29 pages • 58 minutes read
Octavia E. ButlerWild Seed
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Identity, Slavery, and the Gods
The tradition of the slave narrative, from contemporary accounts to modern recollections, contains a strong and necessary political element of serving to humanize those who were dehumanized. Octavia Butler’s fantastic account in Wild Seed upends this tradition, considering the perspectives of both the enslaved and the enslaver, interrogating modes of asymmetrical power as she goes.
White supremacist economic models brutally reduce humanity to two factors: race and suitability for labor. They erase tribal and historic identities and replace them with an identity based on raw functionality. Thus, both white and black members of the system have their identities defined by its designers. When traditional slave narratives evoke political empathy, they often leave these underlying identities intact. Leaving them uninterrogated. In this way, their enslaved characters struggle for agency as their slavers struggle to maintain their own in an unbreakable cycle. Wild Seed turns this description of identity on its head. Both Doro and Anyanwu may transform themselves into white people at any time and may perform most forms of labor as they judge without coercion, as they deem it necessary. In addition, their unnaturally long lives mean that they maintain their complex identities throughout trauma and external upheaval.
This freedom allows them to commit to a deeper sense of identity than that created by white supremacist ideology. Doro is at once a slaver and a black man of strong East African identity. Anyanwu is enslaved by Doro not because of her own black skin but because of her reproductive ability, and because of her deep traditional ties to the intersection of family and village that derives from her West African ancestry. Her identity as a woman is deeply ingrained (she has strong mores about the sexual dynamics of becoming a man, which she otherwise does freely) but she also recognizes that the men who are caught within Doro’s abominable breeding program are equally lacking agency.
Asymmetric Power
Classical dramatic theory often balances symmetrical elements in a play of power, as in a game of chess. In Aristotle’s view, for instance, tragedy is not effective if the protagonist is an utter fool, but when dramatic irony is evoked; for instance, when a wise protagonist acts foolishly for an instant, therefore upending his or her universe. This is a highly effective method for producing self-contained drama but has little to say regarding historic monstrosities such as slavery. In this instance, artists turn to art forms such as comedy and melodrama. Science fiction is one such form of melodrama.
Asymmetrical power is a unique subject of science fiction. What is interesting about the colonizing aliens of H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds is not the interplay of their power versus that of the humans, but the totalizing effect of their towering military force, which is akin to the force of Spanish conquistadors to the Native Americans. The psychology of all who fall under Doro’s spell is that of the subjugated. There are those, like Isaac, who live peacefully under subjugation, and there are “wild seed” like Anyanwu who bristle under it, but there is no chance of either defeating Anyanwu by force.
Melodrama is noted for sudden reversals and happy resolutions to violent rising action, and, as a science fiction novel, Wild Seed delivers on this promise. Just as Well’s classic novel ends with the death of the invading Martians by the common cold, so in Wild Seed, Anyanwu must threaten suicide before Doro acknowledges her value to him, forcing him to reorder his purely functional order of the world. As such, melodrama provides catharsis to a series of depressing and violent events. By contrast, comparing the real-life resolution to the colonization of the global south by European powers, which never ended and must still be reckoned with, offers no such cathartic resolution.
Generational and Family Conflict
Doro has little familial or paternal interest in his subjects and, much like Zeus or Cronos before him, is as likely to view his sons and daughters as prey than as inheritors of his legacy. This does not restrict his children from looking upon him as a patriarch. When Doro first proposes the idea of marrying Anyanwu to Isaac, Anyanwu responds, “to me, he is a boy. And to you, both he and I are children. I have seen you watching us like an all-knowing father” (105).
Paternalism is a part and parcel with colonial attitudes. When seeking to justify the ownership and breeding of slaves, white Southerners would often refer to themselves as parents and the enslaved as children. This reduction of systematic white supremacy to a simple matter of a family squabble provides the same cover for injustice as melodrama sometimes does, by providing a neat resolution in the form of a metaphor. Under paternalism, father knows best, and all the children are cared for.
Butler’s interrogation of this tradition in the form of Doro’s “villages” is pointed, but sometimes becomes complicated. The handmaiden to patriarchal rule is a subservient matriarchy, in which the “mother figure” gently scolds and instructs the stern and unforgiving taskmaster of a father to be a better person towards his children. When Anyanwu is an animal, she is free from these constraints, free even of Doro. Yet she finds animal sexuality “abominable,” and is always drawn back to human society—the same lack of metacognition the shields her from Doro while Anyanwu is in animal form repels her from that form. Though she does not mean it, this also brings her back to Doro.
Butler may be critical of Doro’s paternalism, but she takes little interest in the weaker members of the society he forms. In her telling, it is entirely up to Anyanwu to reform the system by making Doro reform. She does so through very gender normative means. She seduces and heals him, thus revealing his tender side. Indeed, Doro’s and Anyanwu’s powers are inversed in the same gender-biased way, where Doro must violently force the acquisition of a new form while Anyanwu can morph into a form without taking away another being. Butler might have played more with gender identity in Wild Seed, but instead left those roles intact.
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By Octavia E. Butler
