“‘It is better to be a master than to be a slave.’ Her husband at the time of the migration had said that. He had seen himself becoming a great man—master of a large household with many wives, children, and slaves. Anyanwu, on the other hand, had been a slave twice in her life and had escaped only by changing her identity completely … She knew some people were masters and some were slaves. That was the way it had always been. But her own experience had taught her to hate slavery” (Butler 10-11).
-Anyanwu on slavery
When you have lived for three-hundred years how can you adopt this attitude on slavery? Anyanwu has been a slave twice in her life, and she admits to hating the institution: yet she agrees it is better to be a master than to be a slave and allows herself to perpetuate the binary. What a choice! To accept the binary—master or slave—is to be insensitive to the reality of servitude. Anyanwu loses her humanity when she loses her compassion for her fellow creatures. After being around for three-hundred years how does she not see some way out of the master-slave cycle?
Perhaps she sees the only way out of the binary is through her children. Since she herself is a wild seed and exists outside of the enslaved progeny of Doro, her offspring too may live outside his enslaved communities. With this hope for the future of her children, maybe Anyanwu finds an escape from the cycle of slavery despite the fact that she herself remains in acceptance of it.
This hope for her progeny relates to the larger topic of eugenics that runs throughout the novel. The narrator tells us Doro’s motivations for seducing Anyanwu: “He had to have the woman. She was wild seed of the best kind. She would strengthen any line he bred her into, strengthen it immeasurably” (23). He wants her because she can give him children with her special abilities to shape shift and heal; she wants him because he offers the hope of giving her children that will never die. He wants to breed children with Anyanwu gifts so that he may consume their bodies. She wants children who will live as long as herself in freedom. In either case the parents are trying to improve the qualities of the human population that they are creating. I suppose when you have tens of spouses and hundreds of children the thought of eugenics might cross your mind.
Anyanwu’s numbness to the cycle of slavery also connects with the lack of sensitivity Doro has when he kills. Doro must kill almost daily as a matter of survival. He is dull to the pain and the loss of a human life. The value of human life is perverted into the measure of how well the body will sustain Doro’s existence until he needs a new body.
So where is Butler going with this? She seems to be processing a mass desensitization in humankind that springs from a seemingly endless cycle of slavery and killing. Taking a Marxist approach to Butler’s novel can suggest that her character’s strife is a cause of their society’s economic base in large slave-owning households. But Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs take the theory even further, as he says: “The greatest literary works do not merely reproduce the dominant ideologies of their time but incorporate in their form a critique of these ideologies” (Newton 85). So are these characters floating hopelessly in their slavery-based society, only reproducing and killing to give themselves momentary respite? In the final scene, Anyanwu is proposing suicide, and she says to Doro: “The human part of you is dying, Doro. It is almost dead … I cannot save it. It’s already dead” (Butler 250). Perhaps Butler’s critique is that these characters were so stuck in their binaries—life or death for Doro, slave or master for Anyanwu—and incapable of imagining alternatives that they can allow for atrocities like slavery to haunt their society. In other words, slavery and killing happens because some people accept it.
Newton, K.M. Ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1988. 85. Print.
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