In this chapter, Sula’s return also profoundly impacts Nel’s life. Sula casually sleeps with Jude. When they are discovered, Jude responds by leaving immediately. Nel blames Sula and begins to define her life in terms of Jude’s absence from it. The fundamental difference between the two women becomes apparent. Nel cannot adapt to the change in her circumstances and sees the changeability of life as the source of the problem. This belief contrasts with Sula’s earlier observation that hell is stasis, permanence without change. Without evaluating whether events are right or wrong, Sula’s outlook is more in line with the reality of life’s perpetual motion and transition. Meaning begins to take shape within the mind of the reader as silent centers of unspoken, unspeakable experience coalesce with the reader’s own, equally essential, experience. I take such an understanding to be necessary for a close reading of Sula and argue not that circles exist within Morrison’s text (which is patently obvious), but rather that they are the carriers of meaning” (116). When Sula is dying, Nel comes to visit her. The visit allows Nel to feel superior and to act as if her motives are selfless. She gets Sula’s medicine from the drugstore and then the two old friends talk about their lives. Sula stresses that even though she is dying alone, it is her choice that she does so— that freedom is not about escaping the inevitability of death but embracing that reality and fashioning it on her own terms. Sula makes a final speech to Nel about the need for breaking down oppositions and categories, something she has tried to do with her life. Then Sula asks Nel why she is so certain of her position as the good one, the right one, a question Nel is not able to answer. Sula dies and her first thought after realizing that she is dead is that she wants to share the experience with Nel. “1941”

It’s just as well he left. Soon I would have torn the flesh from his face just to see if I was right about the gold and nobody would have understood that kind of curiosity. They would have believed that I wanted to hurt him just like the little boy who fell down the steps and broke his leg and the people think I pushed him just because I looked at it.” While some critics interpret the birthmark over Sula’s eye as the biblical mark of Cain, the divergent and quotidian readings of the birthmark in the novel itself (other characters see it as a rose, a snake, ashes, a tadpole) suggest not just spiritual symbolism, but also worldly, deeply human ambiguity. Each person sees the particular evil in her that they need to. The community doesn’t cast Sula out or set out to sacrifice her; everybody knows deep down that her magnificent, maleficent presence is what unites them. Sula isn’t in fact a scapegoat but a supplement, the allegedly “unnatural” extraneous piece that turns out to be missing from the center. (Jacques Derrida writes in Speech and Phenomena: “We can speak … of a primordial ‘supplement’: their addition comes to make up for a deficiency, it comes to compensate for a primordial nonself-presence.”)

Adam Bede

Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Toni Morrison: Critical Overviews Amardeep Singh 9 plain 2021-09-17T11:09:10-04:00 Amardeep Singh c185e79df2fca428277052b90841c4aba30044e1 Contents of this path: Nel is the only character in the novel who openly admits her own shame. She feels shame when Jude leaves her. Nel feels this shame because her status as a wife and mother is destroyed. Her inability to conform to the community’s expectations causes Nel to feel ashamed. Birds Eva snatched the caps off their heads and ignored their names. She looked at the first child closely, his wrists, the shape of his head and the temperament that showed in his eyes and said, “Well. Look at Dewey. My my mymymy.” When later that same year she sent for a child who kept falling down off the porch across the street, she said the same thing. Somebody said, “But Miss Eva, you calls the other one Dewey.” Sula proposes that women often fall in love with men and, when they do, find themselves desirous of possessing them, but Ajax does not want to be tied down. He has an affair with Sula because he is attracted to her independence and aloofness. Once she begins to fall in love with him, however, he leaves her. Toni Morrison's writing is frank and uncompromising. She creates characters who burn with an inextinguishable fire, and she does it through a series of carefully-written moments; ugly, heartbreaking scenes that somehow capture a person, a time, a place or an injustice in full.

Like Nel, Sula is an only child. The two girls have distinct upbringings. Nel is raised in a conventional household while Sula lives in a busy and hectic household, full of lodgers, alcoholics, and her mother and grandmother’s lovers. These differences and their dissatisfaction with their lives is part of what draws the two girls together. Sula and Nel are such close friends that Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger trying to protect Nel from white bullies. The community’s contempt for Sula reaffirms its character as just, appropriate, and, most crucially, apart from her. Upon Sula’s return to town after a lengthy sabbatical, the danger she poses inspires individuals in her immediate vicinity to deepen their bonds momentarily: “Once they recognized the root of their tragedy, they were free to defend and love each other. They began to value their spouses and wives, to safeguard their children, to restore their houses, and to band together in common against the demon in their midst “(Morrison, 1998, p. 118). In comparison, upon Sula’s demise,

Select a format:

Sula is all of these possibilities, every line of light on a dew-lined web. But no matter how many times I reread Sula, analyze her names, untangle her threads, the light of her slips through my fingers. Some small thing that lives in my chest and has a bell for a tongue knows the truth of the matter: Sula is Sula. Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie): A quiet, cowardly, and reserved partially or possibly fully white man who rents out one of the rooms in the Peace household. It is believed that Tar Baby has come up to the Bottom to drink himself to death.

Each of the ten major chapters includes a death, sometimes metaphoric but more usually actual” (29). The inference is that Sula believed she and Nel were identical. Consequently, she may have believed that while Jude belonged to Nel, he also belonged to her. Even as an adult, she does not seem to have attained selfhood. That is, the ability to feel independent indicates a genuine recognition of one’s uniqueness in relation to others. Regardless of how strongly she is dedicated to other people’s pleasure or pain, they are not her, and she is not them. Soon after Nel’s visitation, Sula dies from an apparent medication overdose, lying isolated in the fetal posture on Eva’s bed. Here, Sula and Eva are portrayed as having striking parallels. They employ drastic steps such as slicing pieces of themselves to send a message that they will live and stay as intact as possible. Interestingly, the two ladies endure their last years isolated and dismembered, separated from each other and the family ties they have. Sula is centrally concerned with questions of right and wrong in interpersonal relationships forged by bonds of kinship, marriage, and, not least of all, friendship. What does it mean to be good? What is evil? What does it mean to be a friend? What is love? How might we learn from each other? Because Sula is a novel and not a treatise, potential answers to these questions await the reader in the form of character and situation rather than explicit philosophical argument” (264). In completing the loop of [a] circle of sorrow, and by emphasizing the plurality of the circles of sorrow, Morrison throws into relief the fact that Sula is metanarrative, a story about stories. These include all of the stories contained within the text of Sula, and as I will argue, a set of foundational texts upon which Sula is written in a kind of postmodern palimpsest” (116). In 1940, Sula becomes seriously ill. Nel, who hasn’t seen Jude or Sula in years, decides to go see her old friend. Nel demands to know why Sula broke up Nel’s marriage and destroyed their friendship. Sula responds that she’s strong and independent—she can do whatever she wants. She also asks Nel, “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” Furious, Nel leaves Sula, and Sula dies shortly thereafter.

Prose

Both Hannah and Eva are nonchalant but interested in men. Sula learns from observation that men are fun but dispensable. Eva unintentionally confirms this point of view for her granddaughter when, in 1921, she sets Plum on fire in his sleep. She sees herself as rescuing Plum from infantilization by allowing him to die as a man. “1922” introduces the Wrights, Nel’s family. Nel’s mother, Helene Sabat Wright, is a Creole from New Orleans who spends her life escaping from the legacy of her mother’s occupation as a prostitute. She marries a ship’s cook, Wiley Wright, and moves to the Bottom where the people of the town admire her long hair and light skin. Helen keeps both her daughter and her house oppressively neat. Helene is not very visible for the rest of the novel, but she influences Nel and how Nel relates to Sula and the rest of the world. Nel has seen strange places and people, but most of all she has seen that her controlling mother is not the powerful figure Nel thought she was. After her return home, Nel realizes that she is not defined by her mother—that she is not just her parents’ daughter, but that she is herself. The representation of death in this novel is associated with observation; for even here, when there are no witnesses to watch over the dying, the event still registers as spectacle” (186).

The community views Sula's death as a positive event. However, events are again not what they at first seem. Besides the natural misfortunes of weather and the social misfortune of racism, the community has lost the binding influence of Sula's presence. The community's moral resolve and harmony dissolve in the absence of the woman who, in breaking social conventions, motivated others to uphold them. /PARAGRAPH The final chapter closes the circular narrative of Sula. Nel reflects on the ambiguous blessings of "social progress." The former residents of the Bottom now have more civil rights, and they have been wealthier in the years following the war. On the surface, this seems like a positive thing. However, they have also lost something. The disintegration of the collective social identity that began with Sula's death has only grown worse; the community, which once defined the Bottom, has been replaced by a town in which the people live in relative isolation from one another.Johnson, Barbara. “‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Rapport’ in Toni Morrison’s Sula.” Textual Practice 7 (1993): 165-72. Eva is generous with her house and her resources. When abandoned and neglected children arrive at her door, she always takes them in. In 1921, three such boys arrive at the Peace household. Eva names them all Dewey, and the boys start to resemble each other, eventually becoming indistinguishable. Another outcast, an alcoholic white mountain man that Eva calls TAR BABY, also comes to live at the Peace residence. This ball appears to Nel, or would have appeared had she allowed herself to look at it. After the appearance of the gray ball, Nel finds she cannot allow herself to let out her personal howl of pain following the loss of Jude and her marriage. She feels the howl coming but it will not come. When she stands up, she believes that it is hovering just to the right of her in the air, just out of view. Throughout the novel, Sula is the primary focus of the town’s various attempts to find a scapegoat to shame. Shame in the Bottom is expressed in relation to Sula. Shame is attributed by the weak-hearted to those who do not feel shame. The townspeople believe that their judgments of Sula will create in her a sense of shame. People in the community so associate her with what is wrong, that they refuse to look at her or to interact with her in the same way that they would with each other. Despite her many judgments, even Nel feels compassion for Sula’s “shamed” eyes, but Sula’s independence and freedom do not permit her to feel shame herself. Jude is also associated with shame in Nel’s assessment. Jude does not seem ashamed himself, even when Nel witnesses his and Sula’s affair. In fact, neither Jude nor Sula feel shame at that moment. Although Sula moves between many different characters’ perspectives, it is almost entirely told from the point of view of women living in the Bottom. Often, the men in the novel can’t be “pinned down” for long: their jobs keep them away from home ( Wiley Wright), or their desire for independence leads them to abandon their families ( Jude Greene, BoyBoy, etc.). As a result, it’s no surprise that Morrison offers many insights into the lives of women and their role in their communities.