In the classic debate of nature versus nurture, I stand by the power of nurture. We all have our reasons, whether or not we’re aware of them, for our existences, and drawing on stereotypes and similarly shallow understandings only propagate more misunderstandings that could be prevented if we widened our perspectives and tried to sympathize with another before judgments are cast. With Rufus’ development, however, I find my stance harder to support. Given his possessiveness (towards Alice and Dana), insincerity (the letters), and narrow thinking, it’s as if Dana’s efforts to ward off societal influences were futile. Even though Dana’s involvement in his life cannot reverse the moral disregards accepted as norms in his time, as the story develops, sympathizing with Rufus becomes progressively harder. On page 117, when Isaac pummels Rufus for attacking Alice, Dana also becomes aware that she, rather selfishly, needs Rufus to remain alive for her existence though killing him would bring an end to the pain and suffering that he inflicts upon many others.
It’s easy to compare Rufus to his father and to even blame the change in Rufus’ behavior on his father, but I find that in many ways, Weylin is more of a product of society than Rufus. Though Dana personally fears him, she realizes that he “wasn’t the monster he could have been with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn’t a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134). We do not know of Weylin’s past, but it is probable that he too experienced life on a plantation from the perspective of a son to a well-off slave-owner. He lived in a time when racial discrimination permeated all of society and that brutalizing and enslaving fellow humans based on their skin color was a norm. There was no figure akin to Dana that could have intervened in his life to provide a different perspective; society shapes our understanding of morals. Yet, Weylin, unlike Rufus, honors his word regardless of color. This struck me as incredibly respectable and odd. Weylin, who we are introduced to as a man capable of treating his family coldly and slaves inhumanely, keeps true to his morality with a sense of basic dignity and respect for blacks that the whites of the antebellum South would have scoffed at. Rufus, who has the life-changing (literally) experience of interacting with Dana and having been given the chance to change, fails to adopt his father’s rare and perhaps, only, good trait.
Dana’s choice, however, to continuously save Rufus and see him in a better light strikes me as morally illogical. The slaves that think of her as a sell-out, a “white nigger,” promptly capture my sentiments as the divide that Dana has drawn in choosing Rufus, the white men, “them,” over “us,” her fellow slaves, her black kin (though, yes, Rufus is equally kin) becomes strikingly clear.
In contrast to your post, I feel that, by looking at the evolution of the character of Rufus, this story would add support to the “nurture” side of the “nature vs. nurture” debate. As a child, Rufus treats Dana primarily as a friend. As Rufus grows and becomes more aware of his culture, his mentality gradually morphs to fit society’s typical mold of a slave-owner. Rufus’s natural personality vaguely shows through at times when he disciplines Dana. Typically, first, Rufus yells at Dana as though she were a slave, and shortly after, he remembers himself and talks to her as he would a friend. As Rufus grows, society becomes more influential, and Rufus becomes more of a slave-owner and less of a friend to Dana. I think that if Rufus grew up in Dana’s time period, his mindset would be entirely different. Most likely, he would not be racist and projecting such a sense of superiority. After all, if personality were left entirely up to genetics and nature, then the “racist gene” would continue to be passed on from generation to generation and would still exist today. However, societies evolve, and mindsets evolve as well, as shown by the relative lack of racism today, because culture is what shapes people’s mentalities.
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