Sula

This book surprised me. I was warned that there were some explicit scenes, which I found to be truer than I expected. Not just the sexual parts, but the deaths, especially burning. Toni Morrison is a very detailed author. From the beginning I was struck by her descriptions, like of what Shadrack sees after getting out of the hospital. “There were many people…they were thin slips, like paper dolls floating down the walks…A good high wind would pull them up and away and they would land perhaps among the tops of the trees” (11). Throughout the book Morrison’s language makes me feels like I am a part of the scene.

She is also good at making me feel what the characters are feeling. When Eva is explaining to Hannah why she killed her own child, I want to cry along with her. “I just thought of a way he could die like a man…But I held him close first…My baby boy” (72). Eva is a mother who only wants to do what she thinks is best for her son, even if that means murdering him.

The relationships between children and their parents was a strong topic in this novel, and a disheartening one. This subject is mainly exemplified with mothers and their daughters. A daughter seeks loves from her mother, but does not receive it, and the pattern gets repeated down the generations. This is evident with the Peace women: Eva, Hannah, and Sula. Hannah asks Eve if she loved her when she was little and Eva says “No. I don’t reckon I did” (67). Then when Hannah is talking to her friends, Sula hears her tell them “I love Sula. I just don’t like her” (57). Sula is crushed, as any child would be.

Yet what I took from these relationships is the way the characters define and express love. Hannah says she loves Sula, but basically only because she’s her mother. Nel too “had looked at her children and knew…That they were all she would ever know of love. But it was a love that…had cooked out” (165). Eva interprets love as her motherly duty as well. She yells at Hannah saying “what you talkin’ ‘bout did I love you girl I stayed alive for you” (69). In Sula, being a mother is an act of love in itself.

Sex is a common act in the book, and one usually thought to be of love. However, the characters in Sula challenge that belief. After Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband Jude, Nel is devastated. A few years later when Sula is sick in bed, Nel comes to visit and asks Sula why she did it. “[Sula] looked bored…‛Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head…And Jude filled it up. That’s all’”(144). Sula doesn’t see sex as a very big deal, a lesson she probably learned from her mother. “[Hannah] would f--- practically anything” which “taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable” (43,44). Sula adopts her attitudes about men from her mother, but her way of life affects many people.

It really surprised me that the whole town is affected by Sula’s actions. Being a tight-knit community, it makes sense that people gossip about Sula, but I didn’t expect that they would act differently because of her. Sula is named a devil after sending Eva to an old folks home, sleeping with Jude, and doing “the unforgivable thing…[sleeping] with white men” (112). Yet the town, rather than be stirred up and angry as I would anticipate, unites with love. “They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst” (117). Sula’s corrupt behaviors cause the people of the Bottom to be kind.

Just the opposite happens when Sula dies. While “The death of Sula Peace was the best news folks up in the Bottom had,” the community does not react happily (150). “Hard on the heels of the general relief that Sula’s death brought a restless irritability took hold….The tension was gone and so was the reason for the effort they had made” (153). Sula, however disliked, is a powerful woman who has a strong hold on the town. She is persistent with what she did. And although she may make the wrong choices, at least in the eyes of others, one thing is very true—she is herself.

Sula always knows what she wants, and she goes out and gets it. Her confidence makes her a good friend for Nel, who even with her “new found me-ness” lives under a mother who “drove her daughter’s imagination underground” (29,18). Nel and Sula are opposites, but that is no hindrance to their friendship. “[Sula] made [Nel] laugh…made her see old things with new eyes, in [her] presence [Nel] felt clever, gentle and a little raunchy” (95). Nel needs Sula and Sula needs Nel. “[Sula] had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self...Nel was the one person who wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her” (119). Even though it takes Nel a long while to realize it, she needs Sula more than anyone. At the end of the books Nel discovers that she was grieving the loss of Sula, not Jude.

A major lesson I got out of Sula was the value of a great friendship. Nel and Sula have a strong bond, and while they never regained that bond after Sula slept with Jude, both women were changed by their companionship. This book makes me value my own friends even more.

Some things I want to talk about in discussion are the characters of Shadrack and Eva, and what it means to be part of the Bottom. I also want to discuss what happened when everyone joined Shadrack in the National Suicide Day march. Actually, I just need some clarification on everything relating to Shadrack because his character confused me, especially at the beginning of the book. I don’t know why he was in the hospital or what was going on when he first got out of the hospital.