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Definition of Allusion
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals, historical events, or philosophical ideas... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to other literary works, famous individuals... read full definition
In literature, an allusion is an unexplained reference to someone or something outside of the text. Writers commonly allude to... read full definition
Chapter 2: The Fire
Explanation and Analysis—Elisha :
In a scene in which Dana learns more about her own time-traveling abilities, Butler alludes to a biblical passage in which the prophet Elisha revives a boy who has died. On her first trip to the past, Dana saved Rufus from drowning, but she was attacked by his mother, Margaret, who misinterpreted her actions. Now, during her second trip, Dana discusses the event with Rufus in order to gain a better understanding of what is happening to her:
I rubbed my shoulder where the woman had bruised it with her desperate blows. For a moment, the soreness confused me, forced me to recall that for me, the woman’s attack had come only hours ago. Yet the boy was years older. Fact then: Somehow, my travels crossed time as well as distance [...]
“Mama said what you did after you got me out of the water was like the Second Book of Kings,” said the boy.
“The what?”
“Where Elisha breathed into the dead boy’s mouth, and the boy came back to life."
Though Margaret attacked Dana at first, she later understood that Dana had actually saved Rufus. As Rufus notes, Margaret compared Dana’s actions to those of the biblical prophet Elisha. In the Bible, Elisha is called to the home of a woman whose son had died. Years earlier, Elisha had predicted the birth of the boy to the woman, who had struggled to conceive a child. After the boy’s death, Elisha revived the boy. Here, Butler’s allusion compares Dana’s act to a notable miracle reported in the Bible. Though Dana feels that her rescue of Rufus was no miracle, as she simply used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a common 20th-century medical technique, the allusion captures that there is something possibly miraculous, or at least inexplicable, about her ability to travel back in time.
Chapter 3: The Fall
Explanation and Analysis—Potiphar's Wife:
Butler alludes to “the scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph,” recounted in the Book of Genesis in the Bible, when describing Margaret’s attempts to seduce Kevin. In one of her few and brief moments of free time at the Weylin Plantation, Dana states:
“I’ve seen her using that limited reading ability of hers on her Bible. I suspect that in her own way, she’s a fairly moral woman.”
“You want to know how moral she is?” His tone made me frown.
“What do you mean?”
“If she chases me any harder, she and I will wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads. The scene between Potiphar’s wife and Joseph.”
I swallowed. That woman!
Dana observes that Margaret appears to be quite religious, as she frequently reads the Bible. Kevin, however, dismisses Dana’s characterization of Margaret as a “fairly moral woman” by the standard of her time, noting that he and Margaret are likely to “wind up playing a scene from that Bible she reads.” Here, he alludes to a scene described in the Bible in which the Israelite Joseph is falsely accused of attempted rape by the wife of Potiphar, the captain of the King’s Guard in Egypt who purchases Joseph as a slave and later promotes him to master of his household. The Bible reports that Joseph actually rebuffed the attempts by Potiphar’s wife to seduce him. Through this allusion, then, Kevin suggests that Margaret is a danger to them both, as she might make a similarly damaging accusation if Kevin continues to reject her advances.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Robinson Crusoe:
Butler alludes to Robinson Crusoe, a 1711 adventure novel written by English author Daniel Defoe, in a scene in which Rufus requests that Dana read a book to him from the small library at the Weylin Plantation:
I fell in love with Kevin all over again. Here was the perfect excuse for me to spend a lot of time with the boy. The book was Robinson Crusoe. I had read it when I was little, and I could remember not really liking it, but not quite being able to put it down. Crusoe had, after all, been on a slave-trading voyage when he was shipwrecked [...] I began to get into Robinson Crusoe. As a kind of castaway myself, I was happy to escape into the fictional world of someone else’s trouble.
Though Dana has a complicated relationship with the young boy, who is sometimes capable of kindness but whose values also reflect many of the racist values of his era, at this moment she feels an almost maternal affection for him. Agreeing to read Robinson Crusoe despite some misgivings, as Margaret has not given her permission to read to her son, Dana notes her own complicated relationship to the book, as its protagonist was riding along with a “slave-trading voyage when he was shipwrecked.” Nevertheless, she begins to enjoy this “happy escape” into a “fictional world.” This allusion, then, highlights the presence of slavery in major works of English literature, but also serves as a parallel for Dana’s own experience, as she is, like Robinson Crusoe, in some sense a “castaway.”
Related Themes:
Chapter 4: The Fight
Explanation and Analysis—Gone with the Wind:
Butler alludes both to popular representations of slavery and to the Holocaust in a scene in which Dana returns to 1976 without Kevin and attempts to gain useful information for when she is inevitably forced to return to the past:
I read books about slavery, fiction and nonfiction. I read everything I had in the house [...] —even Gone With the Wind, or part of it. But its version of [...] tender loving bondage was more than I could stand.
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War II books—a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.
Butler’s allusion to Gone with the Wind, a popular yet controversial 1939 historical epic, highlights the racism underlying the film’s treatment of slavery as “tender loving bondage” and of enslaved people as content to be enslaved. Additionally, Dana reads “a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors.” This allusion to the Holocaust establishes a parallel between the American practice of slavery and the genocide of Jewish people by Nazi Germany during the years of the Second World War. The Holocaust, the novel suggests, could be viewed as a refinement of the strategies used by American slaveowners to maintain the practice of slavery in the United States.
Related Themes:
