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Critical Essay on Sula Author: Kelly Winters Date: 2002 From: Novels for Students(Vol. 14) Publisher: Gale Place of Publication: Detroit, MI Document Type: Critical essay Length: 1,734 words

Full Text:  A prevalent theme in Sula is the influence of family and friends on the characters. The book focuses on two friends, Sula and Nel, but both have been shaped, and continue to be shaped, by their experiences with their families, particularly their mothers. Their mothers, in turn, have been shaped by their own mothers, in a chain reaction passing through the generations.

The book could easily be titled Sula and Nel, because it focuses on the lifelong relationship between the two women, the most important relationship either of them ever has, superseding those with their mothers and the men in their lives.

Eva, who has endured desperate and lonely poverty, is a strong, tough woman. She is also proud; she thinks of going back to her family in Virginia for help when her man leaves and she has no food, but as the narrator notes, “To come home dragging three young ones would have to be a step one rung before death for Eva.” Instead, she scrounges as best she can for several months, and then heads out, either selling her leg to science or having it cut off in an “accident,” for which she receives $10,000 in insurance payments.

This act indicates a certain ruthlessness in her character, and Eva is ruthlessly controlling, adopting three boys and giving them the same name, “Dewey,” and treating them as a unit. The emotionally stunting effect of this treatment is plain; the boys eventually become so unindividuated that even their own mothers can't tell them apart, and they never grow, physically or mentally, but remain under Eva's sway.

When her son Plum returns from the war with a drug addiction, Eva pours kerosene over him and kills him by setting him on fire. She rationalizes this by saying that he would have lived a pathetic life, not the life of a man, so it was better for him to be dead.

Hannah, perhaps because she witnesses this event, gets up the courage to ask Eva if she ever loved any of her children. She feels unloved because Eva never played with them or said kind words to them. Eva defends her actions by saying there wasn't time for play and soft talk, that she was so busy just trying to get them food to eat that the notion of “play” was ridiculous, but it's clear that she's defensive, and the fact that she never actually answers the question shows that she's unable to answer “Yes.”

When Hannah's dress catches fire while she's canning, Eva jumps out the window in an attempt to save her, showing that deep down, she does love her daughter. But Hannah's questioning of her mother, and her lifelong feeling of being unloved, shows that a certain amount of warmth was lacking in their relationship.

Although Hannah loves to spend time with men and has many boyfriends, she is never emotionally close to any of them; this is a legacy from Eva, who has the same temperament. Hannah passes this lack of warmth on to her daughter, Sula. Sula overhears her mother's friend discussing her daughter: “Well, Hester grown now and I can't say love is exactly what I feel.”

Hannah says, “Sure you do. You love her, like I love Sula. I just don't like her. That's the difference.”

To a child, however, there is no difference, and this comment sears itself into Sula's consciousness, filling her with a sense of her own unlovable nature and destroying her sense of trust. She has become just like Hannah and Eva, hardened and wary, and throughout the book, she remains detached from other people, as her mother always has. Although she has many relationships with men, she refuses to commit to any of them or to become emotionally vulnerable. She believes she doesn't need anyone else to be happy, and when she finally does fall in love with Ajax, her need for commitment scares him away, hurting her deeply. When she dies, she talks bitterly about the lack of love in the world, and in her life, reflecting on her experience with her mother.

Cecile, who lives in New Orleans, took her daughter Rochelle's baby daughter away from her as soon as she was born. Cecile didn't approve of Rochelle because she was a prostitute, and brought up the girl, Helene, in a strict Catholic atmosphere:

The grandmother took Helene away from the soft lights and flowered carpets of the Sundown House and raised her under

the dolesome eyes of a multicolored Virgin Mary, counseling her to be on guard for any sign of her mother's wild blood.

Morrison doesn't discuss Cecile's reaction to this, but it's evident that mother and daughter did not have a close relationship, and that the daughter has remained bitter and closed because of it.

This lack of closeness continues between Rochelle and Helene. When Helene goes back to New Orleans after her grandmother dies, she meets her mother for the first time in many years; although Morrison doesn't make this clear, it may be for the first time since Helene was an infant. “The two looked at each other,” Morrison writes. “There was no recognition in the eyes of either.” Then Helene said, “This is your . . . grandmother, Nel.” The only conversation between Rochelle and Helene occurs when Rochelle asks Helene about Nel: “That your only one?” They have a stiff, chilly conversation about what will be done with the house, and when Rochelle speaks Creole, Helene tells Nel severely, “I don't talk Creole. And neither do you,” thus denying her past, and her connection to her mother. When Nel says of Rochelle, “She smelled so nice. And her skin was so soft.” Helene says scornfully, “Much handled things are always soft,” referring to her mother's life as a prostitute.

Helene brings up Nel in a strict, religious, and emotionally chilly home. “Under Helene's hand the girl became obedient and polite. Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter's imagination underground,” the narrator states, and gives readers a picture of Nel's life: “Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother's incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back . . .” Nel longs for excitement, variety, and passion, but her mother doesn't foster any of these.

Because of her strict upbringing, Nel is attracted to Sula's wild, disorderly house, and Sula is equally attracted to Nel's quiet, calm qualities. “Their friendship was as intense as it was sudden,” Morrison writes. Throughout the book, she makes it clear that each girl finds completion in the other; they are opposites, but they fit together and make a whole. Each is only a partial person without the other, and as girls, they're inseparable, perhaps finding in each other the warmth, support, and reassurance they didn't get from their families.

The book could easily be titled Sula and Nel, because it focuses on the relationship between the two women, the most important relationship either of them ever has, superseding those with their mothers and the men in their lives. Although they are very close as children, when they grow up they each feel betrayal from the other–Sula has an affair with Nel's husband Jude, forcing the end of the marriage, and when Nel gets angry and possessive about her husband and the affair, Sula feels betrayed. She had counted on Nel. Morrison writes, “Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. Now she wanted everything, and all because of that,” meaning marriage. From being a free and accepting friend, Nel has become one of “them,” the traditional, possessive, small-minded and limited women of the town, according to Sula's view. This “surprised her a little and saddened her a good deal,” because she had thought Nel was different.

Throughout most of the book, Sula is viewed by the other characters as evil, and Nel is seen as good. However, by the time Sula dies, their positions have become reversed. Nel visits Sula on her deathbed out of a feeling of duty–not out of true friendship or love– and feels virtuous about doing so. Sula, however, tells Nel that she may not be as good as she thinks she is. She plants a small seed of doubt in Nel's mind when she asks Nel, “How you know?” Nel responds, “Know what?” Sula says, “About who was good. How you know it was you?” Nel asks, “What you mean?” Sula responds, “I mean maybe it wasn't you [who was good]. Maybe it was me.”

Soon after Sula's death, Nel goes to visit Eve, who is in a nursing home. Perhaps senile, perhaps clairvoyant, Eve looks at her and says, “Tell me how you killed that little boy,” asking about Chicken Little. Nel says Sula was the one who threw him in the water, and Eve says, “You, Sula. What's the difference? You was there. You watched.”

Nel thinks about her response to the accident. She was calm; Sula was distraught. Sula had sought help; Nel had said, “Come on, let's go.” She realizes, when Chicken Little's hands slipped and he flew out into the water, she had a “good feeling.” “Why didn't I feel bad when it happened?” she wonders. “How come it felt so good to see him fall?” She realizes that she is far more evil than Sula, that what she had told herself was maturity and compassion was “only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation”–in this case, the thrill of his death.

Nel realizes that she was even closer to Sula than she thought, more like her than she ever thought, and that her relationship with Sula was more important than any other; that it was more important than her marriage. At the end of the book, after Sula's funeral, she thinks about her feeling of sadness after her marriage broke up and says to herself, “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude,” when in fact, she was missing Sula, and that now her life without her will be, as Morrison writes, “just circles and circles of sorrow.” These circles reflect, and are an amplification of, her original sorrow over her relationship, or lack of a relationship, with her mother.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition)    Winters, Kelly. “Critical Essay on Sula.” Novels for Students, edited by Jennifer Smith, vol. 14, Gale, 2002. Gale Literature Resource

Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1420040768/GLS?u=lincclin_mdcc&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=e918d0e3. Accessed 24 June 2024.

Gale Document Number: GALE|H1420040768

Toni Morrison Sula

First published in 1973

It is sheer good fortune to miss somebody long before they leave you. This book is for Ford and Slade, whom I miss although they have not left me.

“Nobody knew my rose of the world but me… I had too much glory. They don't want glory like that in nobody's heart.”

–The Rose Tattoo

Foreword

In the fifties, when I was a student, the embarrassment of being called a politically minded writer was so acute, the fear of critical derision for channeling one's creativity toward the state of social affairs so profound, it made me wonder: Why the panic? The flight from any accusation of revealing an awareness of the political world in one's fiction turned my attention to the source of the panic and the means by which writers sought to ease it. What could be so bad about being socially astute, politically aware in literature? Conventional wisdom agrees that political fiction is not art; that such work is less likely to have aesthetic value because politics–all politics–is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production. That wisdom,

which seems to have been unavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens, is still with us, and, in 1969 it placed an inordinate burden on African American writers. Whether they were wholly uninterested in politics of any sort, or whether they were politically inclined, aware, or aggressive, the fact of their race or the race of their characters doomed them to a “political-only” analysis of their worth. If Phillis Wheatley wrote “The sky is blue,” the critical question was what could blue sky mean to a black slave woman? If Jean Toomer wrote “The iron is hot,” the question was how accurately or poorly he expressed chains of servitude. This burden rested not only on the critics, but also on the reader. How does a reader of any race situate herself or himself in order to approach the world of a black writer? Won't there always be apprehension about what may be revealed, exposed about the reader? In 1970, when I began writing _Sula,__ I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, _The Bluest Eye,__ by both black and white reviewers that–with two exceptions–had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. The judgment was based on whether “Black people are–or are not–like this.” This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored the shallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed. Only a few people would

be interested, I thought, in any wider approach–fewer than the tiny percentage of the fifteen hundred who had bought the first book. But the act of writing was too personally important for me to abandon it just because the prospects of my being taken seriously were bleak. It may be difficult now to imagine how it felt to be seen as a problem to be solved rather than a writer to be read. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston–all had been called upon to write an essay addressing the “problem” of being a “Negro” writer. In that no-win situation- -inauthentic, even irresponsible, to those looking for a politically representative canvas; marginalized by those assessing value by how “moral” the characters were–my only option was fidelity to my own sensibility. Further exploration of my own interests, questions, challenges. And since my sensibility was highly political _and__ passionately aesthetic, it would unapologetically inform the work I did. I refused to explain, or even acknowledge, the “problem” as anything other than an artistic one. Other questions mattered more. What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society's approval? What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community? Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when-especially when–it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peach was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a

certain kind of female–envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva's physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel's accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula's resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation. Hannah's claims are acceptable in her neighborhood because they are nonfinancial and nonthreatening; she does not disturb or deplete family resources. Because her dependence is on another woman, Eva, who has both money and authority, she is not competitive. But Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard. Hannah, Nel, Eva, Sula were points of a cross–each one a choice for characters bound by gender and race. The nexus of that cross would be a merging of responsibility and liberty difficult to reach, a battle among women who are understood to be least able to win it. Wrapped around the arms of that cross were wires of other kinds of battles–the veteran, the orphans, the husband, the laborers, confined to a village by the same forces that mandated the struggle. And the only possible triumph was that of the imagination. The job, of course, was summoning those perceptions in language that could express them. _Sula__ stretched my attempts to manipulate language, to work credibly and, perhaps, elegantly with a discredited vocabulary. To use folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic,

neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed. I wanted to redirect, reinvent the political, cultural, and artistic judgments saved for African American writers. I was living in Queens while I wrote _Sula,__ commuting to Manhattan to an office job, leaving my children to childminders and the public school in the fall and winter, to my parents in the summer, and was so strapped for money that the condition moved from debilitating stress to hilarity. Every rent payment was an event; every shopping trip a triumph of caution over the reckless purchase of a staple. The best news was that this was the condition of every other single/separated female parent I knew. The things we traded! Time, food, money, clothes, laughter, memory–and daring. Daring especially, because in the late sixties, with so many dead, detained, or silenced, there could be no turning back simply because there was no “back” back there. Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people's expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves. In that atmosphere of “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” I began to think about just what that kind of license would have been like for us black women forty years earlier. We were being encouraged to think of ourselves as our own salvation, to be our own best friends. What could that mean in 1969 that it had not meant in the 1920s? The image of the woman who was both envied and

cautioned against came to mind. Elsewhere (in an essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”), I have detailed my thoughts about developing the structure of _Sula.__ “Originally, _Sula__ opened with 'Except for World War II, nothing interfered with National Suicide Day.' With some encouragement I recognized that sentence as a false beginning.” Falseness, in this case, meant abrupt. There was no lobby, as it were, where the reader could be situated before being introduced to the goings-on of the characters. As I wrote in that essay, “The threshold between the reader and the black-topic text need not be the safe, welcoming lobby I persuaded myself [_Sula__] needed at that time. My preference was the demolition of the lobby altogether. [Of all of my books], only _Sula__ has this 'entrance.' The others refuse the 'presentation,' refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation between… them and us. Refuse, in effect, to cater to the diminished expectations of the reader, or his or her alarm heightened by the emotional luggage one carries into the black-topic text…. [Although] the bulk of the opening I finally wrote is about the community, a view of it… the view is not from within… but from the point of view of a stranger–the 'valley man' who might happen to be there and to and for whom all this is mightily strange, even exotic…. [In] my new first sentence I am introducing an outside-the-circle reader into the circle. I am translating the anonymous into the specific, a 'place' into a 'neighborhood' and letting a stranger in, through whose eyes it can be viewed.” This deference, paid to the “white” gaze, was the one time I

addressed the “problem.” Had I begun with Shadrack, as originally planned, I would have ignored the gentle welcome and put the reader into immediate confrontation with his wounded mind. It would have called greater attention to the traumatic displacement this most wasteful capitalist war had on black people, and thrown into relief their desperate and desperately creative strategies of survival. In the revised opening I tried to represent discriminatory, prosecutorial racial oppression as well as the community's efforts to remain stable and healthy: the neighborhood has been almost completely swept away by commercial interests (a golf course), but the remains of what sustained it (music, dancing, craft, religion, irony, wit) are what the “valley man,” the stranger, sees–or could have seen. It is a more inviting embrace than Shadrack's organized public madness–it helps to unify the neighborhood until Sula's anarchy challenges it. Outlaw women are fascinating–not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman's escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not complete disaster. In _Sula__ I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.

Sula

In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood. It stood in the hills above the valley town of Medallion and spread all the way to the river. It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. One road, shaded by beeches, oaks, maples and chestnuts, connected it to the valley. The beeches are gone now, and so are the pear trees where children sat and yelled down through the blossoms to passersby. Generous funds have been allotted to level the stripped and faded buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course. They are going to raze the Time and a Half Pool Hall, where feet in long tan shoes once pointed down from chair rungs. A steel ball will knock to dust Irene's Palace of Cosmetology, where women used to lean their heads back on sink trays and doze while Irene lathered Nu Nile into their hair. Men in khaki work clothes will pry loose the slats of Reba's Grill, where the owner cooked in her hat because she couldn't remember the ingredients without it. There will be nothing left of the Bottom (the footbridge that crossed the river is already gone), but perhaps it is just as well, since it wasn't a town anyway: just a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes, and, if a valley man happened to have business up in those hills–collecting rent or insurance payments–he might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk, a bit of black bottom, a bit of

“messing around” to the lively notes of a mouth organ. Her bare feet would raise the saffron dust that floated down on the coveralls and bunion-split shoes of the man breathing music in and out of his harmonica. The black people watching her would laugh and rub their knees, and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew's curve. He'd have to stand in the back of Greater Saint Matthew's and let the tenor's voice dress him in silk, or touch the hands of the spoon carvers (who had not worked in eight years) and let the fingers that danced on wood kiss his skin. Otherwise the pain would escape him even though the laughter was part of the pain. A shucking, knee-slapping, wet-eyed laughter that could even describe and explain how they came to be where they were. A joke. A nigger joke. That was the way it got started. Not the town, of course, but that part of town where the Negroes lived, the part they called the Bottom in spite of the fact that it was up in the hills. Just a nigger joke. The kind white folks tell when the mill closes down and they're looking for a little comfort somewhere. The kind colored folks tell on themselves when the rain doesn't come, or comes for weeks, and they're looking for a little comfort somehow. A good white farmer promised freedom and a piece of bottom land to his slave if he would perform some very difficult chores. When the slave completed the work, he asked the farmer to keep his

end of the bargain. Freedom was easy–the farmer had no objection to that. But he didn't want to give up any land. So he told the slave that he was very sorry that he had to give him valley land. He had hoped to give him a piece of the Bottom. The slave blinked and said he thought valley land was bottom land. The master said, “Oh, no! See those hills? That's bottom land, rich and fertile.” “But it's high up in the hills,” said the slave. “High up from us,” said the master, “but when God looks down, it's the bottom. That's why we call it so. It's the bottom of heaven–best land there is.” So the slave pressed his master to try to get him some. He preferred it to the valley. And it was done. The nigger got the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter. Which accounted for the fact that white people lived on the rich valley floor in that little river town in Ohio, and the blacks populated the hills above it, taking small consolation in the fact that every day they could literally look down on the white folks. Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there sometimes wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it was the bottom of heaven. The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things–and each other, wondering

even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom.

1919

Except for World War II, nothing ever interfered with the celebration of National Suicide Day. It had taken place every January third since 1920, although Shadrack, its founder, was for many years the only celebrant. Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917, he had returned to Medallion handsome but ravaged, and even the most fastidious people in the town sometimes caught themselves dreaming of what he must have been like a few years back before he went off to war. A young man of hardly twenty, his head full of nothing and his mouth recalling the taste of lipstick, Shadrack had found himself in December, 1917, running with his comrades across a field in France. It was his first encounter with the enemy and he didn't know whether his company was running toward them or away. For several days they had been marching, keeping close to a stream that was frozen at its edges. At one point they crossed it, and no sooner had he stepped foot on the other side than the day was adangle with shouts and explosions. Shellfire was all around him, and though he knew that this was something called _it,__ he could not muster up the proper feeling–the feeling that would accommodate _it.__ He expected to be terrified or

exhilarated–to feel _something__ very strong. In fact, he felt only the bite of a nail in his boot, which pierced the ball of his foot whenever he came down on it. The day was cold enough to make his breath visible, and he wondered for a moment at the purity and whiteness of his own breath among the dirty, gray explosions surrounding him. He ran, bayonet fixed, deep in the great sweep of men flying across this field. Wincing at the pain in his foot, he turned his head a little to the right and saw the face of a soldier near him fly off. Before he could register shock, the rest of the soldier's head disappeared under the inverted soup bowl of his helmet. But stubbornly, taking no direction from the brain, the body of the headless soldier ran on, with energy and grace, ignoring altogether the drip and slide of brain tissue down it