Sula

Only two characters, Nel and Shadrack, maintain a static interpretation of Sula’s birthmark, revealing their alienation from society at large. Nel’s unchanging perception of Sula’s birthmark as a stemmed rose highlights her own need for consistency.

Being oppressed by her mother, Nel has an attraction to Sula's carefree environment which, unlike her own, lacks any oppression. Likewise, Sula has an attraction to Nel's peaceful and orderly environment. They both desire something that the other does not have, and that's where such a strong attraction comes from. Together, they are perfect- Nel finds in Sula the youthfulness and the fun she's missing, and Sula finds order and stability in Nel.

Toni Morrison’s Sula revolves around the relationship of her two main characters, Sula and Nel. The childhood friends grow apart with age. Although it is indicated that their friendship is the most important relationship they participate in, they eventually betray each other and lead dishonest lives. Throughout the novel, we see their constantly deteriorating relationship as a result of absence of a family life. Sula is a novel about the influence family may have on the make up of someone’s personality. In particular, the novel examines the effect parents can have on their children and the conscious effort the main characters make to be unlike their mothers.

She too sleeps with only the husbands of other women. Sula has never witnessed a healthy relationship between a man and a woman. This is regarded by the community as terrible. Sula uses the men she sleeps with for pleasure, taking no consideration as to how the men feel. She refuses to have such patriarchal relationships as Hannah did. Hannah may indeed have received pleasure from the men she slept with but she remained the submissive participant in her relations. "Hannah rubbed no edges, made no demands, made the man feel as though he were complete and wonderful just as he was- he didn’t need fixing..." (p 2012). Sula, on the other hand, has a need to feel in control right down to the mechanics of her affairs. "And there was the utmost irony and outrage in lying under someone, in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power." (p2048). She not only took sex from men as pleasure, but sought out to claim power over them. "Sula was trying them out and discarding them without any excuse the men could swallow." (p2044). This made the women upset and furthered their hatred for Sula. Sula had power by sleeping with these very same men who held power over submissive wives. The town regards all of Sula’s actions as evil. They called her a "roach" and a "bitch", but above that spread a nasty rumor that she slept with white men. "There was nothing lower she could do, nothing filthier." (p2043). Though it is mentioned in

Two young girls, coalescing on a grass-laden field while lying on their stomachs, dig a hole in unspoken harmony. A picture of youth and innocence, this scene depicts an innocuous moment which the two girls share as a result of their juvenescence--or does it? In Toni Morrison 's Sula, this scene, among others, appears at first to be both irrelevant to the novel’s underlying theme and out of place with regard to the rest of the plot. Yet, when analyzed further, the literary devices that Morrison uses in these scenes bring readers to a vastly different conclusion. These scenes serve as windows into the mind of Morrison and even into the larger themes present in the text. So, perhaps two girls sharing a seemingly casual experience is not as

Despite being presented as opposites of good and evil, Nel and Sula are actually quite similar, as both Nel and Sula posses the traits that defined the other, effectively blurring the lines between good and evil. As young girls, Nel pushed herself to become friends with Sula in the first place as “Nel, who regarded the oppressive neatness of her home with dread, felt comfortable in t with Sula, who loved it and would sit on the red-velvet sofa for ten to twenty minutes at a time… As for Nel, she preferred Sula’s wooly house”(29). As a child, Nel yearned to be free and independent, and to be her own individual self separate from who her mother expects her to be. Sula however already lives this life of living in a non-traditional home and

Since they are taught at such a young age, they do not have the critical thinking skills and they automatically believe the ideas that their parents taught them. For example, in Sula, Nel is under the control of her mother. After she sees her mother places herself in an inferior position and smiles to the men on the train, she realizes that she does not want to be like her mother. Nel says, “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me” (Morrison 28). She wants to be wonderful, unique and free. However, since she is too young, she cannot persist her dream of freedom under the control of her mother and she utterly gives up. Morrison writes, “Under Helene’s hand the girl became obedient and polite. Any enthusiasms that little Nel showed were calmed by the mother until she drove her daughter’s imagination underground” (Morrison 18). She finally becomes one of the “normal” women who does follow all the social conventions and loses her sense of self. She cares about how other people and the society think instead of how she feels. She marries a man and their marriage is not based on love, but instead, it is aimed to satisfy the normative expectation of their community. Therefore, one of the reasons why Nel loves Sula is because Sula succeeds in being unique, free and ignores all the social conventions that she does not like agree

In Toni Morrison’s Sula, gender heteronormative relationships are demonstrated in a very punishable manner. The two main characters Sula Peace, and Nel Right share a very strong, well connected friendship. The two of them are a mirror reflection of each other, with the same desires. Heteronormative institutions in the book do not seem to be stable for the most part. Hannah Peace, the single mother Sula, lives a disordered life in her household while Helene Wright belongs to a conservative and peaceful life, but her husband is never around. With the two daughters of both families being part of each other’s lives, they create a friendship that shows the privilege for female-female bonds over male-male bonds.

The relationship first starts to take a turn for the worst when Sula accidentally kills a local boy named Chicken Little, by throwing him into the river. The town never finds out who is responsible for his death, mostly due to the girls silence. Though Nel played no roll in Chicken Little?s death, she stands by Sula and tells no one about what she saw that day at the river. At his funeral, ?[the two] held hands and knew that only the held hands and knew that only the coffin would lie in the earth, the bubbly laughter and the press of fingers in the palm would stay aboveground forever? (Morrison 66). Nel?s silence in support of Sula is the first instance when Sula takes advantage of Nel, relying on her in order to survive.

During this time of their separation, the strength of their friendship appears evident. They both long to still be friends, to talk again. However, Nel sees this event as a true betrayal of friendship from Sula, while Sula sees what happened as casual and not a big deal.

After her marriage, Nel becomes a conventional, settled down woman. Her life when Sula is not around is much like her life in the “oppressive neatness”(Morrison 29) in her mother’s house. She loses her true unique self after Sula is gone. She realizes this when Sula comes back to Medallion. “Nel felt new, soft and new. It had been the longest time since she had had a rib-scraping

This behavior is seen when Nel attempts to recreate the relationship that she and Sula share with someone else, instead of maintaining her relationship with Sula. Now instead of Nel and Sula joined to make one person, Nel and Jude "together would make one Jude." (Page 83) Another of Nel’s negative qualities was how dependent she was on what other thought of her. The only reason Nel ended her relationship with Sula was because she felt she needed to be "needed by someone who saw her singly." (Page 84). Initially this statement appears to state that Nel wishes to become more of an individual, when in actuality it is only further proof that she is completely dependent on what others think of her.Nel’s want to be an individual while still

In a man’s world, women who want must suffer. They are turned away from personal achievement and forced down a path that encourages a devotional, misguided love. The desperation derived from this obsessive love inevitably causes destruction to its bearer in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. In her novel, the protagonist Milkman searches for his personal and communal identity against a backdrop of disenfranchised, lovelorn women, and the reader watches as their inescapable desires for affection bring women to ruin. Morrison’s female characters are constantly wanting, propelled by their quest for intimacy. In this novel, female love is all-consuming and obsessive to reflect age-old oppressive patriarchal values; women are primarily defined by the men in their lives and achieving a home and a husband should be paramount for even nonconforming women. This wreaks havoc on the psyches of Hagar and Corinthians and begets endless anxiety over marriage and commitment. Through the consistent disintegration of her female characters, Toni Morrison examines the repressive, traumatic ‘ideal’ path for women and its prevalence in our and her novel’s society.

In her novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Dominican author Julia Alvarez demonstrates how words can become strange and lose their meaning. African American writer Toni Morrison in her novel Sula demonstrates how words can wound in acts of accidental verbal violence when something is overheard by mistake. In each instance, one sees how the writer manipulates language, its pauses and its silences as well as its words, in order to enhance the overall mood of each work.

As seen by many different mothers in the novel Sula by author Toni Morrison, mothers play an important part in kid’s life, shaping how they view different beliefs in the world and setting up values in their child. Every individual’s life is shaped by personal relationships they have with others. The mother and child relationship greatly affects the identity development in the kid. As seen in the racist community in the novel, the mother and kid relationship is important in the sense that the mothers and children share understanding of the sexist oppression, intertwining their lives together even more than they