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"New World Woman":
Toni Morrison's Sula.
by Maggie Galehouse
I always thought of Sula as quintessentially black, metaphysically
black, if you will, which is not melanin and certainly not
unquestioning fidelity to the tribe. She is new world black and new
world woman extracting choice from choicelessness, responding
inventively to found things. Improvisational. Daring, disruptive,
imaginative, modern, out- of-the-house, outlawed, unpolicing,
uncontained and uncontainable. And dangerously female.-Toni Morrison,
"Unspeakable Things Unspoken"
Although Toni Morrison's observations have the benefit of
hindsight-they are taken from a 1989 essay and Sula, Morrison's second
novel, was published in 1973-they outline and respond to a distinct,
cultural group. Sula chronicles a community in which black women
dominate public and private life, narrating, as Mae Gwendolyn Henderson
notes, the "intracultural/racial sites from which black women
speak"(24). Yet Morrison's point in her description of her protagonist
supersedes questions of gender and race. Since Sula Peace is conceived
outside of the constraints ordinarily felt by women in her community
(Sula, alone, is "dangerously female"), her status as woman is only a
small part of how she perceives herself and, ultimately, how she is
perceived by readers. The same goes for race. While the near-absence of
whites in the novel forces a recognition of difference within race,
Sula's blackness, as Morrison defines it, also transcends race
altogether. Sula is simply too much of an enigma to be truly
representative of either group. As Morrison notes, Sula's "new world
black" is more than moxy and melanin: it is jazz-inspired, something
individual, fundamental, and internal, manifesting itself in a
resistance to existing social mores and a cultivation of the untried
and the unknown. In many ways, Sula goes as far as Morrison's Beloved
in describing the extent to which one woman's rejection of every
available social script generates tangible, even fatal, 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. Sula becomes instructive to readers
precisely because she is deemed destructive by the other characters in
the novel. 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. And despite her status as protagonist-the novel
does, after all, bear her name-Sula occupies a relatively small amount
of page-space, even dying a full two chapters before the novel's close.
This comparative absence from a text that purports to be about her,
coupled with the moral slipperiness of her character, makes Sula both
difficult to like and difficult to know.
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, pithy 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. (Sula 118-19)
Here, Morrison provides a textual definition for her notion of "new
world woman." 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 quotidian morality. She
is, in the truest sense of the word, self-ish. 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. Indeed, to "verify herself" would be to
sum up, to suggest that there is an ego that anchors or fixes her. She
has no such thing.
Faced with such
a protagonist, many readers are discomfited. It is not easy to identify
with Sula, and when, in the second half of the novel, she sleeps with
her best friend's husband, some readers might wash their hands of her
altogether. Inevitably, this particular, climactic incident generates
from readers the morally-driven query: "How could she do that to her
best friend?" The question is instructive for a few reasons. First, it
reveals how difficult it is to accept Sula as Sula's protagonist. One
assumes that she is the focus because of the book's title, but most
readers find it easier (or as easy) to identify with Nel-the best
friend, the compassionate woman, the good girl. Certainly, Nel fills as
much textual space as Sula, if not more. Second, if one accepts that
the book is about Sula, one also assumes that Sula will either be
"good" in a traditional sense or will, at the very least, grow and
change and gain self-knowledge as the novel progresses. This
transformation does not happen. Instead, Sula is developmentally
complete by the middle of the novel; she does not question herself and
she has no revelations or regrets, yet she manages to propel the story
forward by the sheer unpredictability of her actions. On the one hand,
these attributes make Sula heroic. She contextualizes herself by
herself; her disinterest in children, a spouse, a job, and a home is,
ultimately, a gesture toward creative agency and authority that the
other characters in the novel do not make. On the other hand, Sula's
individuality, as Morrison conceives it, cannot help but collide with
other characters and with the practicalities of the narrative itself.
The "how could she do that to her best friend" question, then, is
important because it is the wrong question, wrong because it assumes a
moral universe in which Sula does not trade. A better question, or
questions, would be: Is it possible to contain in language a character
who is conceived as "uncontainable"? If so, how does a writer construct
a character who is largely uninformed by the people, places, culture
and customs around her? Can such a protagonist sustain a novel?
These questions cannot be answered via a standard feminist or race
reading of Sula. Although members of the Bottom community chastise Sula
for failing to live up to their notions of womanhood and blackness,
Sula does not see herself in conjunction with any of their ideals. This
distinction is important. Since neither of these readings can
completely contain or account for Sula's uniqueness, and since most
critiques of the novel fall into one of these two categories, Sula can
benefit from being viewed through different sets of lenses: some formal
(including characterization and narrative structure), and some
extra-textual (including Morrison's own thoughts on Sula as expressed
in articles and interviews after the novel was published). In keeping
with the tenor of her protagonist, Morrison's narrative tactics in Sula
tend toward the abstract and unobtrusive; Morrison draws Sula's
character largely by suggestion, indirection, and absence. To set up
the story, Morrison opens the text with a kind of prelude, pointing out
the important characters and preparing readers for the events to
follow. In these four pages, Morrison establishes a tone that
encourages the reader to view Sula as a parable; the reader senses that
there is a moral and/or spiritual lesson to be learned from Sula's
fundamental abstraction from people and place and that this lesson may
be atypical. Outfitting Sula with a birthmark allows Morrison to
strengthen Sula's connection to the natural world and lends her
character a certain biblical resonance, complicating the dialogue
between good and evil that the text teases out. Morrison also employs
two characters as foils, casting Sula in bas relief against Shadrack
and Nel, on the one hand, and the rest of the Bottom community, on the
other. And last, Morrison invokes the supernatural, exposing, in the
second half of the novel, the irrational influence Sula claims over her
community and the formal limitations that an otherwise realistic1
narrative imposes upon Sula's character. Nel emerges as the other key
player in this scenario, assuming narrative responsibility where Sula
shuns it. Sula's resistance to the notion of progress complicates her
role as protagonist and compels Morrison to relieve her of her formal
duties.
From the outset of Sula,
Morrison goes to considerable lengths to describe the cosmic guffaws
that bolster Sula's world; irony is built into the landscape. The
four-page prelude introduces the neighborhood and signals readers to
pay attention to Sula and Shadrack. Essentially, the prelude describes
both the death and birth of the Bottom, a neighborhood in a town called
Medallion, which sits at the top of a hill overlooking an Ohio valley.
Thanks to an old "nigger joke," the original black community was
tricked into thinking that Bottom land, which was presented as "the
bottom of heaven," contained the most arable soil. In reality, though,
it was dryer and harder to cultivate. In a discussion of the folk
tradition out of which Morrison writes, Barbara Christian notes: "Like
the ancestral African tradition, place is as important as the human
actors, for the land is a participant in the maintenance of the folk
tradition. It is one of the necessary constants through which the folk
dramatize the meaning of life, as it is passed on from one generation
to the next. Setting, then, is organic to the characters' view of
themselves" (48). To live in the Bottom requires hardiness and humor,
attributes that are ingrained in Sula's personality. Like Sula's
conclusions about humanity- "there was no other you could count on . .
. no self to count on either"-the Bottom is not particularly forgiving,
offering little in the way of a solid foundation for subsistence.
Instead, it is a place that began as a "joke" and will end as a kind of
joke-a golf course, in fact, as Morrison states in the very first line
of the novel. Like Sula, then, the Bottom is built out of paradox, and
this short opening section helps introduce the overall blurring of
binary oppositions that occurs throughout the text. As Deborah McDowell
asserts, "We enter a new world here, a world where we never get to the
'bottom' of things, a world that demands a shift from an either/or
orientation to one that is both/and, full of shifts and contradictions"
(152). Indeed, the Bottom sits at a topographical summit, while the
town name-Medallion-evokes an object that is, by definition, doubly
inscribed.
In the years following
Sula's publication, Morrison came to think the better of this opening:
"In 1988, certainly, I would not need (or feel the need for) the
sentence-the short section- that now opens Sula. The threshold between
the reader and the black-topic text need not be the safe, welcoming
lobby I persuaded myself it needed at that time" ("Unspeakable Things
Unspoken" 23-24). Morrison's wishful editing aside, this short section
promotes the Bottom as a place that exists both within and without
time, lending the text the tone and texture of a parable. The first
line reads, "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" (3). Described in the past
tense, with urbanization and the destruction of natural resources set
against the mystery of "nightshade" and the hominess of "blackberry
patches," the Bottom is at once distanced chronologically and wrapped
in the language of folk. As Morrison says, in "Unspeakable Things
Unspoken," "In between 'place' and 'neighborhood' I [now] have to
squeeze the specificity and the difference; the nostalgia, the history,
and the nostalgia for the history; the violence done to it and the
consequences of that violence" (25). These opening pages work as a kind
of cursory admonishment, a warning to read with suspended judgment, to
find humor within horror and vice versa.
The second beginning of the text-the story, itself-opens with Shadrack,
a shell-shocked World War I veteran and Sula's silent compatriot in the
novel. Beginning with Shadrack allows Morrison to hang his character as
a backdrop for Sula, setting the stage for the displacement that both
characters embody. The story opens on National Suicide Day, a local
holiday of Shadrack's own invention, which evolved out of his war and
post-war trauma. While in combat in France, Shadrack found himself next
to a man whose head was blown off. As Shadrack watched, the man's body
continued to run, even after his face disappeared under his helmet and
his brain began to slide down his back. That same mind/body separation
is what undercuts Shadrack's own sense of self, rendering him unable to
confront or contain his physical mortality. While in hospital after the
war, Shadrack keeps his hands under the bedcovers because, when in
view, he sees his fingers start to grow uncontrollably. It is not until
he sees his own reflection in a toilet bowl that he is able to find
comfort in the blackness of his face and live (just barely) within the
boundaries of his physical frame. When Shadrack finally makes his way
back to the Bottom, he creates National Suicide Day as a way of
consolidating his fear of death and the unknown:
It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness
of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a
year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the
rest of the year would be safe and free. (14)
Shadrack needs National Suicide Day to help him order existence.
Certainly, his name reinforces the displacement-the near
obliteration-of his self. In the Book of Daniel, Shadrach is one of
three Jews sent to the fiery furnace by King Ned-u- chad-nez'zar for
failing to serve the king's gods or the golden image that the king has
raised. Yet Shadrach and the other two men are saved by their faith in
God, emerging from the furnace unharmed. The king recognizes the power
of their faith, decreeing that "there is no other God that can deliver
after this sort" (Daniel 3.29). Like his biblical namesake, then,
Shadrack doggedly defends and enforces the parameters of his own
reality. And also like his namesake, Shadrack is saved from death at
the end of Sula, when National Suicide Day fulfills the prophecy of its
name.
Shadrack and Sula have one
significant interaction. Sula visits his house on the day that Chicken
Little dies and, in her haste to depart, leaves behind the purple and
white belt to her dress. Shadrack saves the belt, a memento of "his
visitor, his company, his guest, his social life, his woman, his
daughter, his friend . . ." (157). Here, Morrison verifies the
implicit, existential bond between the two characters and, in their
brief interaction, makes their differences (and the effect they each
have upon the Bottom) more readily apparent. As Morrison clarifies, in
a 1976 interview: ". . . with Shadrack, I just needed, wanted, a form
of madness that was clear and compact to bounce off of Sula's
strangeness" (qtd. in Stepto 21-22). Both Shadrack and Sula are
outcasts. Both witness death first-hand: Shadrack in the war and Sula
at home. And perhaps because of their experiences, both face their own
mortality and the precarious construction of the self in direct,
disturbing ways. As a child, Sula learns to confront fear head-on. She
cuts off her fingertip in front of a group of boys who are terrorizing
Nel to show them that if she could do such a thing to herself, she
could easily do something equally terrifying to them. By adulthood,
fear is effectively exorcised from her life. Her ten-year absence from
the Bottom fine-tunes an already-thriving existential wanderlust,
ultimately allowing her to sustain self-exploration while staying
physically put. By her late twenties, Sula no longer needs physical
upheaval to prompt internal quest. Conversely, Shadrack tries to keep
his thoughts at bay, and acting out his fears eases his mind. The best
he can do is control fear by allotting it a certain time and place and,
in that way, imposing order on the disorderliness of existence.
Morrison notes that "Sula as (feminine) solubility and Shadrack's
(male) fixative are two extreme ways of dealing with displacement-a
prevalent theme in the narrative of black people" ("Unspeakable Things
Unspoken" 26). Shadrack clings and Sula releases, performing for the
townspeople two familiar (displacement) narratives: the lunatic, and
the evil/sensual woman.
Perhaps
because of his gender, his war history, and his solitary ways, Shadrack
is incorporated into the Bottom routine. "Because Shadrack's madness
involves only a different way of structuring the community's sense of
time and ritual, rather than an actual disintegration of order, he is
assimilated more easily into the community's life than is Sula, who, in
contrast, challenges the community's collective identity," notes Cedric
Gael Bryant (734). Bryant goes on to argue that "Shadrack is also less
threatening than Sula because eventually his madness-his wild
exhortation that the community literally act out its most anarchistic,
self-destructive fantasies every January third-while at first
frightening, ceases to be dangerous once he has been assigned a place
in the community's life" (734-35). Shadrack's assiduous isolation
serves as a silencing, protective shield around his person, while
Sula's independence, because it manifests itself randomly and
sporadically, lays her open to the Bottom's scrutiny. Shadrack's
character helps define the "new world woman" by confirming that Sula is
neither mad nor asocial.
Sula
fails to inhabit the social place that has been forged for her, and she
bears the stamp of her difference in the form of a birthmark over her
eye:
Sula was a heavy brown with
large quiet eyes, one of which featured a birthmark that 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 like the keloid scar of the razored man who
sometimes played checkers with her grandmother. (52-53)
The rose has many rich associations, and, certainly, Sula's social
prickliness and sensual vibe are captured in this symbol. Yet the
birthmark is also interpreted in Sula as a copperhead, a tadpole, a
"scary black thing," and the ashes of Sula's mother, whom Sula watches
burn to death in the back yard. This physical inscription identifies
Sula as touched by something out-of-the-ordinary, perhaps menacing,
perhaps powerful. A natural, biological stamp, the mark appears over
her eye, signifying a break in the sequence of her face, which alters
the nature of her eye/I. Mae G. Henderson argues that Sula's is "a mark
of nativity-a biological rather than cultural inscription, appropriate
in this instance because it functions to mark her as a 'naturally'
inferior female within the black community" (27). Henderson's reading
stumbles over the fact that, while there are many women in the novel,
only Sula is marked. Clearly, then, Sula's birthmark distinguishes
beyond gender and beyond a simple cultural inscription. Unlike
clothing, tattooing, or other, more contrived, means of self-
presentation, Sula's permanent, "natural" adornment comes unencumbered
by invention or economic signification. It exoticizes her, setting her
apart from the rest of the community.
Like Shadrack's name, Sula's birthmark has biblical resonance. Carolyn
Jones argues that the birthmark functions like the mark of Cain,
publicly setting Sula apart from the community's actions and ideals.
Jones cites the Genesis Rabbah, which says that God "beat Cain's face
with hail, which blackened like coal, and thus he remained with a black
face" (626). Certainly, Sula shares with Cain social isolation,
ostracism, and a profound absence of guilt. For example, when Nel
visits Sula on her deathbed and asks Sula why she slept with her
husband, Jude (Judas, the traitor), Sula says, "Being good to somebody
is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for
it" (144-45). This is Sula's spin on "I am not my brother's keeper."
But Jones's reading is also worth expanding to include consideration of
Cain's vagrancy. In order for people to know Cain upon sight, "the Lord
set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him" (Genesis
4.15). Cain is subsequently cast out of his community, his orders to
roam the earth a physical/spiritual sentence that effectively banishes
him from home. A vagabond, he is "marked" so that his community will
enforce the segregation that the Lord decreed (not unlike Hester Prynne
and her scarlet "A"). Like Cain, Sula is a kind of vagabond, leaving
the Bottom for a full decade to wander through the country before
returning home as an adult. Even in the Bottom, Sula is best classified
as a drifter; she lives day to day, resisting employment,
companionship, even assistance, until she has no one and nothing left.
(Indeed, Shadrack and Sula, although both are housed, are the town
vagrants, culturally and communally dispossessed-Sula by choice, and
Shadrack by default.) For Sula, then, her birthmark could denote a
double mark against her (even as a young girl, she equates whiteness
and maleness with freedom and triumph),2 yet she bears it as a mark of
liberation. The difference between Cain and Sula is that Sula
segregates herself from the laws of her community which, in turn, gives
her the chance to write her own life: God's "sentence" becomes
self-authorship.
Nel is Sula's
other foil in the novel, and her task is far greater than Shadrack's.
As Sula's childhood confidante, Nel functions much like a sister,
someone whose presence Sula never fundamentally questions. Some critics
go further, arguing, as Barbara Smith does, that Sula can be read as a
lesbian text: "it works as a lesbian novel not only because of the
passionate friendship between Sula and Nel but because of Morrison's
consistently critical stance toward the heterosexual institutions of
male-female relationships, marriage and the family"(165). Insofar as
Sula is about communication between characters, Smith's reading is apt.
Much of the inventiveness of the novel stems from the ultimate
subordinance of heterosexual romance. In addition, the only real
epiphany in Sula belongs to Nel and occurs in relation to her estranged
love for Sula. Yet some argue against Smith's analysis. For example,
Alisha R. Coleman maintains that Smith has misread the "emotional
intimacy" drawn between these two female characters. Coleman's
psychoanalytic reading asserts that the friendship between Sula and Nel
makes Sula a feminist novel in which the two women "complement" or
"complete" one another, generating "two halves of a personality that
combine to form a whole psyche"(151).
Interestingly, both of these readings are bolstered by the notion that
the solitary Sula is somehow incomplete; each interpretation assumes a
potential dyad with Nel, when it is precisely Sula's studied belief in
her own completeness-as-one that distinguishes her. Morrison herself
has noted that each character lacks what the other has: "Nel . . .
doesn't know about herself. Even at the end, she doesn't know. She's
just beginning. . . . Sula, on the other hand, knows all there is to
know about herself because she examines herself. . . . But she has
trouble making a connection with other people and just feeling that
lovely sense of accomplishment of being close in a very strong way"
(qtd. in Stepto 14). There is no question that Sula and Nel 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. Furthermore,
Morrison has stated that, in Sula, she was "interested . . . in doing a
very old, worn-out idea, which was to do something with good and evil,
but putting it in different terms" (qtd. in Stepto 12). In traditional
terms, of course, Sula is evil and Nel is good. At worst, Sula is
unbearable and, at best, unknowable to readers. Conversely, Nel becomes
for readers just what she becomes for the Bottom-a reliable, likable,
accessible woman. In this way, Nel is the reader's segue to Sula, her
importance undeniable and two-fold: she helps draw out the
peculiarities of Sula's actions and temperament, and she carries the
novel in a way that Sula (because of said actions and temperament)
cannot. Ultimately, the real reciprocity between Sula and Nel is the
shared responsibility of serving as protagonist.
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" (52). Rather than complete one another, as Alisha R. Coleman
argues, the girls feed one another, peer-parenting in the absence of
balanced parenting and local role models. Up until Nel's marriage to
Jude-a man who believed that, with Nel, "the two of them together would
make one Jude" (83)-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.
As an adult, married
with three children, Nel is utterly contained by the Bottom's
sensibility. Morrison reflects: "Nel knows and believes in all the laws
of that community. She is the community. She believes in its values.
Sula does not. She does not believe in any of those laws and breaks
them all. Or ignores them" (qtd. in Stepto 14). Bryant puts it another
way: "Nel lays claim to the pathetically small domain of the Bottom and
her own house. In contrast, Sula's concern is with dominion-that is,
sovereign authority over the self-which, in effect, makes the world her
domain" (738-39). Nel's knowledge and experience is local, parochial,
with no frame of reference outside her hometown. Sula's is another
matter.
Sula's long, high-heeled
trek up the birdshit-soaked street is an appropriately strained
introduction for her reappearance in the neighborhood. Armed with a
college education and an edgy cynicism, Sula is an outcast from the
start. Her status as a woman without a man and a woman without children
simply does not translate into a life that the Bottom understands.
Sula's grandmother, Eva, speaks for the whole community when she tells
her granddaughter to have some babies, that it will "settle" her. When
Sula responds defensively, they argue:
"I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself."
"Selfish. Ain't no woman got no business floatin' around without no
man."
"You did."
"Not by choice."
"Mamma did."
"Not by choice, I said. It ain't right for you to want to stay off by
yourself." (92)
Eva (like Eve, the first woman) has been the reigning matriarch of her
own family/community for years and she is powerful and independent and
fierce in the role. Even though she is not part of a couple herself, to
simply reject the notion out-of-hand is incomprehensible, even to her.
It is the accepted template for women's lives, even though it is, more
often than not, a failed or malfunctioning model. Furthermore, to Eva
and to people in the Bottom, children are part of the order of things,
the literal outgrowth of a concept of womanhood that is valued by what
it produces and tends. To Sula, however, being a wife and a mother are
not pre-requisites for selfhood. Her own "business"-the business of
being, of living-is not dictated by family or community.
In her essay, "Feminism and Critical Theory," Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak addresses the Marxist conceptions of "use- value,
exchange-value, and surplus-value" in terms of feminism and Freud,
examining childbirth and child-rearing as the kind of women's work that
is not subject to communal compensation: "One could indefinitely
allegorize the relationship of woman within this particular triad-use,
exchange, and surplus-by suggesting that woman in the traditional
social situation produces more than she is getting in terms of her
subsistence, and therefore is a continual source of the production of
surpluses, for the man who owns her, or by the man for the capitalist
who owns his labor-power" (79). Spivak notes that the idea of a womb as
a place of production is avoided in both Freud and Marx, and that in
rereading Freud, feminists should "make available the idea of womb-envy
as something that interacts with the idea of penis-envy to determine
human sexuality and the production of society" (81).
Spivak's reading of women's work has interesting implications for Sula.
From the vantage point of the Bottom, the adult Sula thwarts community
mores surrounding gender, race, and vocation/avocation, generating a
tension that is three-fold. Her disinterest is interpreted as
selfishness; she believes in self-nurture as an end in and of itself,
whereas for Eva, Nel, and the other women in town, mothering,
care-taking and running a household are non-negotiable women's work.
Eva's chastisement (and, by extension, the town's judgment) is very
specific: it is all right if Sula ends up alone, but it is not all
right for Sula to cultivate aloneness. Yet from sleeping with married
men to not wearing underwear to church suppers, Sula does just that.
Her resistance to what the Bottom silently (but aggressively) perceives
as her duty, not only to her sex but to her race and community, calls
into question the perpetuation of existence as the Bottom knows it. And
in rejecting a commitment to community, woman-to-woman bonding, and a
taking care of kin, Sula's "new world black" is interpreted by the
community as too close to "white." The rumors that Sula sleeps with
white men, and Sula's decision to place Eva in a white-run home for the
elderly, are the final nails in Sula's social coffin. Without the
racial element, these actions would be injurious; with it, they are
unforgivable. Although Morrison's four-page prelude has instructed the
reader to suspend judgment on Sula's story, the town cannot. There is
no place for a "new world woman" within the community's life.
The transformative moment in Sula occurs when Nel discovers her husband
and Sula, naked and on all fours in the bedroom. The scene is important
for two reasons. First, the narrative moves from its usual omniscient
voice into the first person, with Nel as the "I." Morrison thus
discourages the reader from entering Sula's mind, which is without
revelation and without comprehension of Nel's grief. Even a dalliance
with her best friend's husband does not assume any real significance
for Sula beyond its actual occurrence. More importantly, though, this
scene is the first strain or tear in the narrative fabric, a climax
that exposes the glaring limitations of Sula's status as the novel's
focus. Without sympathy herself, Sula cannot elicit sympathy from the
reader, so Morrison places her character (and herself) in a difficult
position. By this point, the reader sympathizes with Nel, and so in
order for the incident to play itself out, for the novel to work, the
reader must suspend judgment of Sula and wait to see the outcome of her
impact upon the town.3 While such waiting is difficult, it is, in a
sense, Morrison's ultimate test. In this scene, Morrison positions the
reader with Nel, confirming that neither Nel nor the reader can expect
anything different from Sula than what Sula offers to the rest of her
fictional world. There are no exceptions. To accept the book, we must
accept Sula's actions. Yet as Nel's vulnerability is highlighted, the
reader begins to watch and wait for Nel to respond to the changes in
her life that Sula and Jude's union has generated. In short, Nel begins
to assume responsibility for the narrative, and Sula begins to retreat.
Without Nel to stabilize or counteract Sula's real or perceived
toxicity, Sula is left to play out for the community and, by extension,
the reader, the only available narrative she has (and the one that the
town has provided): the evil woman.
From the beginning of her return to the Bottom, Sula is perceived as
evil-so evil that the townspeople believe that she has supernatural
powers. Morrison prepares the reader for this perception in the very
first line of the novel, when (however obliquely) she associates Sula
with nightshade. The line begins, "In that place, where they tore the
nightshade and blackberry patches. . ." and Morrison, writing more than
fifteen years later, notes:
my
perception of Sula's double-dose of chosen blackness and biological
blackness is in the presence of those two words of darkness in
"nightshade" as well as in the uncommon quality of the vine itself. One
variety is called "enchanter," and the other "bittersweet" because the
berries taste bitter at first and then sweet. Also nightshade was
thought to counteract witchcraft. All of this seemed a wonderful
constellation of signs for Sula. ("Unspeakable Things Unspoken" 26)
Here, Morrison unveils another paradox: while Sula is conceived, in
part, as an enchanter, she is also affiliated with the antidote to the
kind of power or black magic she is ultimately accused of inflicting
upon the town. Certainly, Sula's birthmark "marks" her as different
from conception, but her second birth or incarnation in the Bottom is
also "marked": "Accompanied by a plague of robins, Sula came back to
Medallion. The little yam-breasted shuddering birds were everywhere,
exciting very small children away from their usual welcome into a
vicious stoning" (89). Essentially, Sula's return to the Bottom is
greeted with a stoning, a punishment traditionally reserved for the
public humiliation of a criminal or, more to the point, a witch. In
addition, Sula's re-arrival becomes linked to the physical accidents of
others. When Teapot, a young boy, comes to Sula's door to collect
bottles, he falls down her steps and hurts himself. And when Mr.
Finley, who had sucked on chicken bones for years, looks up to see Sula
in the distance, he chokes on a chicken bone and dies (113-14).
The result of all these incidents is that Sula comes to be regarded as
the local incarnation of evil, a pariah who effects and creates change
and catastrophe within the social and natural worlds. Karin Luisa Badt
maintains that "Sula, the errant erotic force who breaks up people's
marriages and destroys friendships, reminds the people of the Bottom of
their own lack of bottom" (571). That is not quite it. In point of
fact, Sula allows the Bottom to create its own bottom-to build, in the
collective rejection of her, a frame of social rules over which it can
stretch its convictions. In other words, the people of the Bottom
facilitate Sula's paradox: because they believe her to be evil, she
provides for them an antidote to themselves. It is only because the
community believes in evil as a matter of course that it is able to
cast Sula in the role of pariah at all. As Christian concludes, "Since
she [Sula] does not fit the image of mother, the loose woman, or the
lady- wife . . . the community relegates her to their other category
for woman, that of the witch, the evil conjure woman who is a part of
the evil forces of Nature" (54). Sula becomes the woman the Bottom
loves to hate and, in hating her, Sula's seductiveness is never
stronger. In fact, the townspeople are seduced by their own
interpretation of Sula's evilness. Protecting themselves from her
through ritual, they nonetheless leave her to her own devices: " . . .
they laid broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkled salt on
porch steps. But aside from one or two unsuccessful efforts to collect
the dust from her footsteps, they did nothing to harm her. As always
the black people looked at evil stony-eyed and let it run" (113).
When Sula dies in the fall of her thirtieth year, the people of the
Bottom are left without a direct, evil force with which to contend. Her
death, described as a "sleep of water," coincides with an early frost
(suggesting that Sula does have some influence over the forces of
nature), which ruins harvests and renders folks housebound. With
environmental and communal warmth frozen, even Teapot's Mama, who had
become doting after she feared that Sula had knocked her five-year-old
down the steps, returns to beating her son:
She was not alone. Other mothers who had defended their children from
Sula's malevolence (or who had defended their positions as mothers from
Sula's scorn for the role) now had nothing to rub up against. The
tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made.
Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair .
. . Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a steeping
resentment of the burdens of old people. Wives uncoddled their
husbands; there seemed no further need to reinforce their vanity.
(153-54)
The anger and passion
that Sula generated kept the Bottom up and running. In this way, Sula
nurtured, even sexualized her community (note the phrase "rub up
against" and the word "flaccid" in Morrison's description). Ironically,
in the community's collective hatred of her, Sula enforces the very
roles they accused her of abusing: mother and lover. Her death renders
the town socially impotent, as citizens are moved to undo the good that
her alleged evil provoked.
Sula is
aware of the impact that she has on the Bottom, and nowhere is this
knowledge more pointed-or poignant-than in her deathbed rave to Nel,
which assumes the form of a half- humorous, half-haunting incantation.
Sula's ironic speech about the town's hatred comes across as a kind of
spell, a final reckoning that she sets into motion just before her
death. In it, she articulates the unlikelihood of ever being understood
on her own terms and, in the process of this articulation, underscores
the unreadiness of the Bottom to entertain any other world-view than
its own:
Oh, they'll love me all
right. . . . After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers;
when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles;
after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white
women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the
jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after
all the faggots get their mothers' trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with
Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all
the dogs have fucked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn
flies off the roof to mount the hogs . . . then there'll be a little
love left over for me. (145-46)
Nel, who is on the receiving end of these words, is nearly struck dumb.
Sula's soliloquy projects the profundity of Sula's imminent absence
and, at the same time, predicts a dual apocalypse: the first, the end
of Sula's life (these are close to her last, spoken words), and the
second, a time when all kinds of couplings-men and men, men and women,
women and women, old and young, animal and object, black and white-are
foreseeable and acceptable. That is, Morrison ruefully suggests, the
end of the world. And, indeed, the end of the Bottom world is nigh,
since it is soon after Sula's death that many of the Bottom folk are
drowned in a tunnel (another water- related catastrophe) and, soon
after that, that the Bottom itself is leveled to make way for a golf
course.
Morrison strengthens
Sula's supernatural affiliation by granting the reader access to Sula's
thoughts after she has died. Sula's death is not heroic; she does not
die trying to do the impossible. If anything, she dies just as she had
lived: unrepentant and alone. Yet Morrison records her post-mortem
ruminations: "Well, I'll be damned," she [Sula] thought, "it didn't
even hurt. Wait'll I tell Nel" (149). In some ways, this type of
temporal manipulation is characteristic of Morrison's fiction. As
Christian notes, "In Morrison's novels, Time is a unified entity,
rather than a chronology that is divided up into discrete fractions of
past, present and future, for it is the impact of significant events on
the lives of the folk" (57). Certainly, Sula reinforces Christian's
point; while the chapters are named and divided by years, with the
narrative focusing on the "peace"ful period between the World Wars,
this formal cataloguing of time also serves to outline its irrelevance.
Nel's epiphany at the end of the novel proves, for example, that her
connection to Sula (who has been dead for years) is as strong as ever.
In turn, Sula's first thoughts after her own death are of Nel, from
whom she has been estranged. Still, when Sula speaks from beyond the
grave, she also speaks from beyond the parameters of realism, and the
break in the text is jarring. While Morrison's novels are full of
ghosts, magic, and even, in the case of Song of Solomon's Pilate, a
woman born without a navel, Sula's post-death utterances push the "new
world woman," into another genre, a different narrative landscape. It
is the only scene in the novel in which this type of moment occurs and,
as such, it is significant.
In the
simplest of terms, then, the ending of Sula completes the parable that
Morrison's prelude began. Through Sula and Nel, respectively, Morrison
narrates the good side of bad and the bad side of good. Sula lives
according to her own design and, for that independence, dies early and
alone on the second floor of an empty, run-down house-but as she says,
"my lonely is mine" (143). Nel survives, but it is only on the final
page of the novel that she begins to understand that it is Sula, and
not Jude, who she has been missing for decades. The parable is
seemingly complete: One must strive to strike a balance between
self-knowledge and narcissism. Nel should have known herself better,
Sula should not have known herself quite so well, and the people of the
Bottom should have recognized the good that their perception of Sula's
evil fostered.
Of course, there is
no lesson for Sula because her character does not recognize the
absolutes of good and evil. Morrison asks the reader to both entertain
and resist these absolutes, as well, in order to sustain the narrative,
which examines the ways in which right and wrong are socially
construed. Indeed, Morrison deconstructs the hierarchies of good and
evil, right and wrong, through Sula, using Sula's estrangement from the
community to negotiate the no man's land of "new world woman." And as
the novel bears out, there is no social, spiritual, or intellectual
space for the "new world woman" in the old world community of the
Bottom. Indeed, Sula's resistance to the narrative that the town would
like to impose (woman/wife/mother) creates, in turn, Sula's narrative;
in response to Sula's egolessness, the town develops a collective ego
that effectively writes her out of her own story. Sula's early
death-like her prophetic musings and post-death utterances-makes this
point, rather conspicuously. In the Stepto interview, Morrison claims
that she wanted the reader to miss Sula in the latter part of the book,
to experience, along with the Bottom, the change in social texture that
Sula's absence provoked. Yet by the end of the novel, Sula's
disappearance from the text is necessary not only for purposes of plot,
but for structural integrity. For while there can be a Nel without a
Sula, it becomes clear that there can be no Sula without a Nel.
Ultimately, Sula shows that a novel cannot rely upon a character who,
while compelling and experimental, does not really grow.
It is Nel who survives in Sula, living on long after her husband and
children have departed, long after Sula's death. The keeper of realism,
Nel is the character left to finish the business of the story, clean up
the narrative strands, have the epiphany at the end of the novel, and
be for readers that character who approaches movement, change, and
transcendence. Nel emerges as the traditional "old world" hero, because
Sula, as Morrison conceives and constructs her, cannot. Because the
notion of progress is antithetical to Sula's make-up, her character
never builds any momentum. We know that we will be surprised, shocked,
perhaps, by Sula's choices, but, so knowing, we cease to be surprised
or shocked by her. And that is Sula's ultimate paradox. Though
exciting, independent, and unpredictable, her character is
fundamentally, finally static; Sula's uncontainability is so
well-contained that no one and nothing can get to her. A
non-traditional or, to use Morrison's word, "improvisational" character
cannot sustain a traditional role. So Morrison must build for Sula an
escape hatch-a literal, structural out that will allow her character to
exit/disappear. Morrison fashions this hatch from a gradual shift in
genre. As the anarchistic, antagonistic protagonist, Sula's character
is pushed into a modern gothic, predicting the end of the world, dying
in solitude and poverty in an empty old house, and speaking from beyond
the grave. Only by eluding the formal containment of narrative realism,
and shrugging off the responsibilities of novelistic form, does Sula
become the "new world woman" of Morrison's vision.
Works Cited
Badt, Karen Luisa. "The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of
'Ancient Properties.'" African American Review 29 (1995): 567-77.
Bryant, Cedric Gael. "The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in
Toni Morrison's Sula." Black American Literature Forum 24 (1990):
731-45.
Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism-Perspectives on Black
Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.
Coleman, Alisha R. "One and One Make One: A Metacritical and
Psychoanalytic Reading of Friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula." CLA
Journal 37 (1993): 145-55.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics,
and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Changing Our Own
Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed.
Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 16-37.
Jones, Carolyn. "Sula and Beloved: Images of Cain in the Novels of Toni
Morrison." African American Review 27 (1993): 615-26.
McDowell, Deborah. "'The Self and the Other': Reading Toni Morrison's
Sula and the Black Female Text." Modern Critical Views-Toni Morrison.
Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1990. 149-63.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: A Plume Book/New American Library,
1973.
--.
"Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American
Literature," Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 1- 34.
Smith, Barbara. "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism." All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Eds. Gloria T.
Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. Old Westbury, NY:
Feminist, 1982. 157-75.
Spivak,
Gayatri Chakravorty. "Feminism and Critical Theory." In Other
Worlds-Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. 77-92.
Stepto, Robert. "Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni
Morrison." Conversations With Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille
Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. 10-29.
1 In this context, the "realist" narrative can be defined as one in
which gender issues, the class system, customs, and morality are
consistent with the historical era that the author depicts. In Sula,
Morrison offers these "realist" elements as touchstones for Sula's
difference.
2 As children, Sula
and Nel share a common realization: "Because each had discovered years
before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and
triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something
else to be" (Morrison, Sula 52).
3
The "wait and see" attitude Morrison sets down in Sula's opening pages
is best expressed in the following line, which concludes the four-page
prelude: "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" (6).
Maggie Galehouse
recently received her Ph.D. in English from Temple University, where
her emphasis was twentieth-century fiction. She writes for The
Philadelphia Inquirer, and her book reviews have appeared in The New
York Times and The Washington Post.
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