Wikipedia talk:Education program archive/CUNY, LaGuardia Community College/The Research Paper: Octavia Butler's Fledgling (Spring 2015)/sandbox team 2 draft

Team 2 Sections

Further reading

• Dubey, Madhu. "Octavia Butler's Novels of Enslavement." Novel: A Forum On Fiction 46.3 (2013): 345-363. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.

• Elber-Aviram, Hadas. "Constitutional Amnesia and Future Memory Science Fiction's Posthuman Vampire." Of Empire and the City : Undead Memory : Vampires and Human Memory in Popular Culture. Ed. Bacon, Simon, and Bronk, Katarzyna. Oxford: Peter Lang AG, 2013.

• Ferreira, Maria Aline. "Symbiotic Bodies and Evolutionary Tropes in the Work of Octavia Butler." Science Fiction Studies 37.3 (2010): 401-415. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.

• Fink, Marty. "AIDS Vampires: Reimagining Illness in Octavia Butler's Fledgling. Science Fiction Studies 37.3 (2010): 416-432. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.

• Hampton, Gregory J. “Vampires and Utopia: Reading Racial and Gender Politics in the Fiction of Octavia Butler. CLA Journal.52.1 (Sep 2008): 74-91.

• ---. Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 5 June 2015.

• ---. "Lost Memories: Memory as A Process of Identity in the Fiction of Octavia Butler." CLA Journal 55.3 (2012): 262-278. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015
• Lacey, Lauren J. "Octavia E. Butler On Coping With Power in Parable Of The Sower, Parable Of The Talents, and Fledgling." Critique 49.4 (2008): 379-394. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.
• Nayar, Pramod K. "A New Biological Citizenship: Posthumanism In Octavia Butler's Fledging." Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (2012): 796-817. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.
• Pickens, Theri. "'You’re Supposed To Be A Tall, Handsome, Fully Grown White Man'”. Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.1 (2014): 33-48. Academic Search Complete. Web. 5 June 2015.

• Pulliam, June. "Fledgling." Encyclopedia of the Vampire: The Living Dead in Myth, Legend, and Popular Culture. Ed. S T. Joshi. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2011.

Quotations

Pg. 63: "We have very little in common with the vampire creatures Bram Stoker described in Dracula, but we are long-lived blood drinkers." -Iosif saying how Ina are different than vampires depicted in literature.

Pg. 110: "And this was the way a symbiont behaved when she was missing her Ina. Or at least this was the way Celia behaved--suspicious, short-tempered, afraid." -Shori witnessing a symbiont go through withdrawal.

Pg. 127: "I wanted that—a home in which my symbionts enjoyed being with me and enjoyed one another and raised their children as I raised mine. That felt right, felt good." -Shori's mutualistic and less predatory relationship with her symbionts.

Pg. 238: "You're not Ina!..."You're not!. And you have no more business at this Council than a clever dog!". -Milo said this about Shori during his speech at Council.

Pg. 194 " The adults would be killed, and their children dispersed among us to become members of others families... We would bring the adults to you. You are the person most wronged in all this and the only surviving daughter. I think you could manage it." Hayden explained to Shori about the Council of Judgement

Pg.218: "Preston wants you. He thinks you're worth the risk. He says your mothers made genetic alterations directly to the germ line, so that you'll be able to pass on your strengths to your children" Daniel adds when telling Shori he and his brothers will mate with her.

Pg. 265: "We Ina don't handle loss as well as most humans do. It's a much rather thing with us, and when it happens, the grief is ...almost unbearable". - Shori is acknowledging herself as an Ina and also showing the comparison of how humans and Ina's deal with loss.

Pg. 105: "..I wanted to kill them, had to kill them. How else could I keep my new family safe?" Shori takes responsibility for her father's and brother's symbiont after they die and becomes protective of them.

Reception

Fledgling received mostly positive feedback. Novelist Junot Diaz declared it his “book of the year,” calling it “[a] harrowing meditation on dominance, sex, addiction, miscegenation and race that completely devours the genre which gave rise to it.” Butler scholar Sandra Y. Govan pronounced it "[a]n extremely well-crafted science fiction story… [that] engages us and is exciting because it invokes and riffs upon vampire myth and legend while wearing a number of masks—murder mystery, crime novel, coming-of-age, innocence-to-experience, initiation, quest tale, and outsider/survivor novel."

Many critics also praised Butler’s exploration of innovative and transgressive topics and themes. The New York Times declared Fledgling “a captivating novel that tests the limits of ‘otherness’ and questions what it means to be truly human.” Susanna Sturgis from Women's Review of Books pointed out that “[t]he vampire premise is perfectly suited to themes that Butler has been exploring since her earliest novels: interdependence, freedom and unfreedom, and the cost of human survival." Susan Salter Reynolds of the Los Angeles Times praised Butler’s ability to address controversial topics in a way that leaves the reader open to them: “[t]he idea of an ordinary man picking up an apparent 10-year-old girl, taking her home and having sex with her is beyond the bounds of civilized behavior. Yet somehow, Butler, with her quiet, spare language, helps us overcome this and many other cross-cultural hurdles in the book.”

Reviewers also commented favorably on Butler’s reinvention of the vampire figure, with Ron Charles of The Washington Post arguing that "Fledgling doesn't just resurrect the pale trappings of vampire lore, it completely transforms them in a startlingly original story about race, family and free will." While reviewing the novel for the journal Gothic Studies, Charles L. Crow noted that “[while] Fledgling may be the least Gothic of Butler’s fictions….Butler makes unsettling demands of the reader, as always, and we must at the beginning accept as narrator and heroine a vampire whose first act is to kill and eat a man who is trying to help her.”

Even though many found Fledgling’s plot skillfully rendered and gripping, a few reviewers described the novel as slow-paced and not very engaging. Rob Gates argues that “Fledgling is certainly not a perfect book. The pacing in the second half of the book is quite slow at times, and the dynamics of the Ina trial did not sustain my interest well.” Reviewer Rachel Shimp claims that “Butler's sparse prose is meted out at times as painstakingly as it must feel for Shori each time she's flooded with a new memory. The slow pace of the book works with her character-in-progress, but it builds to a climax you see coming midway through. It's the only disappointing thing about Fledgling, which otherwise offers a unique vision of the modern vampire, and a kick-ass heroine to boot.”

Main themes

The revision of the vampire figure

One of the most commented aspects of Fledgling is its unusual type of vampire, the result of Butler’s fusion of vampire fiction with science fiction. While the Ina are simply another species coexisting with humanity, the traditional vampire's monstrosity and abnormality routinely symbolizes deviant sexuality and decadence, serves as a foil for humanity, or is a projection of repressed sexual desire or fear of sexual or racial contamination.

Biological rather than supernatural, the Ina do not turn humans into vampires. They are not ruthless, threatening, predatory, intimidating, or generally antagonistic to humans. Instead, they create closely-knit Ina-human communities where they cohabitate with selected humans in symbiotic relationships. In fact, as Pramrod Nayar notes, Butler creates an alternate history where humans and Ina have always coexisted in “non-hierarchic, interdependent and unified ecosystems.”

Aside from their unusual relationships with humans, the Ina are quite ordinary. Steven Shaviro describes them as having “a culture, with laws and customs, kinship groups, a religion and an ethics and a politics, and disputes and power struggles about all these things — just as any group of human beings does.” Butler even renders the Ina less than perfect in that they are prone to the intolerance and bigotry usually reserved for humans.

Fledgling’s vampire protagonist is even more unusual, as she has been genetically enhanced. While the Ina are stereotypically white, as is traditional for vampires, Shori’s genetic makeup includes human melanin, which renders her skin brown, a necessary trait for her kind to be able to survive exposure to the sun. Sanchez-Taylor suggests that Butler’s choice in making Shori dark-skinned aligns Fledgling's narrative with the Afrofuturist idea of defying the predominately white vampire stereotype, such as those represented in Bram Stoker's or Anne Rice’s novels. Such characters traditionally symbolize white masculinity; instead, Butler replaces them with a black, female main character.

Additionally, Shori is portrayed as less intimidating than stereotypical vampires. As Melissa Strong notes, Shori’s diminutive size makes her seem non-threatening. Her treatment of symbionts is kind and understanding: instead of considering her symbionts as victims or pawns, Shori’s relationship with them reflects mutuality and balance.

Difference as means of survival

Fledgling is typical of Butler’s work in that her protagonist’s difference from the Ina norm marks her as an evolutionary step in the right direction, both in biological and in cultural terms. Biologically, her dark skin and ability to stay awake during the day allows her to save herself, her loved ones, and an entire Ina community from a series of attacks occurring during daylight. Culturally, her blackness symbolizes her closeness to humans, a trait that is portrayed as desirable for a proper Ina-human relationship. As Shari Evans explains, Shori’s amnesia, which the Ina treat like a disability, in fact gives her an advantage. Her memory loss leads her to question her belief in the underlying arrangements forming Ina society that are normally left unchallenged. In addition, Shori must re-create her relationship to herself and her culture; this gives her an advantage because she is able to decide what kind of Ina she will become with the support of her symbionts. Unburdened by cultural memory, Shori has the ability to choose what she wants to remember and how she wants to portray herself, using her own sense of morality.

Likewise, Pramrod Nayar believes that Shori’s loss is what makes her the best of all possible Ina, and therefore a symbol of the future. Butler proposes that vampires should become less vampiric by attaining more human qualities such as emotional attachments and sense of community. Meanwhile, humans should also lose certain aspects of themselves as well, such as their vulnerability to disease and tendency to be sexually possessive. Only by losing their weak characteristics and gaining stronger ones, the human and vampire species are able to evolve and improve. Fledgling creates a progressive plan by converting Ina and human into a companionate species through the adoption of qualities of the Other.