The Strong Women of Sula
Sula is a gorgeous book to read, and it I am glad I had the documents and Foucault to offer additional insight. Toni Morrision does a good job portraying Sula in all her shades of gray. I found that I was slow to judge her (and the rest of the characters) because of our other class readings. I am still not sure what I think about Sula or Nel. I want to hear others’ opinions before I make my final judgment. I do not want to be quick to love or dislike them, as I was with Humbert Humbert in Lolita. Reading Sula was also my first experience with literature written by and about Blacks. I am not familiar with living in a black community, and so I was glad to have the essays by Brenda E. Stevenson and Karen V. Hansen to provide historical and analytical insight.
I jotted down notes in the margins as I was reading Sula, and I want to share them here. First, I thought of Rochelle and Helene as representing Foucault’s hysteric woman and good mother. Rochelle is the hysteric woman in the sense that society is not comfortable with her. Her grandmother raised Helene to not become an erotic woman like her mother. Helene took this to heart, and passed it along to Nel. “She rose grandly to the occasion of motherhood…Under Helene’s hand the girl became obedient and polite” (18). Affected by her own childhood, Helene does her best as the ‘good mother’ to ensure that Nel is not the ‘masturbating child.’
Hannah Peace’s attitude towards sexuality and sex is a departure from what we have read so far in class. She “taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (44). Unlike Hester Prynne or Humbert Humbert—for who sex is conjoined with emotional love—Hannah regards sex as physical pleasure, and nothing more.
Brenda E. Stevenson’s essay, “Slave Marriage and Family Relations,” put Sula into context. What happened in the past has a strong impact on future situations, and that is clear in Sula. Social set-ups and viewpoints are influenced by pre-Civil War life. For example, Stevenson writes that matrifocality was the leading family arrangement amongst slaves. This is evident in Sula: Nel, Eve, and Hannah all run their households, and women seem to be the defining force in Medallion. Likewise, Stevenson states, “Slave females…received most of their gendered socialization from their mothers, other female kin, or community women” (165). Nel and Sula grow up under the influence of strong women; men exist in a different world, one full of sexual curiosities. Sexuality is not the only province of strong Black women. Stevenson writes that among slave women, “Few hesitated to steal, lie, and cheat in order to guarantee their physical survival or that of their children” (165). Indeed, Eve’s loss of her leg (which very well may have been intentional) provided the money needed for her children to be clothed, housed, and fed.
Karen V. Hansen’s, “An Erotic Friendship Between Two African-American Women” provided insight into Nel and Sula’s friendship. Theirs may not have been the erotic relationship of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, but Sula and Nel certaintly fit the profile of two women fiercely devoted to one another. Their love is most poignantly expressed in the last page when Nel says, “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude” (174).
Tags: Black Community, Erotic Woman, Good Mother, Slave Relations, Sula, Woman-Friendship
April 14th, 2012 at 11:38 am
Hi Tal,
The theme of strong women–even if they have a variety of weaknesses–is a great one for our discussion on Tuesday. Your links between the historical materials and the novel are terrific and precisely what is needed to grasp Morrison’s characters, since they are not typical in the canon of American literature (although Faulkner is a forerunner in certain ways).
I wonder if you thought about how the novel may be read through the dramaturgical method. Does it help in analyzing the dynamics between characters and within the community?