Category: McCoy 431 Fall 2017

After finishing Fledgling and our discussion of Shori as a character in class, I decided to look into why Shori is such a likeable individual. More so, I want to look into Shori’s “Ina traits” and her “human traits”. Is Shori more human or Ina? Can we even classify all traits into human and Ina categories?

Perhaps one of the most apparent characteristics of Shori and other Ina is that they age very slowly. Wright thinks that Shori is ten or eleven when in reality, she is fifty-three. Does Shori’s child-like appearance make her likeable? I believe at first glance that it does. For example, there are certain characteristics that we associate with children. Such characteristics include: innocence, purity, happiness, dependent upon others, adventurous, small, curious, young, funny, and honest. For most people, I feel as though they tend to assign positive traits to children, reflecting how they feel about them. Even though Shori is far from a child in human years, her physical appearance leads most to immediately categorize her as a child.

Another aspect that makes Shori a very likeable character is her genetic makeup. Her mixture of human and Ina DNA give her desirable characteristics and advantages in the Ina community. Shori’s genetic composition allows her to stay awake during the day and walk in the sun. These are tremendous advantages to any Ina, resulting in many Ina families, like the Gordons, wanting to mate with Shori. However, these traits are also a problem. For example, the Silks find Shori to be a threat to the Ina. They do not see her as a real Ina due to her human characteristics and label her as an outcast.

One quality that definitely makes Shori likeable is her bite. Butler writes, “Venom from Ina females is more potent than venom from males” (109).  Shori’s symbionts love receiving Shori’s bite. For them as well as Shori, it is an intoxicating euphoric experience. Although this clearly makes the symbionts like Shori, does it hinder their perception of her? Do they actually like Shori or do they like the pleasure they get from her bite? Does this bite make them want to stay with her or do they willing choose to? I believe that her bite plays a huge role in determining whether these symbionts choose to stay and bond with Shori. I guess the more specific question I have is: How large a role does Shori’s bite play in the symbionts perception of her?

Finally, one of the main reasons why I like Shori is the human way in which Octavia Butler chooses to portray her. Shori’s human characteristics make her more relatable to the reader. In addition, it makes it easier to sympathize with her and root for her during the Council of Judgement. Shori is an extremely moral character within the book. Her morality can be most clearly seen in the treatment of her symbionts. As a group of people, Shori treats her symbionts very well, but she also takes the time to go to each of them individually. Even when Shori meets her father and others of her kind, she still puts her symbionts first, making sure that they will be okay moving into a new community and directing questions regarding their needs. She also seeks justice for the ones she loves such as her Ina families and Theodora. Because Shori follows her moral compass and feels things on such a deep level, Shori is depicted as a loveable character.

Do you think Shori is more human or more Ina?

After discussing the issues of ageism that Butler brings to light through Shori’s relationship through Theodora, I began to think more about the connotation that older women have in our society.  This reminded me of a piece that I wrote for Syracuse University Project Advance (SUPA) while in high school, in which a blog brings and binds together women of the senior set through their passions that are often overlooked due to their age.  The blog, Advanced Style (http://www.advanced.style) helps create a platform and discourse in which older women have a comfortable environment to express themselves without limits on their age.  I figured I would share my paper on this blog, as to give some insight and thought into our society’s concept of fashion and aging.  Please keep in mind that this was a piece written in high school that I have not touched since.  Continue reading “Ageism and Fashion”

This is somewhat tangential, and focuses mainly on Clay’s Ark, but it’s something I had been thinking of as we spoke in class about Clay’s Ark, and something that Brendan’s post makes me question even more. It seems that the class largely came to the decision that Blake’s goal to get to a hospital and find a cure to the infection is misguided, arrogant, and unrealistic. Believing this, we can empathize even more so with Eli, and his goal to contain the infection as much as possible. In the climax of the novel, Blake causes the epidemic, infecting a truck driver, and it seems to the reader that Eli was right. I think that Butler constructs this ending to push the reader to begrudgingly side with Eli over Blake, even as we have seen Eli go to inhumane extremes to contain the virus. Continue reading “The Ethics of Self-Destruction in Clay’s Ark”

I always like to look up books on GoodReads and see what other people thought, and I came across this (I thought) brilliant analysis of Fledgling.

Continue reading “Patriarchy and Fledgling”

In both of Octavia E. Butler’s novels we read so far, Clay’s Ark and Fledgling, the author repeatedly demonstrates how horrible humans can be. Oftentimes, Butler seems to think of humanity in rather negative terms, shedding light on our many weaknesses and emphasizing the importance of acknowledging our faults. She writes about the dark and realistic aspects of humanity, but with an optimism of exposing these things, knowing that we can be (and do) better. Thus, I wouldn’t necessarily call Butler a misanthrope, but I do believe her novels express a lot of contempt of the human species and of our fundamental dispositions and traits.

As we discussed in class, Butler is trying to make us imagine worlds that are more just and less aggressive than the one we live in today. But “how on Earth is that possible?” First and foremost, the author clearly draws a picture of our species’ brutality and the segregation we still enforce in our contemporary society, whereby she makes it clear that our world is everything else but perfect. Humans tend to include and exclude others according to their individual preferences, they fight and hurt, and they do whatever it is that will bring them to their goal (frequently neglecting how this might affect others). Yet, we all rely on each other and cannot deny that we are an utterly interdependent society.

Although Butler’s created worlds may seem unnatural (in sexual, communal, familial, societal, financial, and many other ways) to the reader at first, these fictitious places allow us to recognize and better understand the dilemma of our own world. Perhaps Butler is trying to tell us that what we think of as normal is only viewed as normal because our way of life is engrained into our brains from the moment we are enabled to think for ourselves. If we look at our society from a different (outside) viewpoint (to the degree that this is possible), we can see how distorted and corrupted the world is we live in. In many ways, Butler’s imagined communities function on a higher level than our society, her worlds’ inhabitants acknowledge their interdependence and therefore show more respect and appreciation to each other. Their knowledge of their reliance on others enables them to create one big in-group, rather than countless small out-groups. Accordingly, we see less rejection and discrimination in Butler’s worlds and can begin to ask ourselves if the world we live in is really as “natural” and “normal” as we think it is?

 

 

 

My first encounter with vampire novels was The Twilight Saga, and yes, I was team Edward. But after having completed the saga, I noticed a peculiar dynamic in Vampiric literature that I would later see in other novels like that of the Vampire Academy series, the Dark Heroine series, and Fledgling.   Continue reading “Vampiric Literature, Fledgling, and Loyalty”

The way “Bloodchild” dealt with non-consent bothered me. The way Clay’s Ark dealt with non-consent bothered me. The way Fledgling dealt with non-consent bothered me. As Dr. McCoy said at the end of class on Monday, patterns are emerging. Continue reading “The Model”

In Fledgling, the later half of the story is set in a place named Punta Nublada in California (133). In my initial reading, this caught my eye. Being a native Spanish speaker, I quickly made the translation that Punta Nublada in English is “Cloudy Point”. I was immediately intrigued when I noticed this and I was hoping that Butler would mention the translation at some point, which she didn’t do. I thought of this as Butler making a clever joke that was out in the open and if you spoke Spanish, you would get the joke. It almost seemed like an indirect communication between her and her readers to see if they were paying attention and I interpreted it as a vampire joke. Traditionally in vampire stories and in Fledgling, vampires (except Shori) are powerless against the sun so I found it funny that the place in which this Ina family resides is named “Cloudy Point” because they cannot be in a sunny location.

At first I considered this a funny anecdote, but after discussing it with Dr. McCoy, I realized this was another way for Butler to allude to the idea of boundaries and consent. In this colony of Ina and symbionts, there is sort of this hazy idea of what is right and it’s something that Shori consults with a lot throughout the novel. As she is trying to recover from memory loss, there are a few things that are continuously unclear to her such as, who is trying to kill her and her family? How does she protect her symbionts? How does she start a new life on her own while being responsible for her symbionts? Who killed Theodora? What happens next? I find it interesting that the place where she tries to make clear of these things are in a part of the world labeled as a ‘Cloudy Point’ because it seems like a clear (haha) connection between Shori’s experiences and her current setting. As readers, we also have to contend with unclear boundaries along with Shori because as our narrator, she is responsible for clueing us into the world that Butler has built. Since we currently (to our knowledge) do not live in a world with Ina, we too have to wonder where the boundaries lie with Ina and their symbionts as well as between the Ina families. There are many places where things are unclear for both us and Shori and the name of our setting could be Butler’s way of reminding us of that. Continue reading “Punta Nublada”

The growing anticipation surrounding Ta Nehisi Coates’s new book, We Were Eight Years in Power, prompted me to go back and read his essay from The Atlantic “The First White President,” a selection from the book about the ways in which Donald Trump used his whiteness to reach the presidency. Coates’s main argument is that Trump’s rise to power had everything to do with his being the negation of a black president. As I looked at the selection a second time, I recalled the language of negation worked to categorize humans and otherwise in Clay’s Ark and Fledgling. 

Continue reading “Negation and Identity”

While reading Fledgling, I’ve been struggling to accept Shori and Wright’s sexual relationship. When we first meet Shori, Wright thinks she looks about ten or eleven (8). Later, Shori tells Wright she’s pretty sure she’s older and remembers having sex before, and even though she still looks physically young, they have sex (21-22). I think part of that definitely has to do with the venom in her bite which links humans to Ina, but there’s still part of Wright that is attracted to her. This made me feel, for lack of a better word, “icky” because Shori seemed so young. I know we were having conversations about consent in class, and the issue arises because Shori looks like a tween, but is really 53, so technically she can consent, but does that make it okay for Wright to have sex with her?  Butler wants to push us on this, especially when we consider that Shori actually has more power over Wright, so I keep trying not to let myself get caught up in how it bothers me. Even as the book develops, their relationship still makes me uncomfortable because Shori is still very-childlike in her physical appearance.

Continue reading “Shori and Wright’s Sexual Relationship”