An AP Literature practice Q3.
In many works of literature, a character suffers a physical injury, illness, or bodily impairment. This physical condition often serves as more than just a plot device, carrying symbolic significance or reflecting a character’s psychological, moral, or social struggle.
Choose a novel or play in which a character’s physical injury or condition plays a significant role. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how this physical condition illuminates the character’s internal conflict or relationship to their society, and contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.
In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the injuries suffered by Edana “Dana” Franklin possess additional psychological symbolism. Dana’s arm initially functions as a means of aid and rescue for Rufus Weylin, but her ultimate decision to use it to stab Rufus causes her to permanently lose it in the past, symbolizing how her time in the antebellum South irreparably deprives her of the hope she once had for reform.
Dana uses her arm to rescue Rufus several times, and it symbolizes hope that her aid might reform Rufus and prevent him from following in the footsteps of his slaveholder father. Dana first encounters Rufus mid-drowning, so she has to use her arms to pull him out of the river. When he later falls from a tree, her arm also helps her administer medicine. Throughout the novel, Dana’s arm represents her care for Rufus, and the fact that she uses it so many times reflects her misplaced optimism that rescuing Rufus will draw out his sympathies and eventually encourage him to step away from slavery.
Thus, when Dana makes the momentous decision to stab Rufus, she sacrifices not only her arm but also what that arm symbolizes—her hope of reforming the Weylin plantation. As Rufus repeatedly refuses to relinquish the power slavery provides him in spite of Dana’s efforts, she finds increasing conflict between her duty to Rufus and her moral convictions. Although she still tries to talk Rufus out of his deplorable actions—such as raping Alice—she realizes he is truly irredeemable once he tries to rape her as well. At last, she decides to use her arm and concealed knife to stab Rufus, but in his dying moments, Rufus grabs on to Dana’s arm—for the first time, harming rather than aiding him—right as she returns to the present. To her horror, she finds it stuck in a wall and must amputate it completely. This amputation thus serves as a physical manifestation of her symbolic detachment from what her arm once represented: her hope for Rufus, now irreparably shattered by his refusal to reform.