were actors." (Page 98). The author creates a scenario where a woman from modern times finds herself thrust into slavery by account of her being in a period where blacks could never be anything else but slaves. The author draws a picture of two parallel times. From this parallel setting based on what Dana goes through as a slave and her experiences in the present times, readers can be able to make comparison between the two times. The reader can be able to trace how far perceptions towards women, blacks and family relations have come. The book therefore shows that even as time goes by, mankind still faces the same challenges, but takes on a reflection based on the prevailing period.
Boyle and Hemingway use the same three elements of fiction to tell the story; both stories are written about pregnancy, abortion, and manipulation; on the other hand, they have their difference because their main characters differ in maturity. One wonder about up to what degree is abortion considered to be a crime. Both couple considered the same crime, although China and Jeremy’s actions are unthinkable to the eyes of the reader.
...e, history, and blood. The specific commingling that emerges, however, has common roots in its very diversity. Throughout her tale Menchaca's allegiance is clearly to her race, and while the bias comes through, the history she traces is never the less compelling. The strongest achievement of this book is that it fundamentally shifts the gaze of its reader by reifying race and celebrating its complexity.
First came the pride, an overwhelming sense of achievement, an accomplishment due to great ambition, but slowly and enduringly surged a world of guilt and confusion, the conscience which I once thought diminished, began to grow, soon defeating the title and its rewards. Slowly the unforgotten memories from that merciless night overcame me and I succumbed to the incessant and horrific images, the bloody dagger, a lifeless corpse. I wash, I scrub, I tear at the flesh on my hands, trying desperately to cleanse myself of the blood. But the filthy witness remains, stained, never to be removed.
The Bloody Chamber is a remake of the original fairytale Bluebeard; however Angela Carter rewrites the fairy tale using her feminist views to raise issues concerning roles in relationships and marriage, sexuality and corruption. Carter challenges the classic role of the male protagonist and the female victim; she does this by changing the stereotypes of the traditional fairy tale’s males as the saviours and females as the victims. She challenges the fairy tale’s traditional sex roles when she replaces the brother of the bride for the mother as the rescuer, “one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my fathers service revolver” this demonstrates to the reader that women are as strong as men, even stronger and can take on a expected man’s role and make it their own therefore challenging the stereotypical gender roles of Men. In addition to this as a feminist, Carter uses anti-essentialism to present that time, power and position are the details that makes a man act like he does and a woman like she does. This is revealed through the setting, France 1790’s, were men and women were not equal. The Marquis in this story is presented as a wealthy older man who has the ability to seduce and retrieve what he wants, “his world” this emphasizes the power he maintains and it gives him ownership not only of his wealth but the young bride and even possibly the...
Bad blood is a book that was written James H. Jones who is an associate professor of History. The book narrates on how the government through the department of Public Health service (PHS) authorized and financed a program that did not protect human values and rights. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment which was conducted between 1932 and 1972 where four hundred illiterate and semi-illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama recently diagnosed with syphilis were sampled for an experiment that was funded by the U.S Health Service to prove that the effect of untreated syphilis are different in blacks as opposed to whites. The blacks in Macon County, Alabama were turned into laboratory animals without their knowledge and the purpose of the experiment
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, is a novel about an African American woman named Dana (born in 1950) who lives in 1976 California. She experiences weird headaches and dizziness one day and gets teleported to a river in the woods. She sees a boy drowning and rushes into the river to save him. The boy’s mother comes out yelling at Dana and then the father comes out with a shotgun just as Dana is sent back to her house. Dana kinda sees it as a hallucination and goes on shocked. Later she experiences the dizziness again and is sent back to a house this time. Then she finds out she is being sent to the past to help her relative Rufus from dying. Every time Rufus gets in trouble to the point of dying Dana is flung back in time to save him. But she is sent to the 1800s
...tionship has completely evolved and the narrator somewhat comes into her own a natural and inevitable process.
The book is laced with emotionally and erotically boosted encounters. A person who would enjoy reading about vampires, the urge to keep reading comes within the first few chapters; in this story early as chapter three. The novel is a new vampire paradigm that casts a steady eye on racism, sexism, poverty, and ignorance. Relationships in this story, as loving and loyal as they are yet, are very different. There is no moral questioning at all, but this total acceptance of paedophilia is not only seen in those having sex with children, also by every single other character. Even though being black brought Shori some str...