Deadly Love

Dana experiences much abuse and discrimination at Rufus’s hands, yet despite this, she retains the capacity to love him. However, this love proves detrimental not only to the people on the plantation but especially to Rufus himself.
At first, Dana’s love appears beneficial to Rufus, whose mother’s and father’s opposite styles of parenting fail to provide a stable upbringing. Dana hopes to instill morals in Rufus so that he will not grow into the rigid slaveholder reflected in his father. But this is a naïve and hopeless attempt. While Rufus needs stable and consistent love, he also requires a firm authority figure, one who can administer consequences aside from whipping. As she poses as a slave, Dana cannot hold this power. The only punishments Dana can use against him are guilt and abandonment, both passive techniques that cannot teach a headstrong child like Rufus. Therefore, Dana’s motherly actions are only half attempts lacking a fundamental task of parenting much like Rufus’s real mother.
While her authority is weak, the tender side of Dana’s love is neither smothering nor absent. Thus, Rufus clings to her love because it is the most nurturing love available to him. He comes to depend on it, and as he grows, feels he has a right to own it just as he “owns” Dana. This notion grows from Dana’s limitless love for him and the absence of an ethical law dictating how he should treat her. He believes that, no matter how vile his actions, Dana will always forgive him and feels confident in this thinking because Dana is legally subservient to him. Without an enforcement system, he grows up without respect for Dana and harbors instead the psyche of a master.
However, Dana fails to see this dangerous consciousness forming in Rufus. Alice warns her, “The more you give him, the more he wants,” but Dana ignores the caution. She continues giving Rufus her love, which he covets. Without the central authority, this outpouring translates to permission for Rufus to continue hurting slaves such as Sam. Thus, her love feeds his already supreme power, failing to achieve its original purpose: to teach Rufus kindness and compassion towards slaves. Rufus then steps beyond what little passive control she had over him as a child, believing he holds immunity to punishment. However, when he attempts to rape Dana, he finds his mistake too late. Dana, though she had saved and nurtured him his entire life, is forced to kill him in self-defense. Rufus had become dependent on her love because she offered it freely, and when he tries to take it, the attempt ends in his death. Thus, Dana’s love destroys Rufus, just as Rufus’s love nearly destroys Dana.