Final Thoughts on Kindred

I touched on this issue in my reaction paper, but I found that what stuck with me most after finishing Kindred was a question more than a lesson or any sort of complete thought. I was forced to contemplate how much of who I am, or who I think I am, is just a direct a result of the environment I was raised in. I never really thought about who I could've been without a social context to define me; how can you be a good person if there isn't a set standard to be compared to? So the question still begs to be answered, are we who are because of our inherent natures, or is the bulk of how we act determined by the culture we grow around? What even is an inherent nature? With Dana's case, she is a progressive, independent woman in the 70's who then is forced to act behave and live like a slave in the 1800's. As time passes, she eventually stops acting altogether. She acclimatizes to her role as a slave because those are the circumstances she is dealt, and what she gradually grows to think of as 'normal'. Of course her exposure to the modern world still garners strong reactions towards the "diseased" mentality behind institutionalized slavery, but Dana herself unwittingly becomes an unquestioning part of the system as she spends more and more time in the past. As she assimilates into the community of slaves on the Weylin plantation, the lines between Alice and Dana blur when we begin to view them together in similar situations. Alice acts as a parallel to Dana in the antebellum south, and we consider the possibility that Dana might have been exactly like her, in thoughts and sentiments, if she had been born and raised in that time period. Alice too, in other circumstances, could've grown to be just like Dana. I guess it seems like a very simple observation that most people have given thought to, but before reading the novel I never really realized just how much weight our environment plays in shaping us as individuals. Me personally? I'm a pretty flexible person that can bend in a lot of directions, and I definitely think that different situations could have fostered completely distinct Tanisha's. So strange to think about who we are without background conditions to explain for it.