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'Sula' and 'Beloved':
images of Cain in the novels of Toni Morrison.
by Carolyn M. Jones
In The Mark of Cain, Ruth Mellinkoff rejects the single modern image of
Cain she examines, Hesse's Demien, as an "intentionally distorted"
treatment of the myth. In Hesse's novel, she claims,
the interpreter has designed his interpretation to serve his own
purpose--a
self-conscious twisting to achieve personal ends. Clarification
or elaboration of biblical texts is not the primary goal; rather,
biblical
elements are used to enhance the interpreter's particular point of view
about something he is critical of in his contemporary society. (81)
Displacements of myth in contemporary fiction, however, are not
distortions but are intertextual examinations of the place and function
of myth in contemporary life. Myth as a point of reference is
archetypal memory, fixed in time and space; but as writers utilize
myth, they signify on it, displace its original meanings. This
displacement, as Charles Long explains, "gains its power of meaning
from the structure of the discourse itself without the signification
being subjected to the rules of the discourse" (1). This allows "the
community [to] undercut this legitimized signification with a
signification upon this legitimated signifying" (2). Thus, the minority
writer or community may emphasize a meaning or an implication of a myth
that the "master narrative,"(1) the ideological script that the Western
world imposes on "others," refuses to consider, and may signify the
original meaning into the background, giving primary authority to the
signification over the master's trope. Thinking and writing about myth
in the modern world is, to use Henry Louis Gates's term, double-voiced,
representing a process of both repetition and revision (22, 50, 60).
Thinking on Cain has been subject to this process of signification.
Writers, working with the Biblical myth, have focused on the meaning
and form of Cain's mark. Various answers for what the mark was have
been offered--either a mark on Cain's forehead(2) or a blackening of
Cain's face, connecting him with Ham as a father of the black race
(Mellinkoff 77).(3) Cain himself has been called the mark, a pariah
identifiable by his marked body--either his trembling, groaning, or
incessant wandering.(4) Yet, what strikes me about the Cain myth,
reading it in a hermeneutical and intertextual relationship to
Morrison's Sula and Beloved, is Cain's complete refusal to remember and
to mourn. Cain denies responsibility both for his brother and for his
act: "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Genesis 4.9). And he seeks to protect
himself: "Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear" (Genesis
4.13). Cain, concerned with self, lets sin in the door, but more
importantly, he refuses to acknowledge his effect on the "other"; he
refuses to remember and to mourn his brother Abel.
This refusal marks him, and tattoo becomes taboo: He is set apart as
both dangerous and holy.
Sethe and Sula, both victims and victimizers, reenact the myth of Cain.
Sethe is the beloved slave who is "remarked" as an animal when
Schoolteacher's odious nephews drink her breast milk while
Schoolteacher "remarks," writes down her reactions, using the ink that
Sethe herself made. They then mark the experience on her body, whipping
her and creating a chokeberry tree on her back. Sethe's mark limits
her. It is the sign of her slavery, and with the return of Beloved, it
traps her in 124 Bluestone. Sula, with her rose birthmark, is denied
identity by her mother, and she murders a childhood friend, throwing
him accidentally into the Ohio River. Yet Sula, in contrast to Sethe,
claims absolute freedom, which is symbolized by her mark. Both Sethe
and Sula commit Cain's act, although they do not act out of jealousy as
Cain does. Sethe acts out of pure desperation, and Sula, who feels
Cain's sense of rejection, kills accidentally. They also bear Cain's
mark, a mark that sets each woman apart both from person identity and
from community, and each must undergo mourning and memory to find and
define the self.
Understanding and
transcending the mark has to do with coming to terms with the past.
Memory is a special and essential category for Toni Morrison. To
"rememory" is to make an act of the moral imagination and to shape the
events of one's life into story. Even events that must be put behind
one must be subjected to the formative power of memory then
"disremembered," put into their proper place in the individual's life.
The process of mourning is a special and essential kind of memory,
because it creates a hermeneutic between the self and the "other." As
Deborah E. McDowell says, "the process of mourning and remembering ...
leads to intimacy with the self, which is all that makes intimacy with
the others possible" (85). Yet both Sethe and Sula forsake this
intimacy. Sethe, alone at the grave of the child she murdered, trades
ten minutes of sex for seven letters: Beloved. Later, at the funeral of
Baby Suggs, Sethe refuses to accept the support of the community, and
members of the community, in turn, abandon her. Sethe feels that she
has no self, except in the role of mother.(5) Sula, a rejected child
who becomes a woman who refuses to be defined by anyone except herself,
sits apart as Chicken is mourned and, later, dies alone. Both women
deny themselves and are denied a sense of self and a place in
community. Sula finds her uncentered and unbounded existence is one of
exile, and she seeks boundaries in herself, in the community of
Medallion, and in her friend Nel; Sethe finds that motherhood is not an
affirmation of her identity but another manifestation of her mark.
When Paul D, the man whose compassion is his blessedness (Beloved 272),
stands behind Sethe, holding her breasts and kissing the chokeberry
tree on her back, he is affirming Sethe's whole self, though the course
of the novel is run before Sethe herself can make this affirmation.
Sethe's sense of her identity comes from denying the chokeberry tree,
which is completely dead to feeling, and from affirming her breasts,
her role as mother, having "milk enough for all" (100, 198). The victim
becomes victimizer as she, having enjoyed twenty-eight days of freedom,
sees Schoolteacher coming to take her and her children back to Sweet
Home plantation. A terrified Sethe takes her children to the coal shed
at the back of 124 Bluestone Road and cuts the throat of her "almost
crawling!" baby girl. The "lessons" of Sweet Home and the murder are
what Sethe avoids. She, thus, traps herself in time and in space, in a
house haunted by her baby's ghost, keeping the past at bay and losing
the future, "not having any dreams of her own" (20). Paul D begins to
break apart this stagnation and to chase away the spirit, but he cannot
do Sethe's rememory for her. Beloved, though she has many dimensions,
is memory: The child that Sethe murdered comes to demand explanation,
the child, that, as Mae Henderson says, Sethe must rebirth in her
remarking on her own story.
Sethe
thinks she is "junkheaped ... because she loved her children" (174),
but though her individual "sin" is murder, her community sin is her
pride. Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law, begins the cycle of pride.
Baby's motto is "|Good is knowing when to stop'" (87), but she violates
that maxim when Sethe and Denver arrive safely at her house. Brought
buckets of blueberries by Stamp Paid, she and Sethe make a feast for
the entire community, and the satiated community becomes suspicious of
the Suggs family. The animosity created by this excess is a second
origin of Beloved. Baby Suggs smells the anger of the community, but
behind it she smells Beloved, a ghost in black shoes (138). The
community does not warn Baby that the slavecatchers are coming to her
house and, thus, participates in the murder of the child.
Sethe compounds this sin of pride and alienation when Baby Suggs dies.
The community will not enter the house, so Sethe refuses to go to the
funeral. At the graveside, the community does not sing for Baby and to
support Sethe, so Sethe does not eat their food, and they do not eat
hers. A funeral is a ritual of mourning which binds the individual and
the community in an act of remembrance and which, potentially, is a
point of reconciliation. Here, both Sethe and her community deny
themselves this opportunity. Each refuses to engage in the rememory
that will articulate Baby Suggs's place in the public sphere and that
will honor her spirit as an ancestor. Thus, the individuals are denied
access to her power in their private lives. There is loss on both
sides. By ostracizing Sethe, the community commits a sin of pride
against Baby Suggs, and Sethe, in her pride, freezes memory and makes
her life stagnant. In essence, both are marked, both become images of
Cain. For Sethe, this mark is deep, for it completely isolates her.
Ella, for example, understands Sethe's rage but not Sethe's decision to
refuse the help of the black community. Neither does she understand
Sethe's act. Ella believes Sethe's rage to have been prideful and
misdirected.
In Sethe's act, blood
and breast milk, rage, pride, and love become one. When Sethe tells the
story of her escape, she stresses that she did it alone, out of love
for the children: Nobody could take care of them like she could. Nobody
could nurse them like she could. Nobody else would mother them like
Sethe. Like Odysseus, who cries "Nobody" and must become "Nobody,"
Sethe loses herself in her mother role. Morrison says that Sethe is a
woman [who] loved something other
than herself so much [that] she had
placed all of the value of her life in
something outside herself.... [This
is] interesting because the best thing
that is in us is also the thing that makes
us sabotage ourselves, sabotage in the
sense that our life is not as worthy, or
our perception of the best part of ourselves.... what
is it that really compels
a good woman to displace the self, her
self? (Naylor and Morrison 584-85) For Sethe, the tree on her back is
nothing compared to the fact that Schoolteacher's boys took her milk,
but we realize that the two emblems are the same. The primary,
destructive connection of mark and milk is illustrated as Denver, the
miracle child born while Sethe is running north, from Sethe's breast
right after the murder of Beloved, taking in her sister's blood with
her mother's milk. Enacting her extreme and exclusive self-definition
as mother, Sethe becomes what Schoolteacher defined her as: an animal
without memory. Baby Suggs tells us that "|Good is knowing when to
stop.'" Sethe's love, like Cain's for God, becomes one with Sethe's
pride and rage. Sethe argues that, by killing her baby, she kept her
safe from the dehumanization of slavery. The children are her only
self, her "best things"--she claims she "wouldn't draw breath without
[her] children" (203)--and she will destroy rather than surrender them.
Paul D, listening to the story, thinks that more important than Sethe's
act is her claim (164), that maybe there is some worse than slavery.
And there is.
Stamp Paid tells us
that whites so feared the black people that they enslaved that they had
to deny completely the humanity of blacks. So whites, whom Baby Suggs
says have no limits, are savages, and project onto the blacks that
savagery:
... it wasn't the jungle that blacks
brought with them to this place
from the other (livable) place. It was
the jungle whitefolks planted in
them. And it grew. It spread. In,
through and after life, it spread,
until it invaded the whites who had
made it. Touched them every one.
Changed and altered them. Made
them bloody, silly, worse than even
they wanted to be, so scared were
they of the jungle they had made.
The screaming baboon lived under
their own white skin; the red gums
were their own.
Meantime, the secret spread of
this new kind of whitefolks' jungle
was hidden, silent, except once in a
while when you could hear its
mumbling in places like 124. (198-99) The "worse sin" is to let that
jungle loose. What is worse than slavery is to let the soul become so
contorted that the only self you are is the self that the master
defines for you. Sethe stops Schoolteacher, but she destroys her child
and nearly herself. Paul D tells Sethe that she has two legs, not four;
she is human, not animal. Accepting Schoolteacher's definition of
herself creates Sethe's "thick love," the love that is "safety with a
handsaw" and that keeps Sethe from knowing where the world stops and
where she begins. This love denies that the children are true "others."
Like Schoolteacher's "thick mind," the excess of reason which allows
him to deny the humanity of the human beings on whom he conducts his
experiments, Sethe's "thick love" is an excessive love that allows her
to destroy what she has created, to deny the humanness of her own
child.
Beloved is the child that
Sethe has to rebear in order to rememory the mother role and to grieve.
In essence, what marks Sethe as Cain is that she refuses to acknowledge
the implications of her act and to mourn properly her child. Her pride
becomes a shield against her grief. Beloved shatters that defense; she
taker, Sethe deep into the truth that, until she mourns, she is still a
slave. The three hand-holding shadows of Paul D, Sethe, and Denver
which make a tentative family are replaced by Beloved, Sethe, and
Denver--a mother and her children. The silent jungle speaks in 124, and
Sethe is isolated in her role as mother and with her pain, denying
there is a world outside her door. Eventually, even Denver is excluded,
as Beloved and Sethe create anew the Cain image, the
victim-victimizer/master-slave relationship. Beloved seeks 'the join'
(213) to become what Sethe says she is, her best self; she draws off
Sethe all that is vital until she is "pregnant" with Sethe, becoming
the mother. Sethe, finally facing her memories, rejoices in the return
of human feelings, yet she is as trapped in them as she was in her
denial. She loses the remnants of her self and enjoys the pain.
Denver tells us that Sethe does not want to be forgiven (252). The
relationship between the two becomes hostile, as Sethe is denied
Beloved's forgiveness and as Beloved drives Sethe to self-destruction.
Denver, frightened, ventures into the community. Wearing Beloved's
shoes (243), she too makes a return from the grave that 124 has become.
Denver, who was a child and innocent in Sethe's and the community's sin
against Baby Suggs, can be touched by Baby's spirit. She is forced by
Baby Sugg, to give up her defense and face the future:
But you said there was no
defense.
"There ain't."
Then what do I do?
"Know it, and go on out the yard.
Go on." (244) Denver, who realizes that she has a self of her own to
preserve (252), becomes the agent of reconciliation. She, the child who
ingested blood and breast milk, is as much a symbol of Sethe's pride as
is Beloved. Denver, too, has been exiled, trapped in Sethe's memories.
But Baby's spirit tells Denver that life is risk, and only through
risk, relationship, and rememory is the self formed. Armed with this
knowledge, Denver acts. She practices what her mother could not at the
funeral--humility--and does what her mother could not--she asks for
help. Her humility causes the community, especially the women, to rally
around the family in 124.
Ella,
taking Baby Suggs's maxim to heart, recognizes that Beloved is excess,
that, though the mother killed the child, "|... the children can't just
up and kill the mama'" (256). What follows this recognition is a
repetition of the past--a recreation of the moment of the murder and
the flooding of memory into the present so that reconciliation can take
place. The women go to 124 Bluestone. They remember the feast that Baby
Suggs prepared for them; they remember themselves young. They make the
primal sound that they did not make for Baby at her funeral: They
mourn. Meanwhile, Mr. Bodwin, the abolitionist who has helped the Suggs
family, drives toward the house. Sethe believes that he is
Schoolteacher, come for Beloved, and runs towards him with an ice pick.
This time, she attacks the master and not the child, and this time, the
child saves the mother. Denver, the flesh-and-blood child nursed on
blood and milk, throws her mother to the ground, and the women of the
community collapse on them like a mountain, a symbol of solidity and
endurance. This action honors Baby Suggs even as it saves Sethe and
affirms Denver's independence. Thus, on the level of community,
rememory is accomplished.
The
reenactment of Sethe's memory and that of the community exorcises
Beloved, restoring the Suggs family to its place in the order of
things. Still, Sethe is not yet saved. She can hate the master, but she
cannot love herself. She remains in exile. Like Baby Suggs before her,
she takes to her bed, feeling that, without her child, there is no
future, no possibility for living and for change:
... "Paul D?"
"What, baby?"
"She left me."
"Aw, girl. Don't cry."
"She was my best thing." (272) Paul D, who has decided that he wants to
put his story next to Sethe's, affirms verbally the action he made in
the beginning of the novel when he held Sethe's breasts in his hands
and kissed the scar on her back:
"Sethe," he says, "me and you,
we got more yesterday than
anybody. We need some kind of
tomorrow."
He leans over and takes her hand.
With the other he touches her face.
"You your best thing, Sethe. You
are." Sethe cries, "|Me? Me?'" (273), a timid identification of her own
self, but a bold step out of her exile. Paul D, who has made his own
odyssey in the course of the novel acknowledges the link between
Sethe's breasts and her back, and helps Sethe to see that they are not
in opposition to one another but can be balanced if integrated into
Sethe's identity. Paul D offers an alternative to the "thick love" of
the victim-victimizer cycle. Thick love would rather destroy than
mourn, rather face exile than put its story beside that of another.
Sethe has to yield her fierce pride to become her true self. The end of
the novel dramatizes Sethe's coming to wholeness, the first step in
Cain's return.
Baby Suggs's spirit
said to Denver, as the girl hesitated on the edge of the porch, that
the life of a black person is not a battle; it is a rout. The whites
have already won, and the only defense is to accept the defeat whites
made on the terms of power and to claim another kind of victory. That
victory comes when one takes the risk to suffer and to understand. The
curse of Cain, of guilt and alienation, is broken when Sethe can mourn
and when she can tell the tale with moral imagination and, thereby,
find a truth different than the master's truth. The thick love,
erupting from the jungle, has to be first remembered, then
"disremembered," let be. The silent story, exemplified by Beloved, is
"not a story to pass on" (274)--a story neither to ignore nor to
forget.(6)
If Sethe is a woman
trying to find herself, Sula Peace, at first, seems to be a complete
self. Her birthmark seems to confirm this wholeness and difference,
distinguishing her from other "heavy brown" (Sula 52) girls:
[It] spread from the middle of the lid
toward the eyebrow, shaped something
like a stemmed rose. It gave her
otherwise plain face a broken excitement
and blue-blade threat....The
birthmark was to grow darker as the
years passed, but now it was the same
shade as her gold-flecked eyes, which,
to the end, were as steady and clean
as rain (53) As Sula develops, the birthmark on her eye changes. When
she is the rose develops a stem, and as Sula grows older, the mark
grows darker.
Her mark is
interpreted in various, mostly negative, ways throughout the novel:
Nel's children think of the mark as a "scary black thing" (97-98), and
Jude, Nel's husband, who gets angry when Sula will not participate in
the "milkwarm commiseration" he needs to feel like a man, thinks that
Sula has a copperhead over her eye (103). The community, indicting the
evil Sula for every accident that befalls it, recognizes the mark as
the sign of a murderer: They "cleared up for everybody the meaning of
the birthmark over her eye; it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake, it
was Hannah's [Sula's mother's] ashes marking her from the very
beginning" (114). Nel thinks that the mark gives Sula's glance "a
suggestion of startled pleasure" (96). Only Shadrack recognizes the
mark as a sign of Sula's developing self: "She," he thinks, "had a
tadpole over her eye" (156).
Like
Sethe, Sula is both a victim and a victimizer, becoming both at the age
of twelve, when her identity is forming. Sula experiences two things
that create her radical self. First, Sula overhears her mother say that
she loves Sula but does not like her (57). After this incident, Sula
and her friend Nel go to the river and there encounter a friend,
Chicken Little. While swinging him around, Sula accidentally throws him
into the river:
The water darkened and closed
quickly over the place where Chicken
Little sank. The pressure of his hard
and tight little fingers was still in
Sula's palms as she stood looking at
the closed place in the water. They expected
him to come back up, laughing.
Both girls stared at the water. (61) At Chicken's funeral, we realize
that something is wrong in this community. As Reverend Deal preaches,
the members of the community mourn not for the dead child, but for
themselves:
They did not hear all of what he said;
they heard the one word, or phrase,
or inflection that was for them the
connection between the event and
themselves. For some it was the term
"Sweet Jesus." And they saw the
Lamb's eye and the truly innocent
victim: themselves. This image of individuals mourning only for
themselves is intensified in Nel. She stands even more removed from the
mourning process because she, afraid of being caught, separates herself
from Sula and casts herself as the innocent victim: ". . . she knew
that she had |done nothing'" (65). Though Nel will reconcile with Sula
after the funeral, during the ritual, she leaves Sula completely alone
for the first time: "Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each
other during the funeral. There was a space, a separateness, between
them" (64).
Sula, alone, "simply
cried" (65). Yet, Sula's tears neither heal the great pain that she has
experienced nor do they signify mourning for Chicken Little. Her
inability to mourn marks her as one set apart, like Cain. The rejection
by her mother and the death of Chicken, the events that Sula cannot
rememory, make Sula what she is:
As willing to feel pain as to give pain,
to feel pleasure as to give pleasure,
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. (118-19) With nothing to depend on, not even
herself, Sula patterns her life on being unsupported and
unconventional, on the free fall that requires "invention" and "a full
surrender to the downward flight" (120). Sula is, at once, all self and
no self: an artist with no medium, energy without form (121). Refusing
participation in community, Sula finds no "other," against whom she can
define herself. Her energy and curiosity seek limits throughout the
novel, finding the only real limit in death.
There are four temporary boundaries for Sula: the madman Shadrack and
his promise, her best friend Nel, her beloved Ajax, and the community
of Medallion. Shadrack's promise to Sula, along with her mother's
rejection and the death of Chicken Little, becomes the basis of all her
actions. Afraid that Shadrack saw Chicken Little drown, Sula runs to
his house. There Shadrack makes Sula a promise: "|Always'" (62),
answering "a question she had not asked [the promise of which] licked
at her feet" (63). Shadrack promises Sula, who comes to him in his
isolation and becomes "his visitor, his company, his guest, his social
life, his woman, his daughter and his friend," that he, who controls
death through National Suicide Day, will keep her safe from death:
... he tried to think of something to
say to comfort her, something to stop
the hurt from spilling out of her eyes.
So he had said "always," so she would
not have to be afraid of the change--the
falling away of skin, the drip and slide
of blood, and the exposure of bone
underneath He had said "always" to
convince her, assure her, of permanency.
(157)
Shadrack insures that Sula never has to mourn or to remember. Hers is a
life of forward movement, for Sula, there is only the moment. This
sense of her permanence, of her immortality, is Sula's true mark--her
blessing and her curse. It frees her to experiment, to work through the
range of experience, while it insures that she will find only
repetition because she cannot critically evaluate what she does. For
Sula, "... doing anything forever and ever [i]s hell" (108). Yet in her
incessant wanderings, Sula finds the same thing everywhere. The sense
of her own permanence also takes away from her two essential things:
fear and compassion. Lack of fear makes her hurt herself to save
herself, for example, she cuts off the end of her finger to save
herself and Nel--who misinterprets the act--from a group of white
bullies 54,55, 101). Lack of compassion lets her interestingly watch
her mother Hannah burn and enjoy her jerking and dancing. Sula says,
"|I never meant anything'" (147), and she is honest and right. No
experience, from the most trivial--someone's chewing with his mouth
open--to the most important--her mother's death--has any ultimate
meaning to Sula. The darkening and spreading of the birthmark is the
symbol of the tyranny of Sula's eye/I. Because Sula cannot take the
perspective of the "other," she can see neither herself nor anyone else
clearly.
That tyranny of the eye/I
includes even Nel, Sula's best friend, who is "the closest thing to
both an other and a self" that Sula finds. Sula cannot understand that,
though they see together, are one eye, they are also two throats: They
have different needs and are not "one and the same thing" (119). Sula
forces Nel to define herself; Sula knows Nel's name as she will not
know Ajax's (120). Sula, however, refuses to be defined, for she feels
that she knows herself intimately (121). She demands that Nel want
nothing from her and accept all aspects of her (119)--even her adultery
with Nel's husband Jude. Sula's sleeping with Jude is not personal; it
is merely another of Sula's "experiences." Sexuality, for Sula, is not
the attempt to meet with an "other," but with herself. It is an attempt
to find that center that she has lost:
There, in the center of that silence was
not eternity but the death of time and
a loneliness so profound the word
itself had no meaning. For loneliness
assumed the absence of other people,
and the solitude the found in that
desperate terrain had never admitted
the possibility of other people. She
wept then...[in] the post coital privateness
in which she met herself, welcomed
herself, and joined herself in
matchless harmony (123) Sexuality becomes a site of memory, but not one
of meeting. Sexuality is, for Sula, a place where she recovers the self
that her mother took away, the self on which she can depend. It is the
way to experience and to mourn the death of her dislocated self that
Shadrack promised she would never experience. It is a limit, and
limitation is what Sula unconsciously seeks.
Sula's desire for boundaries is best illustrated in her love for Ajax.
Only Ajax, a man as strong and as free as herself, makes her desire to
join the self that she finds in the sexual act with an "other," to
return from her Cain-like exile in taking responsibility for another
person. With Ajax, Sula feels the desires of possession and of
attempting to know a person other than herself. Their lovemaking is
symbolized as a tree in loam--fertile, rich, and moist (130-31)--and
Sula wants to look through all the layers of Ajax to find his center,
to reach the source of that richness. Ajax, however, desires the Sula
that is separate, complete in her solitude. He, like Sula, is a
gold-eyed person, a true individual (Tate 125), and he leaves Sula when
she wants to limit him by making him hers alone. When she says, "|Lean
on me'" (133), Sula is asking Ajax to give up his freedom--to become
bound to her, and to bind herself to him and to the community. Ajax
rejects this relationship for the radical freedom that he has learned
from his mother, another outsider: "He dragged [Sula] under him and
made love to her with the steadiness and the intensity of a man about
to leave for Dayton" (134).
Marriage, like mourning is a ritual that binds the self to the beloved,
to the community, and to God. The loss of Ajax, and with him Sula's one
attempt at joining with another in marriage and with the community of
Medallion, destroys Sula. When she finds his driver's license, she
realizes that, in contrast to Nel, Ajax is someone whose name she did
not know. She sees that, when she "said his name involuntarily or said
it &Y meaning him, the name she was screaming and saying was not
his at all." A name indicates the essence of a human being and Ajax has
not given Sula that deep understanding of himself. Sula realizes that
she would have had to destroy him to get it: "|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'" (136). Faced with this loss, Sula becomes like the headless
solider that Shadrack sees his first day in the war (8). Sula's body
goes on, but she has lost her head, just like her paper dolls'. Sula's
headless paper dolls indicate Sula's having lost herself, having given
up her name, to Ajax and her being unable to "hold her head up," to
maintain herself in the face of this loss: "|I did not hold my head
stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls"
(136). The image of paper dolls also suggests emptiness of body, mind,
and soul, and that emptiness leads to Sula's death.
Medallion and her grandmother's room provide a final limit for the
boundless energy that is Sula. Sula returns to Medallion because she
has exhausted the experience of Nashville, Detroit, New Orleans, New
York, Philadelphia, Macon, and San Diego (120). Toni Morrison has said
that Sula returns because she simply cannot live anywhere else. Though
Sula is recognized as evil the community more than tolerates her, and,
again, we see that something is wrong in Medallion. Medallion is only a
community when it has Sula for a center, when her "evil" draws its
members together in fear. Bad mothers take care of their children;
wives love their husbands to keep them out of Sula's bed; and every
disaster, large and small, has a reason--Sula. The community is bound
in hate and refuses to mourn Sula after her death. The people accept
the news of her death as good and attend the funeral only "to verify
[the witch's] being put away" (150). They leave Sula to the white
people, making her only "a body, a name, and an address" (173)--denying
her essence and dishonoring her. Thus, the question of the hymn "Shall
We Gather at the River?" is answered affirmatively, but in a deadly
way, by Sula's spirit. The destruction of the community at the end of
the novel is accomplished through Sula's element--water. That ruin
comes because the community's refusal to mourn marks it. The power of
her spirit indicates Sula's centrality, negative or not, in Medallion.
Both are Cain, and each destroys the other. Sula takes the community
with her in her return to the womb, her "sleep of water" (149).
Medallion and her grandmother's house and room are, for Sula, the end;
they represent the closure of the circle of her experience. Left by
Ajax, Sula thinks, "|There aren't any more new songs and I have sung
all the ones there are'" (137). Sula refuses to look back, and there is
no future for her. In contrast to Sethe at the end of Beloved, Sula
will not yield. Unlike Baby Suggs, who goes to bed broken, Sula is
defiant to the end, as her final conversation with Nel illustrates:
[Nel] opened the door and heard
Sula's low whisper. "Hey, girl." Nel
paused and turned her head but not
enough to see her.
"How you know?" Sula asked.
"Know what?" Nel still wouldn't look at her.
"About who was good. How you
know it was you?"
"What you mean?"
"I mean maybe it wasn't you.
Maybe it was me." (146) Sula--and we have to admire her--affirms own
mode of being in the world. All that is left for her to experience is
death. Dying, she faces a sealed window--the window from which her
grandmother threw herself while trying to save Hannah, Sula's mother.
The boarded window soothes Sula "with its sturdy termination, its
unassailable finality" (148). The closed room represents the end of the
tyranny of the eye/ I, the closing off of Sula's single perspective,
and the womb, the place where Sula can be completely alone, completely
herself, free of distraction and curled up in water. The promise of
"Always," the promise of permanence, can be fulfilled only in death, in
"a sleep of water always" (149).
For the living Sula, the mark becomes a sign of the completeness that
is her incompleteness--the mark of the independent self who, like Cain,
refuses to acknowledge the need for and the importance of the "other."
Even in dying she will not apologize to and reach out for Nel, her
Abel. For the dead Sula, the mark is a sign of her permanence, her
power, and her beauty. Shadrack's promise, then, is broken in one
sense, but in another it is fulfilled. After her death, Sula recognizes
that she needs community--specifically, that she needs Nel:
She was dead.
Sula felt her face smiling. "Well,
I'll be damned," she thought, "it
didn't even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel."
(149) This need for the "other" is confirmed after death. Sula becomes
her sister's keeper; thus, Sula lives on as Nel feels the presence of
her dead friend. Nel that she never missed her husband Jude at all but
that she did miss Sula: "|We was girls together.... O Lord, Sula, ...
girl, girl, girlgirlgirl'" (174). That "girl" is Nel. Shocked into
seeing herself by Eva's assertion that Nel, too, is guilty and that Nel
and Sula are alike, Nel realizes that Sula was right. There was no
difference between them (169). This recognition leads Nel to mourn her
other self. Doing her rememory and mourning her friend, Nel finds her
own eye twitching as she takes on the mark and is reborn.(7) After her
childhood trip to New Orleans, Nel cried "me" five times, praying to be
wonderful (28-29). Taking on Sula's mark, she begins to become that
"me." Like Sethe at the end of Beloved, Nel finds that her story is
bound with the story of another, and that connection, which transcends
death, becomes the path to finding her identity.
Morrison has said that Sula and Nel make up one whole person: Sula is
ship, the "New World Black Woman," and Nel safe harbor, the
"Traditional Black Woman" (Moyers interview).(8) Neither is complete
alone. That sense of our finitude and the necessity for contact with
the "other" that is central to the Cain myth is what Toni Morrison
retains in the stories of her marked women. She illustrates the sense
of the risk of human life and human relationships that the Biblical
myth contains, even as she signifies on the myth to affirm the healing
power of memory and of ritual. She presents to us the human being,
marked by oppression and/or by an act done in desperation and fear and
set outside of the boundaries of community. That fallen human, however,
cannot be sent "east of Eden" but must be reconciled to the self and to
the community for the sake of both. In a community that has suffered
through slavery and reconstruction, not a member can be lost. Cain
cannot be banished forever but, somehow, must come home, lest both Cain
and community be forever marked. The black community is a people in
mourning, reconstructing itself through memory: This is not a story to
pass on.
For Morrison, the mark
must not passed on, for it always carries possibility; it is not just a
sign of alienation but one of latent beauty and wholeness. Sethe's
chokeberry tree is potentially beautiful--the blood from her back makes
roses on her bed (Beloved 93)--and organic--it might have cherries
(17). When Sethe accepts her mark, she finds the true meaning of her
name. She is no longer Cain, the exile, but is both Set, crucified by
the tree on her back,(9) and Seth, the son who carries on the line of
Adam and Eve and who foreshadows Christ.(10) The tree marks her as one
of out of Eden, yet the tree also connects her to her mother, marked
with a cross, and the group of African slaves who were all marked in
that way. Thus, the mark becomes a sign of community, identity, and
wholeness, and Sethe, the chosen child, has to remember the stories and
witness her people's history--and her own. The tree also becomes a
symbol of Sethe's own power. Sethe's act, however brutal, signals
individual defiance to the oppression of slavery and the beginnings of
claiming and defining the self, of breaking the physical and
psychological boundaries of oppression. Like the trees at Sweet Home
and like Paul D's sapling, however, Sethe finally bends and, thus,
survives--even prevails.
In
contrast, Sula's mark is that of a self who is absolutely unbounded and
free. The mark as rose and snake signifies the beauty and danger of
Sula's kind of freedom. Ultimately, it symbolizes her absolute refusal
to see life, to paraphrase Fitzgerald, from more than one window, from
any perspective other than her own. This immense, unchecked power is
destructive both for the self, as we see when Sula dies alone, and for
the community, as we see when the people of Medallion refuse to
recognize Sula's importance and are destroyed by the angry spirit of
the dead Sula. Alone, Sula, as Morrison says, is a warning. Balanced
after death, however, with the loving and stable power of Nel, who
takes on the task of mourning and memory, the mark becomes tadpole and
not snake. That is, it signals the development of the self and creates
the compassion--the ability to be a self but also to see with the
"other"--that is the basis of true community.
Both Sula and Sethe must embrace and even, finally, celebrate the mark
of Cain which sets each apart but which also makes each unique--and so
must their communities. Toni Morrison shows us in Beloved and Sula that
we are bound together through story and through action. Memory, for the
oppressed person, is a private story that must be understood, but it
must also be shared. Thus, memory is also a public story made permanent
as myth and reenacted through ritual--in these novels, the funeral.
Myth and ritual bind the person to the group and to the sacred.
Steinbeck, in East of Eden, says that the Cain story is "the symbol
story of the [rejected, guilty] human soul" (240). The way out of that
guilt and rejection, for Toni Morrison, is to claim the mark as a
symbol of the self and willingly to undergo what one has been forced to
undergo in the past. The act of rememory is a private and a public act
of homecoming; it is like water, forever moving, forever trying to get
back to where it was ("Site" 119).
Notes
(1.) Morrison used this term in an interview with Bill Moyers. (2.) "To
protect [Cain] from the on-slaught of the beasts, God inscribed one
letter of his Holy Name upon his forehead," writes Louis Ginzberg
(112). Mellinkoff offers other examples: In Symmachus's Life of Abel,
Cain returns home with a "terrible sign on his forehead" (30). See also
Arnoul Greban' "Mystere de la Passion" and Byron's "Cain." Others place
the mark on the cheek or on the arm (Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer). (3.) The
Genesis Rabbah says that God "beat Cain's face with hail, which
blackened like coal, and thus he remained with a black face." Medieval
art picks up this concept of blacks as evil. An altern reading is found
in Ginzberg, where Cain is given leprosy (112). (4.) ". . . the decree
had condemned him to be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth,"
observes Ginzborg (111). This is the origin of de idea d the Wandering
Jew. (5.) For an interesting discussion of the mother-daughter issue in
Beloved, see Horvitz. (6.) For a discussion of the last lines of the
novel, see Holloway 517. (7.) Munro (150-54) dearly connects Sula's
mark with Nel as well as with Sula. (8.) See also Naylor and Morrison
577-78, and Stepto 218-17. (9.) "The furka or |fork' was the cross on
which the Egyptian god Set was crucified," notes Walker. "As the
original of the Biblical Seth, the |supplanter' of [Abel', Set ruled
the alternating halves year in Egypt's predynastic sacred king-cult ...
Annual rebirth of the world was said to be achieved by the blood of
Set, which was spread over the fields" (36). (10.) Seth, observes
Ginzberg, "was one of the thirteen men born perfect in a way.... Thus,
Seth became, in a genuine sense, the father of the human race,
especially the father of the pious" (121).
Works Cited
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of
African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.
Ginzberg, Louis. The Legends of the Jews, Vol. 1. Trans. Henrietta
Szold. Philadelphia: Jewish Publi Society of America, 1968. Holloway,
Karla F. C. "Beloved: A Spiritual." Callaloo 13 (1990): 516-25.
Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in
Beloved." Studies in American Fiction 17 (Autumn 1989):157-67. Long,
Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the
Interpretation of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. McDowell,
Deborah E. "|The Self and the Other': Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and
the Black Female Text." Critical Essays on Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y.
McKay. Boston: Hall, 1988. 77-90. Mellinkoff , Ruth. The Mark of Cain.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1981. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York:
Knopf, 1987.--. Interview with Bill Moyers. "The World of Ideas." 14
Sept. 1990.--. "The Site of Memory." Inventing the Truth: The Art and
Craft of Memoir. Ed. William Zinsser. Bos Houghton, 1987. 101-24.--.
Sula. 1973. New York: Plume, 1987. Munro, C. Lynn. "The Tattooed Heart
and the Serpentine Eye: Morrison's Choice of an Epigraph for Sula."
Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984):150-54. Naylor, Gloria, and
Toni Morrison. "A Conversation." Southern Review 21.3 (1985): 567-93.
Steinbeck, John. East of Eden. New York: Bantam, 1952. Stepto, Robert
B. "|Intimate Things in Place': A Conversation with Toni Morrison."
Chant of Saints: Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and
Scholarship. Ed. Michael S. Harper and Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P,
1979. 213-29. Tate, Claudia. "Toni Morrison." Black Women Writers at
Work. New York: Continuum 1983.117-31. Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's
Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. New York: Harper, 1988.
Carolyn M. Jones is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and
English at Louisiana State University, where she also teaches in the
University's Honors Program.
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