Sula (novel)

Sula

Author	Toni Morrison
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	African-American literature
Publisher	Knopf[1]
Publication date	November 1973
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	192 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	0-394-48044-9 (hardback edition)
OCLC	662097
Dewey Decimal	813/.5/4
LC Class	PZ4.M883 Su PS3563.O8749

Sula is a 1973 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.

Plot summary

The Bottom is a mostly black neighborhood in Ohio. A 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 land. 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."

Shadrack, a resident of the Bottom, fought in World War I. He returns a shattered man, unable to accept the complexities of the world; he lives on the outskirts of town, attempting to create order in his life. One of his methods involves compartmentalizing his fear of death in a ritual he invents and names National Suicide Day. The town is at first wary of him and his ritual, then, over time, unthinkingly accepts him.

Meanwhile, the families of the children Nel and Sula are contrasted. Nel is the product of a family that believes deeply in social conventions; hers is a stable home, though some might characterize it as rigid. Nel is uncertain of the conventional life her mother Helene wants for her; these doubts are hammered home when she meets Rochelle, her grandmother and a former prostitute, who is the only unconventional woman in her family line. Sula's family is very different: she lives with her grandmother Eva and her mother Hannah both of whom are seen by the town as eccentric and loose. Their house also serves as a home for three informally adopted boys and a steady stream of boarders.

Despite their differences, Sula and Nel become fiercely attached to each other during adolescence. However, a traumatic accident changes everything. One day, Sula playfully swings a neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, around by his hands. When she loses her grip, the boy falls into a nearby river and drowns. They never tell anyone about the accident even though they did not intend to harm the boy. The two girls begin to grow apart. One day Sula's mother's dress catches fire and she dies of the burns. Eva, her mother, sees this happening from the window and jumps out into the garden.

After high school, Nel chooses to marry and settles into the conventional role of wife and mother. Sula follows a wildly divergent path and lives a life of fierce independence and total disregard for social conventions. Shortly after Nel's wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom for a period of 10 years. She has many affairs, some, it is rumored, with white men. However, she finds people following the same boring routines elsewhere, so she returns to the Bottom and to Nel.

Upon her return, the town regards Sula as the very personification of evil for her blatant disregard of social conventions. Their hatred in part rests upon Sula's interracial relationships, but is crystallized when Sula has an affair with Nel's husband, Jude, who subsequently abandons Nel. Ironically, the community's labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives. Her presence in the community gives them the impetus to live harmoniously with one another. Nel breaks off her friendship with Sula. Just before Sula dies in 1940, they achieve a half-hearted reconciliation. With Sula's death, the harmony that had reigned in the town quickly dissolves.

Characters

• Sula Peace: the main antagonist, whose return to the Bottom disrupts the whole community. The main reason for Sula's strangeness is her defiance of gender norms and traditional morality, symbolized by the birthmark "that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose,"^[2] which, according to some psychoanalytic readings, is a dual symbol with both phallic and vaginal resonance.^[3]
• Eva Peace: Sula's grandmother, who is missing one leg. Though the circumstances are never fully explained, it is suggested that she purposely put it under a train in order to collect insurance money to support her three young children.
• BoyBoy: Sula's grandfather, who leaves Eva for another woman.
• Hannah Peace: Sula's mother; Eva's eldest daughter. Hannah is a promiscuous and care-free woman who burned to death early on. Her daughter Sula witnessed the fire but did nothing.
• Eva (Pearl) Peace: Sula's aunt; Eva Sr.'s youngest daughter and middle child.
• Ralph (Plum) Peace: Sula's uncle; Eva's son and youngest child. Plum was a WWI veteran and a heroin addict. Eva burns him alive with kerosene because of his mental instability.
• Helene Wright: Nel's strait-laced and clean mother.
• Nel Wright: Sula's best friend (can also be considered a main protagonist) who doesn't want to be like her mother because she will never be reduced to "custard" and she will not be humiliated by other people as her mother is.
• Shadrack: A paranoid shell-shocked WWI veteran, who returns to Sula and Nel's hometown, Medallion. He invents National Suicide Day.
• Jude Greene: Nel's husband, who leaves Nel due to a love affair with Sula.
• Ajax (Albert Jacks): Sula's confidant and lover.
• 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.
• The Deweys: three boys, each about one year apart from one another in age, who were each nicknamed "Dewey" by Eva. Their real names are never written in the novel, and after the introduction of these characters, the three were referred as one being, thus Morrison's use of a lowercase "d" in "dewey" for the rest of the novel.
• Chicken Little: The little boy whom Sula accidentally drowns by throwing into the river.

Literary significance and criticism

Sula was integral to the formation of black feminist literary criticism. In 1977, black feminist literary critic Barbara Smith, in her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," advanced a definition of black feminist literary criticism and (in)famously performed a lesbian reading of Sula.^[4] In her 1980 essay "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism," Black feminist literary critic Deborah McDowell responded to Smith's challenge by acknowledging the need for a black feminist criticism and calling for a firmer definition of black feminism.^[5]

In her essay “Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin,” Deborah McDowell draws on the critical practices of Hortense Spillers and Hazel Carby and reads Sula from a poststructuralist perspective, urging black women critics to “develop and practice […] critical approaches interactively, dialogically” instead of viewing “black female identity as unitary essence yielding an indigenous critical methodology.”^[6] As she points out, the ambiguity of Sula as a character subverts traditional binary oppositions, and “transcends the boundaries of social and linguistic convention.”^[7] The decentering and temporal deferral of the character that lends the novel its title similarly “denies the whole notion of character as static essence, replacing it with the idea of character as process.”^[8] This “complex set of dynamics” forces the reader to “fill in the gaps” as well as to “bridge the gaps separating [them] from the text” and therefore makes them active participants in the meaning-making process.

References

External links

• Sula study guide, themes, quotes, teacher resources