Saturday, April 5, 2014
The Evolution of Rufus Weylin
When we first encounter Rufus Weylin, he's small, nonthreatening, and innocent. Dana, who claims to not even like kids very much, is almost immediately fond of him, and seems unquestioningly set in her resolve to protect his life. Hoping to influence him into thinking outside of the norms of his society, it is a slow betrayal for the readers and Dana to watch Rufus grow into the mold of the men of his time. The level of complexity to Rufus's character comes from our inability to place him as inherently bad or good, his actions almost always still manage to evoke the smallest slivers of sympathy. Initially still unmarked by the horrors of the institutionalized dehumanization, as Rufus grows older he becomes more set in the way of his father before him. Growing up he treats Dana as an equal, if not a superior, who he acknowledges as more knowledgeable than himself. He seeks her advice and never belittles her, paying her an amount of respect that he does not even award to his mother. As time goes on he begins to treat Dana more and more like how he views other slaves on the plantation. He increasingly begins to resort to violence as a means to achieve his ends, and takes advantage of his position of power to leverage decisions to work in his favor. Ultimately Rufus becomes completely indoctrinated into the slavery ideology, and when confronted by Dana about a slave sell, he responds reflexively by calling them his property. Still we can't help but feel the tiniest bit of conflicted emotion when we see him carry out his horrendous behavior. With his repeated rapes of Alice, we are reminded of his 'love' for her, with his disregard for his mother, we think of the abandonment he felt, and with the eventual attack on Dana we might even for a split second think of the grief he must be suffering from the loss of his family members. Ultimately there is no justification for the sheer abhorrent nature of his actions, but we are left considering the fact that he is a product of his time and environment, and are still swayed by our attachment to the child we knew him as.
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I think reading about Rufus from the beginning of his life to the end really affects how we feel about him. Just when I was beginning to dislike him, I re-read parts of the book in which he is still an adventurous, innocent child and my sympathy towards him just grew so much more as I realized he could have been a different person had he lived in a different time.
ReplyDeleteI know!! Under most circumstances, the acts he committed would be subject to my no tolerance policy, I would hate him without question, but seeing him grow up it becomes so much harder to just throw black and white judgement calls against him :(
DeleteA similar effect might take place in _Libra_, where we get "Lee" as a young man trying in rather familiar and not unlikeable ways to distinguish himself from the pervasive conformity all around him. There's maybe less of a sense of his society "shaping" him, in the way we get with Rufus--although Lee defining himself *against* the prevailing values of his society is a version of the same dynamic (think how Younger Brother is still a product of his culture, even though he's a dissenter). But there's the same fascination with seeing someone as a kid who grows into an adult, and the possibility that we'll judge the adult's controversial behavior in a more empathetic light as a result.
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