Presentation of Womanhood in Toni Morrison's Sula

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Presentation of Womanhood in

Toni Morrison’s Sula

In her moving and astonishing novel Sula, published in 1973, Toni Morrison presents the lives of two black heroines - Nel Wright and Sula Peace. The author pictures their growing up together in a small Ohio town, their sharply divergent paths of womanhood, and their ultimate confrontation and reconciliation. Nel Wright chooses to stay in the place of her birth, to marry, to raise a family, to become a pillar of the tightly knit black community. Sula Peace rejects all that Nel has accepted. She escapes to college, submerges herself in city life, and when she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel, a mocker, a sexual seductress. Both women must suffer the consequences of their choices; both must decide if they can afford to harbour the love they have for each other; and both combine to create an unforgettable rendering of what it means and costs to exist and survive as a black woman in America.

Sula chronicles a community in which black women dominate public and private life. Sula Peace is conceived outside of the constraints ordinarily felt by women in her community (she is "dangerously female"). She rejects every available social script, which as a result generates public tension. Despite any real or perceived limitations imposed by her family, her community, or the era in which she is depicted, Sula does not put any limits upon herself. Still, her "quintessential blackness" isolates her from a community that enacts an utterly antithetical aesthetic. A young woman coming of age in a rural Ohio community during the period between the World Wars, Sula is marked, both literally and figuratively, by her singularity of thought and action. She leaves her hometown for ten years, during which she travels across the country and attends college. When she returns, she refuses to maintain the family house in the manner of her mother and grandmother before her. Her sexual exploits do not (nor does she intend them to) lead her to a state of monogamy, shared domesticity, or even steady companionship; with one memorable exception, Sula's interactions with men are consciously finite.

        Two incidents in the novel figure prominently in Sula's development: the first, a conversation in which she overhears her mother, Hannah, conclude, ". . . I love Sula. I just don't like her"; the second, her inadvertent participation in the drowning of one of her peers, a young boy named Chicken Little. Morrison sums up the overall effect of these incidents in one passage:                                                                                                “... she [Sula] lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, hers was an experimental life-ever since her mother's remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow.... She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments- no ego. For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself- be consistent with herself.”                                                                                  The passage describes how Sula's personality has taken shape, and, ironically, in the shapelessness of this shape, the paradox of Sula is revealed. The foundation of Sula's character is, Morrison writes, a lack of foundation, a structurelessness that affects every thought, every action, and every interaction that Sula has. Formed of a creative formlessness, Sula seeks only her own counsel, leaving her indifferent to or uninterested in any kind of morality. Since she has no ambition, she does not project herself, or her actions, into the future, which suggests that she has no sense of, or sensitivity to, cause and effect. Since she does not place the events of her life into a larger context, or even consider them in relation to one another, each experience stands alone.                                                                        Nel is Sula's counterpart in the novel. As Sula's childhood confidante, Nel functions much like a sister, someone whose presence Sula never fundamentally questions. There is no question that they complement each other, yet their characters are fundamentally, finally discrete. Sula dies without ever approaching the kind of intimacy of which Nel is capable and, although Nel does eventually gain insight into Sula's world, it is achieved only decades after Sula's death.

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Despite dramatic differences in upbringing, there are similarities that draw Sula and Nel together: "Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula's because he was dead; Nel's because he wasn't), they found in each others' eyes the intimacy they were looking for". Up until Nel's marriage to Jude, Sula and Nel are kindred spirits. It is upon Sula's return to the Bottom after her ten-year absence that the differences between Sula and Nel are tested and the extent of Sula's otherness made manifest.

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