THE NATURE OF SOCIAL DESIRE
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idealized nor constrained, but delicious in its imperfection. While Celie adores
Shug, she is able to recognize and accept Shug’s weaknesses and failings.
Walker transcends a liberal as well as romantic portrayal of desire, depicting a
love that is unegoistic, a desire that seeks neither status nor triumph in
‘winning5. In fact, Walker’s depiction of Shug’s non-monogamy illustrates a
decidedly unproprietarian approach to love. Shug loves Celie in a spirit of
mutualism, wanting only to further empower her to develop her own
autonomy and potential for self-love, mutualism, and pleasure.
In The Color Purple, Walker paints a world that is both social and sensual,
ethical and anarchistic. The life which Walker creates for Celie toward the end
of the novel represents a metaphor for social utopia: a grand reconciliation of
differences between the sexes and a reclamation of power, pleasure, and
self-love by women. As we leave Celie, we find her living cooperatively within
her small community of friends, engaged in work that she loves, generously
giving to and receiving from her loved ones.
Through the love of another
woman, she lias come home to herself, seated firmly at the center of her own
ability to desire herself, others, and the natural world.
Hence, within second-wave feminism, we find a reach for a new “socio
erotic,” an understanding of desire that has distinctly social, and even
revolutionary,
implications. While Rich valorized the
idea
of women’s
mutualistic desire, Lorde elaborated a poetic and evocative exploration of a
desire to reclaim a cooperative impulse in the face of such injustices as racism
and sexism. In turn, in The Color Puiple, we see a literary illustration of social
desire:
a
story
that
explores
the
possibility
for
re-establishing
new
understandings of the impulse toward mutualism, interdependence, and
sensual pleasure.
Perhaps most significant, we see in this ‘erotic moment5 a critique of
modernity that is not regressive or romantic, but is decidedly forward looking.
Critiquing such modem forms of hierarchy as racism, sexism, and capitalism,
these theorists do not offer an anti-modernist alternative. Tracing hierarchies
such as patriarchy back to pre-modem times, theorists such as Rich, Lorde, and
Walker do not romanticize the past, blaming modem ‘technology5, ‘urban life5,
or ‘humanity5 in general for causing social suffering. Instead, these theorists
ground their critique in a historidzed objection to practices of sexism and
racism, offering possibilities for new forms of subjectivity that may emerge
when people come to resist and transform these structures.
Further, the ‘erotic5 that these writers appeal to is not ‘pre-modem5, ‘rural5,
or ‘free5 from humanity: That Celie faces the racist and sexist horrors of her
childhood in a rural setting speaks to Walker’s rejection of a romantic impulse
that ignores a legacy of racism that still flourishes within the rural South as well
as throughout the country.