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.

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?

Herland Historical Context Powerpoint

Here is the Powerpoint I attempted to present in class in case anyone wants to read up a bit on the historical context of Gilman's Herland...I apologize for the formatting, it didn't transfer well from a PP...

Reform Movements and Industrialization

— -19^th century concept regarded the nature of men and women as opposite, an idea further exaggerated by the industrial revolution

— -Mechanized labor was considered the province of men and the domestic responsibilities were perceived as the natural domain of women; women confined to private sphere in society

— -Women were legally and socially inferior to men

— - Industrialization had far-reaching effects on American society. Social reform movements sprung up around the country to address the needs of the new industrial society, and American authors used literature to comment on the changes they saw occurring.

— -Middle-class women in the industrial age became involved in a wider sphere beyond the home.

— -Reform movements of the 1830s, specifically abolition and temperance, gave women a chance to get involved in the public arena. Women reformers soon began to agitate not just for temperance and abolition, but also for women’s rights.

— - Joined the labor force in record numbers.

— -Other issues included prison reform, labor arbitration, and public health concerns.

— -As social activism among women increased, so did their desire for the right to vote.

US Women’s Suffrage Movement Timeline

— 1792 British author Mary Wollstonecraft argues for the equality of the sexes in the Vindication of the Rights of Women.

— 1821 Emma Willard founds the Troy Female Seminary, the first school to offer girls classical and scientific studies on a collegiate level.

— 1845 Margaret Fuller publishes Woman in the Nineteenth Century, very influential in the development of American feminist theory.

— 1848 The first woman's rights convention, the Seneca Falls Convention. New York State Legislature passes a law that gives women the right to retain possession of property they owned prior to their marriage.

— 1851 Sojourner Truth delivers her "And Ain't I a Woman Speech" at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, OH.

— 1865 The 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, officially abolishes slavery in the United States.

— 1866 The American Equal Rights Association is founded with the purpose to secure for all Americans their civil rights irrespective of race, color, or sex.

— 1868 The 14th amendment adopted, grants citizenship to former slaves, but still does not secure voting rights.

— 1870 The 15th amendment is adopted, grants suffrage to former male African-American slaves, but not to women.

— 1874 In Minor v. Happersett, the Supreme Court decides that citizenship does not give women the right to vote and that women's political rights are under the jurisdiction of each individual state.

— 1882 The House of Representatives and the Senate appoint Select Committees on Woman Suffrage.

— 1887 The first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, are published.

— 1890 After several years of negotiations, the NWSA and the AWSA merge to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

— 1895 Elizabeth Cady Stanton publishes The Woman's Bible, a critical examination of the Bible's teaching about women.

— 1911 National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage is founded.

Reform Movements and Industrialization

— -During the 19th century, as male suffrage was gradually extended in many countries, women became increasingly active in the quest for their own suffrage. Not until 1893, however, in New Zealand, did women achieve suffrage on the national level. Australia followed in 1902, but American, British, and Canadian women did not win the same rights until the end of World War I.

— -Voting was seen as symbolic of all the rights women were denied, and they believed voting would allow them to get into other areas of influence in society

— -Gilman emerged as a key figure in the late-nineteenth century women’s movement

-1892 The Yellow Wall-Paper published

— -1898 Women and Economics, Gilman’s landmark feminist treatise, published. Established Gilman as “the authority on the relationship between female sexual oppression and economic dependence on men” (Knight)

Utopian Movement

— - The most extreme reform movement in the United States was the utopian movement, founded in the first half of the 1800s on the belief that humans could live perfectly in small experimental societies.

— - Founding of utopian communities, most were designed and founded by intellectuals as alternatives to the competitive economy.

— -Aimed to perfect social relationships, reform the institutions of marriage and private property, and balance political, occupational, and religious influences. Most utopian communities did not last beyond the early 1850s.

— -1888 Looking Backward published

— Gilman influenced greatly by Bellamy’s socialist-utopian romance, converted to nationalism (based on principles of reform Darwinism, nationalism reflects a belief in environmental determinism and a belief that society would evolve peacefully and progressively).

— - Also influenced by promotions to end capitalism and class distinctions and promoted the idea of a democratic improvement of the human race.

— -Influenced by Bellamy’s ideas on social reforms, ie economic independence and restructuring of the home

— - Her works resembled Bellamy in that she focused on mental growth over physical struggle as a progressive principle

— - Gilman was interested in exploring the utopian possibilities of a specifically female evolution

Social Darwinism and Eugenics

— - Social Darwinism: the application of Darwinism to the study of human society, specifically a theory in sociology that individuals or groups achieve advantage over others as the result of genetic or biological superiority.

— -In its most extreme forms, Social Darwinism has been used to justify eugenics programs aimed at weeding ‘undesirable’ genes from the population

— -Sometimes accompanied by sterilization laws directed against said ‘unfit’ individuals.

— - Eugenics: the study of/belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population

— - Negative eugenics discourages reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumably inherited ‘undesirable traits’

— -Positive eugenics encourages reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits

— - American eugenics movement was relatively popular 1910-1930, during which 24 states passed sterilization laws and Congress passed a law restricting immigration from certain areas deemed to be unfit.

How is Bellamy's Utopia Convincing?

One of the biggest issues I’m having with this novel is reconciling the concept of the utopian society Bellamy presents us with. By definition, a utopia can be described as an ideal or visionary system of political, social, or moral perfection. By its very nature, a utopia is impossibly idealistic and impractical. Because Bellamy chose to use this utopian model as a vehicle for presenting his ideas on social and economic reform, he is vulnerable to the strengths and weaknesses of the medium itself. This is the same problem that Bellamy foresaw, that his audience might not be entirely receptive to his critiques of the way they live their lives, and it is the reason why he chose to structure the novel in the way that he did. In Looking Backward, Bellamy’s voice is thinly disguised as Dr. Leete, explaining and trying to convince both Julian and the reader of the advantages of society in the year 2000.

Bellamy was aware that his audience would be shocked by some of the very radical ideas he was presenting, and did the best he could to soften the blow. In order to alleviate the harsh critiques Bellamy presents, he often notes that it was ignorance that caused such inefficient and illogical systems. Because reading and book ownership were part of the culture of the upper class, they would have been the main audience Bellamy would be writing to. Throughout the novel he continues to refer to the lower echelon of 19^th century society in negative terms, highlighting their poverty and brutality, and thus appealing to his main readership of upper class society members in that they would no longer have to deal with the scum of the lower classes.

Bellamy also uses the framing of the novel to emphasize and further his argument. Julian West is transported to the 21^st century via hypnosis. Although Bellamy may have chosen hypnosis simply because it was a popular phenomenon at the time, the implications of such a liminal state are interesting to explore. As we discussed in class, perhaps this method of sleep represents the mental state of mind of the general public of the 19^th century as Bellamy perceives it. It is as if the people are asleep, unaware and dormant in terms of their political and social involvement and concern. He hopes that with this novel, he will reawaken them to the economic, social, and political issues and the implications they have on the future of the nation. In ending the novel with a nightmare of returning back to the 19^th century, Bellamy hopes the readers will be awakened from the trance of his utopic world convinced of the social and political reforms he presented.

What kind of a utopia is Bellamy presenting? Although Bellamy goes to great lengths in his attempt to present a ‘perfect’ future in order to expose the problems of the 19^th century and possibly solutions, he fails to explain how such a radical evolution would occur. What is the significance of this? Is his creation realistic? Does Bellamy himself believe it to be possible to attain such a society? How persuasive is the world he creates for both his audience of the 19^th century and readers today?

Power in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

I am curious to explore the concept of power in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. More specifically, I was interested in pursuing the theme of power in relation to Hank, and how his constant quest of power is obtained, retained, manifest, and its limits in 6^th century Arthurian England. The majority of Hank’s power stems from the fact that he is from the future, thus providing him with a plethora of knowledge in terms of historic, scientific, social, and technological occurrences centuries beyond the people of Camelot that allow him to rise up the social ladder.

Although we know very little about Hank’s life in the 19^th century, we are privy to the fact that he was the superintendant at an arms factory in Connecticut. The fact that he comes from a working class family, with a father who was a blacksmith and an uncle who was a horse doctor, implies that he lived a life of hard work in the middle class (Twain 36). Hank looks back at one point in the novel to examine what he would amount to in the 20^th century: “I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine down-street any day and catch a hundred men better than myself” (86). Although he isn’t in a place within society to exert much power in the 19^th century, once he arrives in Camelot he takes advantage of his situation and quickly begins his pursuit of obtaining power and a place in the 6^th century.

What is it about the 6^th century that allows Hank so much power? He is ultimately the same person he was, but Arthurian England provides him with the opportunity to exert power in a way he wasn’t able to in the 19^th century. He is in the upper echelon of Arthurian society in terms of his breadth of knowledge, reason, cunning, and manipulative powers. Ultimately, it is time itself that provides Hank with the necessary tools to gain rank in Camelot. It was his transport to a past era that gives Hank him the upper hand in Arthurian culture. Much of Hank’s power is rooted in the fact that he is a product of the future, of a civilization with thirteen hundred years of innovation and progress under its belt. He uses his knowledge of history, science, and technology as a means of obtaining power.

He uses his knowledge of such innovations of the 19^th century to his advantage. One of the most prominent and effective ways in which Hank obtains power is through his use of spectacle, effect, and theatrics. From his knowledge of the eclipse in Chapter 6, Hank is able to manipulate both his knowledge and the people of the 6^th century in order to gain power in society as a powerful magician and The Boss. After Hank “solidified his power” with the eclipse event, he comes to the realization that he “was just as much at home in that century as I could have been in any other. …Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country” (86). From the moment when he uses his knowledge of the eclipse to frighten the community as to the extent and reach of his supposed powers, to Merlin’s tower, the Holy Fountain, Hank rises in rank from prisoner to his place among the noble elite of the monarchy. He brings dynamite, smoking, telephones, matches, and firearms, among other things, to a time and place in history where they don’t belong, and won’t even come into being for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Without such foreknowledge of technologic innovations, Hank would be ill-equipped to perform such seemingly epic and magic events, thus destroying the very origins of his power.

Introduction

My name is Stephannie Franks, and I am a senior Lit major at the University of Redlands. I started this blog for a Time Travel and Literary Temporality class, and will be posting blogs related to our readings and assignments.

Image Retrieved from: http://www.etbu.edu/opencms/handle404?exporturi=/export/sites/default/Current_Athletic_News/Softball/NCAA_Regional/Logos/Bulldog-with-Horizon.gif_997091637.gif 9/17/2009