Mama's Baby, Papa's Slavery? The Problem and Promise of Mothering in Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild"

Abstract

On planets ravaged by war and in civilizations plagued by oppression, Octavia E. Butler’s mothers invest themselves in caring for their communities. Whether biological mothers, such as Lilith from the Lilith’s Brood trilogy (1987-1989), or adoptive and community othermothers, such as Dana of Kindred (1979) and Lauren of the Parable series (1993, 1998), Butler’s mothers work to improve the circumstances of their people by destroying hierarchical power structures and developing more egalitarian societies. As Dorothy Allison famously asserts, the heroines of Butler’s science fiction are “independent, stubborn, difficult, and insistent on trying to control their own lives” (471), but they eschew the peace of solitude and accept the power of maternity, forging connections that allow them to effect social and political change. Readers will discover powerful mothers throughout Butler’s body of work, yet only in “Bloodchild” (1984) does Butler extend both the emotional potency of motherhood and the physical possibility of pregnancy beyond women, giving the men of her story—including her adolescent male protagonist, Gan—the ability to continue what Naomi Ruth Lowinsky calls the “motherline,” the tradition of maternal care that unites parent and child and, in Butler’s story, human and alien (Lowinsky 12-13). Butler writes in her afterword to “Bloodchild” that she “wanted to see whether [she] could write a dramatic story of a man becoming pregnant as an act of love—choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of surrounding difficulties” (30). By claiming that she composed a “love story” (30), Butler seeks to quell questions and criticism concerning the presence of reproductive “domination” (Butler, “Interview” by McCaffery 56) and “enslavement” (Helford 266) in “Bloodchild.” However, critics such as Jane Donawerth continue to describe “Bloodchild” as a tale of “exploitation” (40), while Amanda Thibodeau and Marty Fink offer more ambivalent responses to the tenor of human-alien relationships in Butler’s story and maintain that the author depicts a “parasitic” partnership (Thibodeau 270) resulting in the “violent physical invasion” and “alien appropriation of human bodies” (Fink 417, 418).