Home?

After our discussion last class, I was drawn to how the concept of home is defined, complicated, and where it truly exists for Dana, if at all. Although at first Dana feels sure that her home is in her time, her house in 1976 California, she begins to unconsciously internalize her life in the 1800s despite her attempts against it. Late in the novel, when she is talking to Kevin, she realizes “It’s real now, isn’t it, …somehow it was abstract then” (243). From the time she arrived and realized the racial, social, political, and historical context of the antebellum South, she “played the slave” (91). In spite of her repulsion to the time, to the violence, fear and brutality that marked it, and physically and psychologically marked her, she “recall[s] feeling relief at seeing the [Weylin] house, feeling that she had come home. And having to stop and correct myself, remind myself that I was in an alien, dangerous place. I could recall being surprised that I could come to think of such a place as home” (190). She doesn’t consciously think of the Weylin plantation as home, it goes against her better instincts, so what is it that that makes the plantation home for Dana? The definition we are given of home in Kindred obviously isn’t the traditional understanding many people have of the concept, of a place associated with safety, but that many would perhaps describe it as Dana does after awakening from being beaten from Tom Weylin, “I was still in hell” (213).

She is even haunted by the past in her California home from the very first time she returns from saving a drowning Rufus: “They stayed with me, shadowy and threatening. They made their own limbo and held me in it” (18). Dana is trapped between these two homes, these two eras, against her better judgement. She comes to realize that even her home in 1976 sin’t “homelike. …The house just wasn’t familiar enough. …Rufus’ time was a stronger, sharper reality (191). It seems that as Dana spends more time in the nineteenth century and internalizes her role as slave, its familiarity and the ties it gives her, an orphan, to family provide some sort of convoluted comfort.

Stuck in this “limbo,” Dana feels as if she is “caught between his [Rufus’] home and mine” (18, 115). Perhaps it is as Kevin points out in moment of frustration when he returns to the twentieth century after his five year absence: “If I’m not home yet, maybe I don’t have a home” (190). These two diverging realities, of the 1800s and 1976, of California and Maryland, don’t “mesh” (115). In the final scene, Dana becomes literally and physically trapped between these two realities: “I was back at home—in my own house, in my own time. But I was still caught somehow, joined to the wall as though my arm were growing out of it—growing into it” (261). Her arm literally becomes one with the house, “meshing with it as though somehow my arm were being absorbed into something” (261). Although Dana is ultimately able to return to 1976, she will never be able to recover her arm and part of her will always remain in that time that had, for a time, become her ‘home.’ Just as she is able to feel her arm (a sensation also known as phantom limb) after it is removed, still haunted by “a strange throbbing of my arm, of where my arm had been,” she will never be able to physically or psychologically escape the experiences and traumas as they are rooted deep within her body and her mind, that have marked her permanently. Is Dana, or even the reader, able to ultimately reconcile the concept of home in the novel?