Did Rufus Love Alice?


Around the midpoint of Kindred, when Rufus began his pursuit of Alice, I wondered if his love for her would inspire a questioning of his own racist beliefs. Maybe, as Rufus acknowledged his feelings for Alice, he would also acknowledge her own humanity and agency. Maybe he would realize that the woman he loved was a woman and not an object. Dana had the same hope for Rufus, and she attempted to guide him toward that realization since she knew she could not separate Rufus and Alice before Hagar was born. Alas, Rufus was unable to make any logical or emotional leap and grant Alice agency. If Rufus was truly in love with Alice, how was he unable to empathize with her? And if Rufus wasn’t in love, what emotion was he taking out on her?

Rufus’s ideal relationship with Alice is not a typical (for the time) master/slave one. He wants a romantic relationship where he loves Alice and Alice loves him back. He doesn’t want to have to force Alice into anything. However, the distinction between Rufus’s and Alice’s relationship and any sort of healthy romance lies in Rufus’s priorities: does he prioritize Alice’s will, or his own? The fact that Rufus would rather hurt Alice than fulfill her own needs by freeing her indicates that while Rufus may be obsessed with Alice, even dependent on her, he does not truly value her as a human being. Instead, he views her as fundamentally “beneath” him, and therefore views his own pathological dependence on her as more important than her well-being. Rufus’s love is the love of a stalker or an abuser who has mentally objectified their victim so much that possession is the only thing that matters. He doesn’t want Alice to have free will or to be a person, because then she might decide to leave him.

Some people might use the word “unrequited” to describe Rufus’s “love” for Alice, given that Rufus desperately wants Alice to love him, while Alice is unresponsive to his advances. But in unrequited love, the object of love has the power to reject the person who loves them. People in unrequited love tend to glorify or deify the objects of their love, further giving them power. But in Kindred, that dynamic is flipped: Rufus wields complete power over Alice, so if Rufus wants Alice to go through the motions of loving him, she is forced to. Rufus doesn’t need to impress Alice or get her to love him. He tries to some extent, but when he fails, he can hold the threat of physical violence over her head to get her to obey him. It doesn’t matter that he would rather not use that power. What matters is that he would rather keep Alice in check with physical violence than let her do what she wants, and that he has the ability to do so.

It’s this power dynamic that makes Rufus unable to love Alice. As long as he is able to order her around with no repercussions, and as long as it’s ingrained in his head that she isn’t fully human and that granting her agency is immoral and unwise, their power dynamic is too uneven to allow for empathy between them. Dana was hoping that Rufus’s realization of his own love for Alice might level that dynamic a bit. But in the end, the divide was too great for Rufus to bridge with empathy.

Comments

  1. Elizabeth TApril 22, 2020 at 9:55 AM

    I definitely agree that while Rufus and Alice’s “relationship” has hints of a modern-day unrequited love story, it is NOT and has a lot of deeply distorted aspects. Maybe even creepier is that the story starts off in that direction – Alice is a free woman who makes her own choices, and doesn’t choose Rufus. Okay, hints of an unrequited love story, maybe. But then Rufus rapes Alice, and she is enslaved and loses her agency completely, giving Rufus absolute power over her. And no matter how Rufus chooses to frame that relationship (and he would certainly frame it as a love story) – it doesn’t change the fact that Rufus has completely dehumanized and objectified Alice into a woman defined not by her own personality or her own choices, but simply by the epithet, “his.”

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  2. MitchellApril 24, 2020 at 12:33 PM

    There's no question that Rufus and Alice represent a horrific distortion of the classic unrequited love dynamic, but initially, this is how Rufus sees the situation--with him and Isaac as "rivals" for Alice's affections. Initially, Alice *does* reject him, and he's hurt by the idea that she would prefer Isaac. But he has so much power over Alice, even when she's "free"--the titular "fight" that Dana interrupts, remember, starts because Isaac finds Rufus attempting to rape Alice. Rufus is then able to purchase and enslave Alice, which gives him an extraordinary and nightmarish degree of control over her--he can impose his will in a way that the classical Petrarchian poet-lover cannot. But Butler is doing something interesting by having Rufus have such *complicated* feelings about Alice--it *is* "progress" of *some* sort that he values and "loves" *her* specifically, and rejects his dad's suggestion that he just "take" any slave woman, as if they're interchangeable. He longs for something like what he sees Dana and Kevin have, and it's impossible for him (for good reason; we *totally* understand why Alice continues to reject him). This only makes him sympathetic to a point, and in many respects, it makes his psychological and physical manipulation of Alice even more diabolical.

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  3. ZillesMay 12, 2020 at 11:23 AM

    I think Rufus does love Alice, just in his own twisted dark way. He is stuck in a tunneled perspective where he cannot see anything from her perspective. He has these feelings for her that are ahead of the time period, but his treatment of her doesn't really show it. He has this power over her that allows him to rape her, and then when she is defended by her man, to have them punished, and to "get her". Basically he can do whatever messed up stuff he wants, and still get his way. Because of this I don't think its a question of love for her that is the problem. They would never be able to have a relationship that works because of the societal views and the power disparities. That is, even if she loved him back they would never be on even footing, and she most definitely does not love him back (atleast at first). This reinstates that no matter how much power someone has over someone else, you cannot force them to love you. She cant disobey him, but she doesn't have to like him. And in the end it is his wildly different world view that causes her to decide she cannot go on. Despite everything, I believe he never stopped loving her, even if he wasnt doing it in a healthy way for either of them.

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