Metaphor of the Limb: So one of the panel presentations brought up the idea that there was significance in Dana losing specifically her arm. I was thinking about the construct of slavery in relation to limbs but what seemed more significant was limbs in relation to a family tree. When Dana kills her ancestor Rufus, she breaks a limb of her family tree and she loses a limb herself. Along these lines, I was thinking about how the fact that they are related means that he is a part of her and with his death she loses that part of her. Though this is not usually not literal, it is for Dana.
Another explanation is that she loses part of herself in the era she visits. A few ideas: She literally loses time in her life because she spends months in the past. The physical manifestation is her lost arm, a relatively small portion of the body but a really important part... She loses an emotional part of herself because of the wildly twisted relationships she forms on the plantation and the emotional hardships. Again, a physical manifestation in the form of an arm... It shows Rufus' control over her physical body... Alice, Dana's metaphorical physical half, dies and anyways Dana is leaving her behind for good so Dana loses a physical part of her body with the loss of Alice... Dana spent enough time there that she created a life for herself and when she leaves that life for good she loses a part of herself...
How/who can judge other cultures?: Some of the panel presentations asked for judgements on Rufus' actions. This made me start thinking about how we judge other cultures. Is it legit to judge other cultures based on today's cultural standard? We want to think that we are uber moral or whatever but in Rufus's time, by what his surroundings taught him, he was just as moral. Just a weird thought I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment