Taking characters out of context

At the end of panel presentations last week, I was sort of conflicted by the fact that we were trying to predict how Alice would behave if she had lived in our time period instead of her own. On the one hand, I suppose it is an interesting question to mull over, but at the same time, I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion of her character.

Obviously, every person is a product of his or her time to some extent. However, exactly how much of a person's decisions are influenced by their environment, and how much simply depends on the person's nature, is a question we cannot reasonably expect to ever answer. Alice, along with Rufus and all the other characters in Butler's novel, could behave totally differently in different circumstances. Or, she could be totally the same. We can argue nature versus nurture forever and ever—and people certainly do—but at the end of the day, we'll never truly be able to know how much each of those factors plays a role in the development of a person's character and the way their lives ultimately play out, so why is it worth our time to even try to speculate?

It sort of comes down to the Tralfamadorian idea of a moment being "structured" in a certain way. Alice exists in the 1800s, and she always will, because that is the way time was set up and, no matter what happens, nothing's going to change that. Her choices exist entirely in tandem with her circumstances, and consequently it's only fair for us to judge them within that context. I mean, it's certainly interesting to observe characters outside of their usual environment, as we can with Dana and Kevin, but we can't really assert that just because they act a certain way in one time period means that they would behave similarly (or differently, for that matter) in another if we're not actually given the opportunity to see them in both situations.

Besides, how does it help us to know how Alice would behave in the present day—or in Dana's time—anyway? The fact that she exists in the 1800s is crucial to her character as we know it, and thus her behavior and decisions in that nineteenth-century context are the only important things to understanding her character. It doesn't make sense to try superimposing her life onto a 1970s backdrop because, at the end of the day, our speculations would say far more about how each of us individually view Alice than it would about Alice herself.