Lien is defined by suffering, “caged” within the confines of her family’s situation and the knowledge that her own son has been taken from her and belongs to T’Gatoi. Since she is unable to resist through violence without endangering Gan, Lien resists by unnecessarily suffering in the face of T’Gatoi’s efforts to pacify her pain, chiefly through the narcotic sterile eggs. Lien’s struggle against T’Gatoi is also a struggle against the society she lives in. In this relationship, T’Gatoi embodies the state in its capacity to protect and pacify; Lien represents the citizen under the weight of society who refuses to be pacified by the stronger agent and voluntarily suffers, but whose suffering harms others as well. Butler thus complicates narratives of martyrdom by showing both the power and futility of passive resistance. Using the relationship between Lien and T’Gatoi and the pain that Lien’s suffering brings her family, Butler offers a warning against “heroic” individual resistance—against a person, state, or circumstance of life—undertaken for selfish motives.
Butler presents the Tlic as a governing authority that is both protective and oppressive. Lien tells Gan at various points in his life that he must respect and honor T’Gatoi and that he must take care of her, since she is all that stands between their Terran family and the “hordes” of Tlic outside of the Preserve desperate for viable hosts. Although Lien and T’Gatoi were childhood friends, as T’Gatoi’s political power increased, they grew apart and the dynamic changed from true friends to ruler and subject. T’Gatoi eventually returned to claim Gan as the reward for her hard work. Though Lien could not refuse, she began to resent T’Gatoi, feeling that she was trying to buy her son with protection and eggs. T’Gatoi often, while laying with Lien, wraps her many legs around Lien’s body. Although Gan enjoys the feeling of security this entails, Lien believes it feels like a cage. T’Gatoi knows this and does it anyway, exercising her authority by literally caging her subject. The nature of T’Gatoi and the Tlic’s authority seemingly robs Lien of any control over her own wellbeing or future. Any individual in such a situation must choose whether to be broken by such a system or to rebel, fighting for the right to have control over their life. Lien chooses to fight.
On top of offering protection, the Tlic use pacification as a means of control. Butler uses Lien to show that when pacification replaces violence as an oppressive tactic, the chief resistance becomes voluntary suffering. Death becomes its own assertion of freedom and independence. The Tlic offer the narcotic and life-prolonging eggs as incentive for good behavior, offering Terrans a drugged escape from the grim realities that come with life in the Preserve, along with the sedating venomous sting of their tails. When Lien refuses an egg, T’Gatoi stings her with her tail to force her to relax, never asking permission or consent. The pacification is literally forced upon her.
Although Lien used to accept eggs, with the realization that Gan belonged less and less to her each day Lien chose to refuse the eggs and feel every minute of her suffering. Unable to protest verbally or violently for the danger it posed to Gan, Lien chose to impose her own suffering and refuse relief. In hurting herself, she also hurts T’Gatoi, who cares for Lien even while she tries to control her. Her resistance to T’Gatoi is also resistance to the social contract that they all must abide by that took her son from her. Lien’s refusal of the life-prolonging eggs is rushing herself towards the martyrdom of an earlier-than-necessary grave. In a society that exerts control by keeping its subjects safe and healthy, bribing them with long life, Lien declares her ability to choose for herself by allowing old age to destroy her. Her self-destructive refusal of the eggs bears parallels to prisoners who undertake hunger strikes in protest of prison abuses, or self-immolating monks who took their own lives to protest oppressive regimes.
Yet contrary to the popular concept of a heroic martyr, Lien’s idealistic suffering also wounds the people she loves. Gan’s resultant complicated and painful relationship with his mother calls into question whether such idealism is worthwhile. Though it was not always this way, Lien’s current relationship with Gan is cold and distant. Gan’s only comfort was to know that somewhere beneath the “duty and pride and pain” his mother still loved him. When Lien is under the sedate narcotic influence of T’Gatoi’s sting and the eggs, Gan fantasizes about showing affection to his mother, in the hope that she would receive it and tell him that she loved him. However, he knows this would become a humiliation for her, so he chooses to let her keep her pride and remain distant. When Gan is struggling with coming of age, he does not go to his mother for support since she has not been emotionally supportive for years and is resentful of T’Gatoi as it is. Rather, he wishes his father were still alive to comfort him.
Although Lien’s voluntary suffering could be seen as heroic, it ultimately comes off as selfish for the unnecessary suffering it imposes on Gan and his family. Rather than a supportive parent, Gan is left with a prideful shell of a mother who can offer no emotional support at all and who, by dying, will voluntarily remove herself from his life. Butler draws on the familiar themes of an individual resisting a repressive power at the cost of great personal suffering. However, Butler is much more critical of the idea of martyrdom, using Lien to show its cost within an interdependent world. When everyone around an individual has chosen to live within an oppressive—or constrictive—environment, such idealistic resistance often brings pain to everyone. “Bloodchild” is a story about individuals who learn to live within difficult circumstances, and Lien’s “heroic” suffering ultimately undermines their efforts to take life on its own terms and take responsibility for the interdependent relationships around them.
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Passive Resistance, Suffering, and Oppression Quotes in Bloodchild
I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.
Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed, them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.
“It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how good it is.”
“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you in such a hurry to be old?”
She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way, but except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.
T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother.
“I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer.”
My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—if you must. But just now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little.”
I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.
Years passed. T’Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work.
