An Overview...

Seeing as the semester is coming to a close, I wanted to look back on the different texts we read and explore the different images of time travel we read. I was looking at Claire’s blog the other day, and she posted a quote by Henry Austin Dobson that really struck me: “Time goes, you say? Ah no! Alas, Time stays, we go.” I think that this is a very applicable quote, in that it separates the ways in which we experience and understand time and space as it implies that time remains as it is, and it is we who travel across space. I want to quickly see how time is experienced in relation to space in these novels, and see if I come to any conclusions or see any more common threads across the texts. Although not all of our books included time travel, per se, I want to delve into the commonalities such novels share with such novels as A Connecticut Yankee, Looking Backward, The Time Machine, and Kindred that illustrate time travel. I want to explore, briefly, the different images and concepts of time we are shown in these texts. In relation to these texts, I want to see how Herland and A Handmaid’s Tale can be considered time travel texts.

We explored many different modes of time travel in the different novels we read this semester. Several of the characters fall asleep and wake up in a different time, like Rip Van Winkle and Julian West (in Looking Backward), or are knocked unconscious like Hank Morgan. Although Kindred is somewhat similar in that Dana has no control over her travels, it is different in the sense that she is physically pulled between the two times throughout the novel and has limited control over her travels to the past (although, risking death, she has a bit more control over her returns to the present era). The Time Machine appears to be the only novel wherein the time traveler employs the use of a physical, tangible mode of transport to travel to a different time. Both Herland and A Handmaid’s Tale don’t employ the use of any sort of physical mode of transport. Although the novel Herland doesn’t contain any sort of machine or other physical or mental mode of transporting Jeff, Van, and Terry across space and time, they do travel to a place that exists outside of history, beyond the traditional conceptions of time and space. With A Handmaid’s Tale, Offred travels back and forth between Gilead and ‘the time before’ throughout the novel. Although all of these novels employ different means to carry people across time and space, they all challenge and complicate our traditional notions of linear time, and the different ways in which people experience time.

Additionally, I wanted to look at how many of the characters travel back to their own time. Despite the fact that Hank Morgan returns to the nineteenth century from his time in the sixth, his sanity doesn’t appear to have made the trip with him. In Looking Backward, Julian West only travels back to the nineteenth century in a nightmare, but happily remains in the year 2000 when he awakes. The Time Traveler in The Time Machine returns to the nineteenth century after experiencing different times of the future. In Herland, the main characters travel back to the US (presumably) all except for Terry, who remains in Herland with his wife and child. In the end of Kindred, Dana returns to the twentieth century for the last time after her travels to the nineteenth century, although she is mentally and emotionally scarred by the experience. Lastly, although we aren’t really sure of Offred’s fate in A Handmaid’s Tale, if she was saved, then one could say she would travel back to her original time, “the time before” beyond the confines of the authoritarian state the US has evolved into. But if Offred was simply taken to prison then she remains in Gilead. All of these characters, whether they return to their original time or not, are permanently affected and consumed by the time they spent in these different times and places.

The Corporeality of Home

I wrote about this subject in my last blog, but for some reason I can’t get it out of my head so sorry if I am beating a dead horse but I am still trying to reconcile where and when is home for Dana, or if it even exists. This is more for my own purposes, since I'm writing my final paper on the subject...

This novel disrupts and dislocates the conceptual understanding of the ostensibly intangible idea of ‘home.’ Both Dana and Kevin struggle throughout the novel to reconcile the seemingly elusive idea of ‘home’ and where and when it exists, whether it is in 1976 Los Angeles or nineteenth-century Maryland. As the novel progresses, it becomes apparent that the traditional notion of ‘home’ as a safe and familiar place isn’t applicable, that the ‘homes’ that Dana is faced with are at odds with such a concept. As Robert Crossly writes in the novel’s “Reader’s Guide,” Kindred challenges the conception of the home as a “magnet for American sentiment and homilies: ‘There’s no place like home’; ‘Home is where the heart is’; ‘You can’t go home again’” (Crossly 267). Instead, home is posited as a convoluted, dangerous, contradictory place, a place where family, safety, and refuge take on a whole new meaning.

Home becomes a paradox for Dana, “the meaning of a homecoming…impossibly complicated” by the dislocation of time and space (Butler 267). No matter where Dana is, chronologically or geographically, she remains haunted by her life both past and present. As John Washington says, “home ‘is a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run’” (Rushdy 140). In other words, ‘home’ is not necessarily a matter of choice but rather a place where simply “belong.” Home is defined in many different, conflicting ways in Kindred. Dana makes “a connection between family and home, between kindred and place,” thus mentally crossing both time and place in her associations with ‘home’ (Rashdy 141).

When Dana travels to the present for the very last time, her arm appears to be simultaneously “growing out of” and “into” the wall, as if her limb is moving in two divergent directions at once though it remains in stasis. The wall becomes a sort of barrier or portal between the two worlds, representing a kairotic moment for Dana, a place literally outside of and beyond the boundaries of time. For a few moments Dana’s body is literally torn between two completely divergent realities in terms of their chronological, geographical, and historical locations. This moment that transcends linear time and space locates Dana within both of her ‘homes’ at once. She is marked permanently by her experiences, and even after the fact Dana is haunted by the ghost of her arm. 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, representing a “kind of birthmark” (Butler 267). The first thing that Dana does after her arm is fully healed is visit the Weylin plantation, or what is left of it, thus revealing that “both her California house and the Weylin plantation have become inescapably ‘home’ to her” (Butler 267).

Blurring the lines between past and present throughout the novel, Butler ultimately meshes the two with Dana’s limb as the liminal divide, crossing the portal between Maryland and California, slavery and freedom, Rufus and Kevin, the nineteenth and the twentieth century, one home and the other. She lives simultaneously in both eras, both houses, both mentalities, as they have become one for her. It isn’t a matter or choice of her own agency, rather both places evolve into spaces wherein she is attached, for the familial connections, sense of refuge, and emotional attachments each place respectively holds for her. It doesn’t seem that the concept of home is truly reconciled in the sense that Dana chooses her home, rather all of her experiences, emotional and physical losses and gains, culminate in an amalgamation of kindred spirits that create a world in which she is able to explore her own self and genealogical past, thus Dana becomes mentally and emotionally joined to both ‘homes,’ no matter where she is located in terms of time or space.

Works Cited:

1. Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003.
2. Rushdy, Ashraf H.A. “Families of Orphans: Relation and Disrelation in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” College English 55.2 (1993): 135-157.