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Team 4 Sections

Quotes

Pg: 75: "You'll have to talk to them, tell them to forget you, and become just a romantic dream for them. Otherwise, chances are they'll look for you. They don't need you, but they'll want you. The might waste their lives looking for you." Iosif to Shori explaining the possible consequences of one bite of an Ina.

Pg. 157: "Three of you aren't enough to sustain me for long without harm to you. I'm going to try to have Theodora brought here, too." Shori demostrating Ina pansexuality

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. 177: " "You need to touch your symbionts more," she said. "Temporaries like Victor don't matter in the same way, and Joel isn't yours yet. You need to touch us and Know that we're here for you, ready to help you if you need us." Brook giving Symbiont support to Shori.

Pg. 75: "I've heard it called a powerful hypnotic drug. It makes them highly suggestible and deeply attached to the source of the substance. They come to need it" - Iosif explaining the addictive effects of the venom to Shori.

Pg. 204: "It scared the hell out of me. I stayed away for about ten months. I'd only been bitten three times in all, so I wasn't physically addicted. No pain, no sickness. But psychologically . . . Well, I couldn't forget it. I wanted it like crazy. - Joel explaining his choice to become a symbiont.

Plot

The novel tells the story of Shori, who appears to be a 10 or 11 year old African-American girl, but is actually a 53-year-old member of a race called "Ina", or vampires. They are nocturnal, long-lived and derive sustenance by drinking human blood. Though they are physically superior to humans, both in strength and ability to heal from injury, the Ina depends on humans to survive. Therefore; their relationships are symbiotic, with the Ina's venom providing significant boost to their humans' immune systems and extending their lives up to 200 years. However, withdrawal from this venom will also lead to the human’s death.

The story opens as Shori awakens with no knowledge of who or where she is, in a cave and suffering from critical injuries. Although she is burned and has skull trauma, she kills and eats the first creature that approaches her. Eating this creature allows her to heal quickly enough to walk and explore on her own. Also she runs into the ruins where a construction worker named Wright picks her up on the side of the road, Shori bites Wright because she finds his scent irresistible and they begin their relationship.

While staying at Wright's uncle’s cabin, Shori realizes she’s in need more blood, so she feeds on other inhabitants in the town and develops a relationship with an older woman named Theodora. Shori and Wright return to the burned-out, abandoned village near where she woke up to learn more about her past. They eventually meet Iosif, Shori’s father, who tells her the burned out town was once her home, where she lived with her mothers and sisters. They also learn that Wright and Shori’s mutually beneficial relationship makes Wright Shori’s symbiont. Furthermore, Shori’s dark skin is the result of a genetic modification because the Ina were experimenting to make their kind resistant to daylight; all other Ina are white-skinned.

Later before Shori is able move in with Iosif, his settlement is burned down like Shori’s home was. Shori and Wright meet the only two human symbionts who survived, Celia and Brook. Shori adopts Celia and Brook as her own symbionts to save their lives, though their bonding is initially uncomfortable for all of them as symbionts become addicted to the venom of one particular Ina. The four flee to another house that Iosif owns. When they are at this new house, they are attacked by several men with gasoline and guns during the day. Because of the genetic enhancements made on Shori she was awake and they are able to escape.

The group travels to the Gordon family settlement, an old friend of Iosif, where they are welcomed and guarded by human symbionts during the day. The attackers also raid their settlement, although Shori and the human symbionts are able to fight back. They capture three attackers alive. The Gordon family interrogates the intruders and finds that they were the same attackers who killed Shori’s parents and were sent by the Silks, another Ina family. The Gordons suspect the attacks on Shori are motivated by disdain for the genetic experimentation that created her.

After failing to get a confession from the Silks, the Gordon family calls a Council of Judgment on Shori’s behalf. Thirteen Ina families and their symbionts come to the Gordon settlement to discuss the Silks attack on Shori. While the Council is happening, the Silk representative, Katharine Dahlman sends one of her symbionts to kill Theodora, Shori’s symbiont and succeeds. So in addition to issuing a punishment upon the Silks, the Council must also punish Katharine Dahlman. The Silks have their sons taken from them, to be adopted by other Ina families. Thus, the Silk line will die out. Katharine Dahlman is sentenced to have her legs amputated. Katharine refuses this punishment and attempts to kill Shori, who fights back and fatally wounds Katharine. Katharine was killed by being beheaded and burned. After regaining consciousness, Shori decides to join the Brathwaite family and learn the ways of the Ina to create her own family.

Main themes

Mutualistic symbiosis

In Fledgling, humans and Ina are bonded into a form of mutualistic symbiosis, a type of relationship that Shari Evans connects to the concept of "partnership" as defined in Butler’s Parable of the Talents: "offering the greatest possible benefit while doing the least possible harm." While in the Parable novels the purpose of partnership is to ameliorate the negative effects of beings or processes that cannot be resisted or avoided, in Fledgling mutualistic symbiosis serves to challenge the idea that the Ina are a superior species by making Ina and humans interdependent of each other. As Susana Morris explains, even though the Ina can satisfy their need for companionship, physical contact, and sexual pleasure with one another, they also must have a deep emotional connection with their symbionts in order to survive.

Likewise, humans crave intimacy with one particular Ina after they have been infected by her or his venomous bite, and may die when they lose their Ina. Butler devotes several moments in the novel to portray the discomfort this required loss of agency causes in the human symbionts. Nevertheless, Fledgling is the first time that Butler illustrates a co-dependent relationship from the point of view of the dominating partner, unlike in previous works such as her novel Dawn or her celebrated short story "Bloodchild."

Scholars have linked Fledgling’s mutualistic symbiosis to various theoretical positions. Pramrod Nayar sees it as a fictional depiction of the relationship that professor Donna Haraway (link to Wikipedia article "Donna Haraway") defines as “companion species” in "Encounters with Companion Species: Entangling Dogs, Baboons, Philosophers, and Biologists." Joy Sanchez-Taylor and Shari Evans recognize it as a form of social commentary: human beings must move away from parasitic, hierarchical relationships and toward symbiosis with each other and other species. Critic Susana Morris connects Fledgling's symbiotic relationships to the Afrofuturistic feminist desire to portray liberation from current forms of hegemonic dominance. Thus, the “cooperation, interdependence, and complex understandings of power” that mutualistic symbiosis represents becomes Butler’s “futurist social model, one that is fundamentally at odds with racism, sexism, and sectarian violence."

Alternative Sexualities

Fledging challenges traditional expectations of sexual categorization and proposes alternatives ways for individuals to relate to one another by having Ina sexual norms override human norms. Ina-human sexual relationships are polyamorous, with one Ina as the primary partner of several male and female human symbionts. Also, symbionts often engage in same-sex and/or opposite-sex relationships with other symbionts. Further, the Ina mate in family-based groups--a group of sisters mating with a group of brothers from a different family. An Ina household, therefore; blurs the boundaries between familial and erotic love by having its members involved with each other sexually.

Butler highlights the strangeness of the Ina sexual arrangements through the reactions of Shori’s first symbiont, Wright. According to Melissa Strong, Wright responds to Shori’s pansexuality with biphobia; for him, proper sexuality has clear categories: male and female, heterosexuality and homosexuality.

Ultimately, Butler’s inclusion of alternative sexualities serves to erode rigid hierarchies. Strong explains that the fusing of family and sexual relations destabilizes the traditional relationship between slave and master. Similarly, Susana Morris argues that, in the spirit of Afrofuturistic feminism, Fledgling’s queer sexualities “uncouple dominance from power,” so that the patriarchal hold over those marginalized is replaced by “coalition and power sharing.”