{"id":75472,"date":"2023-03-11T15:29:47","date_gmt":"2023-03-11T15:29:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/essays.homeworkacetutors.com\/toni-morrisons-sula-african-american-literature\/"},"modified":"2023-03-11T15:29:47","modified_gmt":"2023-03-11T15:29:47","slug":"toni-morrisons-sula-african-american-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/toni-morrisons-sula-african-american-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Toni Morrison\u2019s Sula | African-American Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Toni Morrison\u2019s Sula <\/em>is a novel in the tradition of African-American literature.<\/h2>\n

Toni Morrison\u2019s Sula <\/em>is a novel in the tradition of African-American literature, exploring the legacy of the African diaspora through the images of loss and recovery.\u00a0 Sula <\/em>is set in a black community in the Midwest called The Bottom, and centres on the relationship between Sula and Nel from their intimate childhood friendship to their diverging paths as adults.\u00a0 Sula, in her quest for autonomy, becomes the personification of both the potential of black woman and, ironically, the pariah of her community.\u00a0 In contrast, Nel forsakes her own dream of leaving The Bottom for the sake of her husband and children, diminishing her identity to that of wife and mother.\u00a0 Sula<\/em> is, essentially, a novel concerned with the emotional growth of both Nel and Sula\u2019s friendship to eclipse social constraints.\u00a0 Pin-chia Feng (1998) argues for the textual construction of identity in novels by African-American writers centering on minority women in a society \u201cpermeated by race, class, and sex\/gender oppression\u201d (2).\u00a0 Morrison presents Sula as a tragic figure who fails to negotiate her own identity, but as a character who encourages the reader to engage with a notion of kinship and unity among black women as a means of recreating a lost community.
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Critics often approach Morrison\u2019s writing as if the discourse of gender and the discourse of race are mutually exclusive, but to interpret Sula<\/em> as representative of \u2018black\u2019 literature or \u2018female\u2019 literature is a limiting approach.\u00a0 Traditional feminist criticism interprets the intimate relationship between Sula and Nel as an imitation of the nurturing bond between mother and daughter, and a substitute for the lost sense of kinship in the post-diaspora black community.\u00a0 The return to the maternal relationship in Morrison\u2019s novels is an attempt to recover, or recreate, the lost object of desire, in this case kinship and community, as well as an attempt to recover the past.\u00a0 Laura Mulvey (1981) maintains that the \u2018lost memory of the mother\u2019s body is similar to other metaphors of a buried past or a lost history that contribute to the rhetoric of oppressed people\u2019 (167). \u00a0Sula <\/em>\u00a0maps a discourse of maternal intimacy as a means of reclaiming a sense of self as well as a sense of community. Missy Dehn Kubitschek (1998) maintains that the distinguishing characteristic of feminist criticisms is their feminocentricity, the exploration of issues and interests of women \u201cfrom women\u2019s points of view.\u201d The two main female characters, Sula and Nel, are drawn together out of a shared lived experience as black women in a white patriarchal society.<\/p>\n

Sula and Nel met out of a common experience: both only children, both isolated, their friendship is a surrogate for the intimacy denied them in both the family and community.\u00a0 \u2018Because 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.\u00a0 Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on.\u00a0 Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula\u2019s because he was dead; Nel\u2019s because he wasn\u2019t), they found in each other\u2019s eyes the intimacy they were looking for\u2019 (52).\u00a0 There are critics who attempt to read the intimacy between Sula and Nel as a lesbian relationship.\u00a0 Barbara Smith (1985), for example, argues that the novel \u2018works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate friendship between Sula and Nel but because of Morrison\u2019s consistently criitical stance toward the heterosexual institutions of male\/female relationships, marriage and the family\u2019 (165).\u00a0 Smith\u2019s reading of Sula <\/em>is symptomatic of a feminist scholarship which has focused on the study of femininity and alienation, central to stories about women\u2019s identity, frequently concentrating on heterosexual conflict at the expense of the individual relationships and communities constructed between women.\u00a0 Deborah McDowell and Alisha Coleman refute Smith\u2019s analysis, claiming that the intimacy between the two characters is an act of platonic union and a reaction against the authority of white patriarchy.\u00a0 Both arguments have merit: Coleman\u2019s analysis of the platonic intimacy is valid given the prerogative of reclaiming black kinship and community, but Smith\u2019s reading allows for the fragmented relationships within the black community.\u00a0 As Sula tells Jude, \u2018Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to [black men\u2019s] cuffs.\u00a0 Even little children \u2013 white and black, boys and girls \u2013 spend all their childhood eating their hearts out \u2018cause they think you don\u2019t love them.\u00a0 And if that ain\u2019t enough, you love yourselves.\u00a0 Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man\u2019 (104).\u00a0 It is implied in Sula\u2019s speech that the heterosexual bond is fickle and unstable because of the male ego, whereas the female friendship is reciprocal and enduring.\u00a0 This is the myth to which Sula and Nel cling, but is tested by Sula\u2019s betrayal.<\/p>\n

Returning after ten years away from The Bottom, Sula\u2019s sexual exploits alienate her from the rest of the community.\u00a0 Refusing to maintain the family home and to conform to the heterosexual normativity of marriage, Sula\u2019s one constant was her relationship with Nel.\u00a0\u00a0 Sula \u2018had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing \u2026 Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her.\u00a0 Now she wanted everything, and all because of that<\/em>.\u00a0 Nel was the first person who had been real to her, whose name she knew, who had seen as she had the slant of life that made it possible to stretch to its limits\u2019 (120). Despite having travelled the country and gained a college education, Sula is still rejected and ostracised because she refuses to conform to the ideology of black womanhood to which Nel submits.\u00a0 As they grow and move apart, Sula and Nel recognise their inherent differences, but it is only after Sula\u2019s death that Nel realises their friendship is a bond which nurtures the construction of a new, privileged black womanhood.<\/p>\n

Morrison reveals the construction of motherhood in the context of the African-American experience. \u00a0Responding to the interrelationship between gender, class and race, Morrison creates situations which concentrate on the way in which black women attempt to structure their own social orders but who are limited by their class and race identities.\u00a0 Sula <\/em>foregrounds the conflicted status of race and gender in post-slavery American culture.\u00a0 The inhabitants of The Bottom represented a political system which \u2018represent a political system which has enslaved a people, emancipated a people, enfranchised them, disenfranchised them\u2019 (Hunt 459).\u00a0 Sula and Nel, born into a social position of instability and loss, turn toward each other to reclaim the fractured story of African womanhood in a bond which recreates the nurturing intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/strong>
Collins, P. (1987) \u201cThe Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother-Daughter Relationships\u201d Sage<\/em> 4:2, pp. 3-10<\/p>\n

Feng, P. (1998), The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Kingston. A Postmodern Reading. New York: Chelsea House<\/p>\n

Joseph, G. (1986) Black Mothers and Daughters: Their Roles and Function in American Society. Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives<\/em>, by Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Boston, MA: South End Press, pp. 75\u2013126<\/p>\n

Hirsch, M. (1990) Maternal Narratives: \u2018Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood.\u2019 Reading Black Reading Feminist<\/em>. ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Meridian Books, 415-30<\/p>\n

Hunt, P. (1993) War and Peace: Transfigured Categories and the Politics of Sula. African American Review <\/em>27: 443-59<\/p>\n

Kubitschek, M.D.(1998) Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion.Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press<\/p>\n

Morrison, T. (1973) Sula. <\/em>London: Chatto & Windus Ltd.
Mulvey, L. (1981) Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience. Visual and Other Pleasures<\/em>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 159-76<\/p>\n

Smith, B. (1985) Toward a Black Feminist Criticism. The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory.<\/em> ed. Elaine Showalter. London: Pantheon Books, pp. 168-185<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toni Morrison\u2019s Sula is a novel in the tradition of African-American literature. Toni Morrison\u2019s Sula is a novel in the tradition of African-American literature, exploring the legacy of the African diaspora through the images of loss and recovery.\u00a0 Sula is set in a black community in the Midwest called The Bottom, and centres on the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5858],"tags":[9790,9869,9870,9889,3953,9940,9799,9939],"class_list":["post-75472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-literature","tag-assignment-help-for-masters-students","tag-au","tag-complete-the-assignment-in-a-page-paper","tag-in-1050-word-essay","tag-need-help-writing-a-masters-thesis","tag-online-class-course-exam-help","tag-research-essay-pro","tag-write-my-essay-homework-due-in-hours"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75472\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colapapers.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}