The Power of Promiscuity
For this week’s reading I was particular interested in the power dynamics between the female and male characters in the Toni Morrison’s novel “Sula,” which is also portrayed in Stevenson’s essay Slave Marriage and Family Relations. Stevenson argues that the though slaves where ultimately under the sovereign of their master, they were able to carve out their own distinct niches of power, create their own social and normative rules and enforce them in a variety of ways. Stevenson goes further to analyze the reasons of marriage, and how different types of marriages—whether it is marriage abroad to marriages held in secret—all have their own advantages of stabilizing and enforcing the dominance of matrifocality in slave society.
In “Sula,” we are familiarized with the power of seduction of through a generation of women—from Eva to her attention-grabbing leg, to the promiscuous but suave Hannah, to eventually Sula who later not only sleeps with Nel’s husband but many husband and men. However this seduction, which may climax at sex, never results in any intention for procreation or social commitment. The reader realizes that the flirting and lovemaking of Hannah is only for a physical desire when Morrison writes: “Hannah was fastidious about whom she slept with. She would fuck practically anything, but sleeping with someone implied for her measure of trust and definite commitment” 44. The lack of social commitment is also evident in Sula’s affair with Nel’s husband, where Sula disagrees with the gravity of the affair and responds to Nel: “I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it? The whimsical seduction may be related to what Stevenson describes as a way for a person under slave rule to control their own domestic life. Stevenstone states that: “one of the most compelling examples of slave choice and its impact on slave marital structures and relations is that…men and women not only ‘understood’ poloygynous marital relations, but sought them out…slaves adopted a variety of marriage and family styles and that they were comfortable with that variety” (164).
The beginning of the novel clearly shows the ways in which Sula and Nel start realizing their sexual power. Stevenson alludes to the very fact of girls realizing their own sexuality: “As girls grew older, it was acceptable for them to become more aware of the significance and value of their sexual power, to realize that women, through their sexuality, provided great service to their families and communities… a young women should suggest the sensuality and immortally that she held…a single women’s dress, hair, walk, dance, and language could and sometimes were suppesd to be sexually suggestive” (167). This realization of their own sexuality, as noted by Sula when she and Nel walk down to the ice cream show even though it is “too cold to have icecream” to be subjected to the gaze of men, is similar to Dolores Haze’s realization of the fluidity in power relations between her and Humbert Humbert by using her sexuality as a lever. The realization of this power relations that allows them to “transcend” or perform a “reverse discourse” becomes essential in understanding why some females like Sula utilizes this power for self-serving reasons, while characters like Nel tries to fulfill already created roles. Where Sula tries to defy categorization, she still falls victim to the wanting to “possess” another man, eventually compelling Ajax to leave her.
The complexity of slave marriages and slave relations demonstrated in “Sula” is evident in the ambiguity of relationships in the novel. The poloygynous relationships reveal the desire for fluidity of power among female and male, and their own spontaneous creation of hierarchy, familial structure, and sexual power. The coming of age in female slaves mark the period of the realization of a power structure which not only allows but encourages the use of sexual identity to improve the conditions of ones domestic and social life.
April 5th, 2011 at 6:47 am
Hi Richard,
You might consider taking the title of this entry, “The Power of Promiscuity,” as the focus for your final essay. It would allow you to extend your insights within a comparative framework, dealing with the historical shifts that Foucault points to and two or three of the novels (or play) that we have read. In each case, the various documents and essays in Peiss provide a context that illuminates these differences. This entry is astute about the particularities of African American communities and family structures and the power relations that emerge in contrast to white American communities and family structures that the earlier works dealt with.