Humanizing the Weylins

In Kindred, a lot of attention is placed on the stunning normalcy of the Weylin plantation. Both Kevin and, perhaps more shockingly, Dana, comment on the plantation being less severe than they anticipated. In addition, a significant area of focus is Rufus’s development as a person; whether or not Dana is right to sympathize with him is asked repeatedly.

But for the reader, sympathizing with slaveowners is difficult. Being asked to identify with Rufus, Tom and Margaret feels like an undermining of the evil they did. But I would argue -- and I think this is Butler’s point too -- that it’s exactly because slavery was so evil that we must try and understand the Weylins. Doing so forces us to question in our own complicity in modern-day white supremacy, whereas identifying the Weylins as unilaterally evil allows us to disassociate from the narrative.

A core theme of the novel is the connection between the past and the present. Oftentimes, we think of slaveowners (and other perpetrators of evil, such as nazis) as being inhuman in some sense, in a way that most people could never achieve. But Butler calls this assumption into question by painting the Weylins as complicated, multidimensional characters. Rufus rapes Alice, but is it only because he’s never learned what healthy love looks like? Tom Weylin abuses his slaves, but nevertheless delivers Dana’s letter to Kevin, even though it means she will leave the plantation. Again, I’m not pointing these out to imply that it lessens the evil of slavery or the role of the Weylins in perpetuating it, just that Butler has specifically made an effort to portray them as more than singularly evil slaveowners. Butler also shows us how both Tom and Rufus are ultimately the product of their circumstances- and that Dana and Kevin are as well.

In this way, Butler forces us to question how we are the result of our circumstances, too. Generally, when discussing slave narratives, we like to assume we never would have been involved; Butler asks us to consider if perhaps we might have, had we grown up as the white child of a wealthy plantation owner in the antebellum South. Further, once we’ve accepted that, we must consider the possibility of complicity in modern-day institutions of white supremacy; if it’s only certain that we’d disavow slavery retrospectively, what are we missing that’s happening now? By showing that the perpetrators of slavery were normal people (or normal for the time), merely participating in what was a common and accepted institution of the time, Butler takes away the chance for the modern reader (particularly the white reader) to instantly disassociate and paint themselves as woke, fundamentally different from slaveowners. Thus, rather than undermining the severity of slavery, Butler is reminding us not to be arrogant- and that, when it comes down to it, we might not be so different from the Weylins as we’d like to think.