Perversion the Social Relation

176 Michael P. Biblercertainly testifies to the power and influence of that experience, for in hisquest for a religious community of legal and social equals, he changes theexisting modes of egalitarianism to approximate as closely as possiblehis initial feelings of liberation and equality through sameness.At this stage in Nat's imagination of a post-rebellion community,however, his goal for revolution is fraught with the same core paradoxesthat define homo-ness itself. His first problem is that he privileges theidea of sameness to such a degree that he actually wants to destroy differencesoutright. Secondly, in the same way that the feeling of homonesscan occur only within the hierarchical arrangement of identities itseems to transcend, this particular plan to create sameness through theelimination of difference ironically depends on the very categories anddefinitions that Nat wants to eliminate. If killing whites leaves a newcommunity of people who are the same as each other, they can onlybe identified as the same if the terms of the old culture are transposedinto the new culture. The dissolution of racial oppression ironically relieson the preservation of the racial categories Nat wants to overthrow,as his sermon about blacks loving "they own black skin" shows. Nat isthus refusing to acknowledge the limitations intrinsic to homo-ness becausehe transforms homo-relationality into overt fascism. In this way,Styron's text is still extremely conservative in its politics because he verynearly transforms this heroic slave rebel into genocidal, megalomaniacalblack Hitler. Moreover, what Nat—and possibly Styron—doesn't realizeis that the fascist vision of an all-black society also shifts the axis ofdifference to the more expansive notion of a shared blackness. Whereashis first plan proposed to create a black race of Nats who are equallyeducated, equally religious, and equally free, his second plan redrawsthe line of sameness more broadly. Nat tries to remain true to his experienceof homo-ness, but in doing so, he ironically redefines the waysby which any form of social sameness could now be realized.And, as he resituates his idea of equality on the grounds of a broaderracial sameness, he implicitly does so in a way that seems to privilegeonly black men. Throughout the novel, Nat's violent fantasies of rapingwomen and his obsession with the young, white Margaret Whiteheadindicate a deep-seated, and now almost legendary, misogyny. Assistedby this misogyny, Nat combines his experience of homo-ness with thesingle-gendered egalitarian model of fraternity to exclude women. Nat