critical analysis essay on sula

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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 19, 2021 • ( 0 )

Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison’s second published novel. Like The Bluest Eye , the novel is a story of two girls coming of age. As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of a whole, often seeming to complete each other in opposition.

As they reach and achieve maturity, the differences in the girls’ responses to the pressure to conform to the norms of their community separate them and split their bond, which is not reconciled until the end of the novel. Sula confronts issues of loyalty, family, assimilation, innocence, gender, and sexuality, but is at its heart an examination of the priorities that determine the character, quality, and relationships of a woman’s lifetime.

Sula begins with the story of an African-American neighborhood that once existed on the periphery of a town called Medallion. The story of the neighborhood unfolds years after it has ceased to exist. The neighborhood was called the Bottom because a white farmer, rather than give his freed slave the land he had been promised, lied to the man and told him that the land in the hills was more valuable. The deceptive farmer called the land in the hills the bottom of heaven, and thus the neighborhood acquired its name.

“1919” tells the story of the shell-shocked African-American soldier, known as Shadrack, who returns from combat without any memory of who he is or where he comes from. This rootless man is haunted by his hands, which, in his delirium, continue to grow monstrously large every time he looks at them. After he is released, his perceptions of the out-of-control growth of his hands stop when he finally sees that his face, unlike that of the soldier he saw die in France, is still attached and intact. More than anything else, Shadrack fears death, and so, in an effort to contain his fears, he invents a holiday entitled National Suicide Day, the only day, according to his perceptions, on which death will occur. Through his belief that he has artificially controlled death, Shadrack is able to contain his fear and to begin a new life on the outskirts of the Bottom in a shack once owned by his grandfather. For sustenance, he sells fish to the people of the Bottom.

Shadrack celebrates National Suicide Day by holding a noose and ringing a cowbell and admonishing the townspeople that this is their one annual opportunity to kill themselves or each other. Although the people of the Bottom at first fear Shadrack and National Suicide Day, they grow accustomed to it and him. National Suicide Day, like Shadrack himself, becomes a point of reference in their lives.

“1920” introduces the Wrights, Nel’s family. Nel’s mother, Helene Sabat Wright, is a Creole from New Orleans who spends her life escaping from the legacy of her mother’s occupation as a prostitute. She marries a ship’s cook, Wiley Wright, and moves to the Bottom where the people of the town admire her long hair and light skin. Helen keeps both her daughter and her house oppressively neat.

When Nel is 10 years old, Helene returns to New Orleans as her grandmother is dying. During the trip she is insulted by a white conductor who believes that she is trying to sit in the Whites Only car. Rather than respond with dignity, Helene smiles at the man’s insults. Witnessing the event, Nel fears that she may have no more substance than her mother possesses. After the trip, meeting her grandmother, and attending her great-grandmother’s funeral, Nel feels that she is a person separate from her mother for the first time. Although she does not know it at the time, the trip to the New Orleans funeral is the only one she ever takes out of the Bottom. The trip, however, does embolden her to make a new friend, Sula Peace.

Unlike the Wrights, Sula lives in a house and with a family that is defined by its relative disorder and chaos. Unlike the traditional familial configuration the Wrights maintain, the Peaces are extended family consisting of the matriarch, Eva Peace, her daughter, Hannah Peace, her son, Plum, her granddaughter, Sula, as well as various and sundry boarders and visitors who occupy the house at various times. The house is teeming with human energy and activity.

The story of how the house came to be and how Eva acquired the resources to build her house at 7 Carpenter Road is shrouded in mystery: Abandoned by her husband, Boy Boy, and helpless to feed or protect her children, Eva leaves for a year and returns to the Bottom without a leg, but with all of the money she needs. Following a visit from her delinquent husband, Boy Boy, Eva determines to spend the rest of her life hating him for his abandonment.

Eva is generous with her house and her resources. When abandoned and neglected children arrive at her door, she always takes them in. In 1921, three such boys arrive at the Peace household. Eva names them all Dewey, and the boys start to resemble each other, eventually becoming indistinguishable. Another outcast, an alcoholic white mountain man that Eva calls TAR BABY, also comes to live at the Peace residence.

Both Hannah and Eva are nonchalant but interested in men. Sula learns from observation that men are fun but dispensable. Eva unintentionally confirms this point of view for her granddaughter when, in 1921, she sets Plum on fire in his sleep. She sees herself as rescuing Plum from infantilization by allowing him to die as a man.

Nel and Sula become fast friends as they grow older and both girls are drawn to the dreams of adolescence, fantasies of the opposite sex and of being loved. The girls’ dreams of love are different though. Nel imagines herself a passive princess with an imaginary someone to share the details of her fantasy dress, bed, and flowers. Sula, on the other hand, imagines a beloved observing her as she rides with him on a horse. The differences in the dreams distinguish the girls, their experiences and expectations, as well as foreshadow their future choices.

The girls not only share dreams but also adventures as they pick their precarious paths toward adulthood. When the girls are hassled on the way home by Irish boys, Sula frightens the gang off by cutting off the tip of her own finger. On another summer day, just before the girls run off on an exploit, Sula overhears her mother saying that she loves Sula, but that she does not like her. This information hurts the child and changes her relationship with Hannah. The girls then run off to play and distract themselves by digging a hole deep in the earth with twigs. The girls stop when Nel’s twig breaks and throw all of the detritus they can find into the hole, and then they refill the hole with earth.

Almost immediately, a little neighborhood boy, Chicken Little, wanders by. The girls tease him and then, playfully, swing him around in a circle. When Sula accidentally lets go of the boy’s hands, he falls into the river and drowns. Shadrack witnesses the event and, in language she does not understand, promises to keep her secret. Sula accidentally leaves the belt of her dress in Shadrack’s shack.

The events that culminate in Chicken Little’s death are a secret that Nel and Sula share as well. It is one of the key moments that the girls experience as they move from childhood to adulthood. The girls keep the secret throughout their lives.

The occurrence of three strange events defines this chapter. The first instance that Eva finds out of sync is a question of Hannah. The second peculiar occurrence is a wind storm without lightning, thunder, or rain. The third event is Hannah’s dream of a red wedding dress.

Hannah begins this chapter by asking her mother the question Eva finds so disturbing. Hannah asks Eva whether she ever loved her children. Eva is offended by the question and Hannah never gets the response she desires. Eva sees love as a pragmatic thing that you do, while Hannah wonders about Eva’s feelings, which remain largely hidden and mysterious. Then Hannah asks Eva why she killed Plum. Eva tries to explain that Plum’s addiction after the war had so impaired him that he is no longer able to function as an adult. As such, Eva feels that she had no choice but to relieve the man’s suffering by ending his life.

Shortly thereafter, as Eva looks out her window while combing her hair, she sees Hannah on fire. Using the fastest method she can imagine, Eva breaks the glass in her window and leaps out trying to land on top of Hannah and save the life of her burning daughter. Eva misses Hannah, but survives the fall. Hannah dies as a result of her injuries. After her fall, as she lies on the ground, Eva sees Sula watching the scene. Eva believes that Sula is not moved to help her mother.

This chapter begins with Nel’s marriage to Jude Greene, an attractive, popular 20-year-old man. Jude believes that marriage to Nel will be the transition to manhood denied to him by racism. With the exception of her relationship with Sula, Nel has very little sense of herself and marries Jude because she believes he needs her. After the wedding, Sula leaves the Bottom for 10 years.

Sula returns to the Bottom during a time when the community experiences an abnormal proliferation of robins. The unnatural abundance of the birds becomes permanently associated with Sula’s return in the mind of the community. The community needs to objectify evil and, as one who does not conform to their ideals of normalcy, Sula becomes the personification of all that is bad and wrong.

Even Eva criticizes Sula’s lack of conformity and tells her that she needs to have children and that she needs a man. Sula says she is more interested in creating a self than in reproducing and decides that Eva needs to be placed in a nursing home. Later, she reveals to Nel that she has Eva committed because she is afraid of her.

In this chapter, Sula’s return also profoundly impacts Nel’s life. Sula casually sleeps with Jude. When they are discovered, Jude responds by leaving immediately. Nel blames Sula and begins to define her life in terms of Jude’s absence from it. The fundamental difference between the two women becomes apparent. Nel cannot adapt to the change in her circumstances and sees the changeability of life as the source of the problem. This belief contrasts with Sula’s earlier observation that hell is stasis, permanence without change. Without evaluating whether events are right or wrong, Sula’s outlook is more in line with the reality of life’s perpetual motion and transition.

Nel imagines her pain as a gray ball of fur that follows her, just out of sight. Its presence frightens her but becomes the defining reality of her life. Rather than moving beyond her loss, Nel chooses to try to freeze her life and to cling to the gray remains of the part of her life that has passed.

In the wake of Eva’s institutionalization and Jude’s desertion of Nel, Sula becomes the town pariah. As a final transgression, the men of the town accuse Sula of sleeping with white men. Although this accusation is never substantiated, it is universally believed and is interpreted as the ultimate break between Sula and the community. Everything that happens that is negative in the Bottom becomes associated with Sula. Sula becomes the embodiment of evil and makes the people of the Bottom feel superior by comparison.

Interestingly, because there is some tangible presence to blame for all of their trials, the people of the Bottom are kinder and more compassionate toward each other after Sula’s return. Sula is misunderstood. She is a woman who is sexually, psychologically, and culturally liberated in a time and space where there is no place for a free woman. Even sexuality is for her not an act of union, but of self-affirmation. She does not need the traditional markers—wife, mother, lover—to define herself.

In spite of all her independence, Sula falls into a possessive love with A. Jacks, Albert Jacks. Jacks is attracted to her because he believes that she is self-possessed and independent enough to love him without controlling or trying to own him. Sula falls into the trap of trying to keep him—to make love that is fixed and unchanging. She forgets that nothing alive can ever be permanent. A. Jacks’s absence when he leaves Sula sends her into an isolation and despair that manifests as illness.

When Sula is dying, Nel comes to visit her. The visit allows Nel to feel superior and to act as if her motives are selfless. She gets Sula’s medicine from the drugstore and then the two old friends talk about their lives. Sula stresses that even though she is dying alone, it is her choice that she does so— that freedom is not about escaping the inevitability of death but embracing that reality and fashioning it on her own terms. Sula makes a final speech to Nel about the need for breaking down oppositions and categories, something she has tried to do with her life. Then Sula asks Nel why she is so certain of her position as the good one, the right one, a question Nel is not able to answer. Sula dies and her first thought after realizing that she is dead is that she wants to share the experience with Nel.

News of Sula’s death is met with rejoicing in the Bottom. The people see it as a good omen. Their perceptions are reinforced when they hear rumors that blacks will be employed in constructing the tunnel that will allow easy passage of the river. The other news they view as a sign is the construction of an integrated nursing home that Eva will move to from the original dilapidated colored women’s home where Sula leaves her.

After their hopefulness, the Bottom experiences a devastating ice storm that hurts them physically, psychologically, and economically and ruins their Thanksgiving. With Sula gone, the town has no one to blame for its misfortune and the inhabitants resume the behavior they had before Sula’s return.

The narrative returns to Shadrack and reveals his slowly emerging awareness. He begins to feel lonely and to miss the company of others. He sees Sula’s body and begins to comprehend that his solution to the problem of death, National Suicide Day, is ineffective. With a spirit of despair, Shadrack begins his marking of National Suicide Day 1941. The harsh weather the folks of the Bottom experienced following Sula’s death breaks just before the new year. As a result, they are open to Shadrack’s holiday in a way they have not been before.

Shadrack becomes a Pied Piper leading a large band of followers through the town and toward the river. When they get to the river, they see the excavation site for the tunnel, the tunnel they have not been allowed to work on because of racism. The joyous parade Shadrack begins transforms into an act of subversion as the people of the Bottom destroy the site of the tunnel construction. Some of them venture too far into the partially constructed tunnel and the structure collapses, killing many of them, including Mrs. Jackson, Tar Baby, Dessie, Ivy, and, possibly, the Deweys. While all of this happens, Shadrack stands on the adjacent hill ringing his bell.

This concluding chapter of Sula provides the perspective of the 55-year-old Nel on the post–World War II Civil Rights–era Bottom. She reflects that much has changed and that the people, particularly the young people, are less vital, less powerful than the youth she remembers. Nel does not have another long-term relationship after Jude leaves. The Bottom also changes, with whites now interested in the land in the hills and blacks eager to move to the valley.

Nel visits Eva in the new integrated nursing home, Sunnydale. While Eva seems somewhat out of touch with reality, imagining, for example, that she is ironing, she asks Nel about Chicken Little and how she and Sula killed him. She also tells Nel that she and Sula are the same, echoing Sula’s final question to Nel.

Nel leaves the nursing home disturbed and reflective. She recalls the events of Chicken Little’s death and ponders her own experience in and culpability for his death. She honestly admits that she enjoyed watching the boy slip from Sula’s hand. She walks to the cemetery where the Peace family members are buried and sees the birth and death dates of each member of the family as a kind of incantation, a hope for a kind of serenity in the face of the realities of human existence. Nel understands what Sula represents to the community, an embodiment of all that they fear: change, difference, and, most importantly, themselves. Nel also recognizes her connection to Sula and that her relationship with her friend, not her marriage, is what she has been mourning all of the years since Jude left.

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

In Sula ’s opening chapter, the narrator refers to the herb nightshade. Nightshade is a plant that has both medicinal and poisonous properties. As a symbol, its meaning may be either positive or negative, or even both simultaneously. Nightshade grows in the Bottom, the setting of the novel. The name of the Bottom comes from a deal between a slave master and the man he enslaves. The farmer does not wish to reward his slave with the best land, so he tells the man that the land up in the hills, the bottom land, is the best land, because it is the bottom of heaven. This definition, although intended to be malicious, calls into question the traditional definitions applied to various oppositions, such as good/ bad and valuable/worthless. Both the nightshade and the name of the community, the Bottom, establish the core concerns of Sula. The novel addresses the question of the accuracy of traditional, socially agreed upon definitions. Sula, through its exploration of the relationship between its central characters, is a critique of oppositions—bottom and top, clean and dirty, ordered and disordered. The herb, nightshade, and the soil in which it is rooted, set the stage for the drama that unfolds in the novel, which centrally concerns the coming-of-age of two young girls.

At its core, Sula is the story of two friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright. The girls come from two completely different homes. Sula Peace is the daughter of Hannah Peace and the granddaughter of Eva Peace. Sula’s grandfather, Boy Boy, abandons the family when her mother is a small child, and Sula’s father dies when Sula is young. As a result, Sula lives in a house dominated by women. From her observations of these women, Sula experiences life as a chaotic mix of different people in a house that has a random and eccentric design, one that mirrors the lifestyle of its inhabitants. As a result of her environment, Sula becomes a bold person, but she is uncertain about whether she is loved and about how to express affection for others.

On the other hand, Nel Wright, the child of Helene and Wiley Wright, lives in a meticulously ordered home. Her mother, Helene, is obsessed with ensuring that everything in the house is clean and in its proper place, and that desire extends to her daughter, Nel. Helene, through her insistence on perfection and on the importance of appearances, causes her daughter to feel inadequate and insecure. Nel internalizes an idealized notion of love, believing, along with many other young girls, that eventually she will be rescued from the tyranny of her mother’s home by a gallant young man whose only objective is the guarantee of her happiness.

The friendship of the two girls brings into question the central issues of the novel, namely, who is right and who is not. Nel Wright’s last name suggests this question and it is Nel who, through her experiences during her friendship with Sula, decides that she is the virtuous one. The community of the Bottom comes to agree with her conclusion.

The two girls draw from each other’s strengths and supplement each other in such a way that their weaknesses are less significant as a result of their friendship. This mutual affirmation and reassurance continues until the two are involved with a life altering event, the accidental drowning of a little boy, Chicken Little. As with many literary texts that deal with the subject of coming-of-age, Sula reveals the girls’ confrontation with the knowledge that brings about adulthood, particularly knowledge of sexuality and of death. In a climactic scene, Sula and Nel become familiar with both in a short period of time and, as a result, begin their divergent journeys into adulthood.

Just before the moment when Sula accidentally lets go of Chicken Little’s hands and sends him spiraling toward the river and his death, she and Nel dig a hole in the earth and throw all that they can find into the space in the earth. There are many ways this action by Nel and Sula can be interpreted. This scene has been understood by some critics to refer to the girls emerging sexuality. Creating the deep hole in the earth seems to be an almost sensual experience for the girls until they begin to fill the hole they create with debris. The scene may suggest that, as a result of living in the era and the place in which they are coming of age, Sula and Nel’s sexuality cannot develop in a way that would be wholesome and affirming for them both. Instead, their emerging womanhood is doomed to be polluted with all of the negative associations and definitions already assigned to it by the larger culture.

The impending separation between the two girls becomes apparent immediately after they fill the hole with debris. The girls do not talk to each other while they fill the hole together, and the activity fills the young girls with anxiety and tension, possibly predicting the eventual disintegration of their relationship. Because the accidental drowning of Chicken Little occurs immediately after the incident with the hole, there is an association for Nel and Sula between sexuality and death and their loss of innocence. This climactic moment results in their discarding what they perceive as waste, items that are, perhaps, symbolic of their lost innocence. Although Chicken Little’s body is found and buried, the earth cannot contain his memory and its presence in Nel and Sula’s lives. This event cements in Nel’s mind the ideal that she is the morally superior of the two girls.

When the two reach young adulthood, their choices reinforce Nel’s understanding of herself as good. In the time frame of the novel, the late 1920s, a woman was supposed to marry, settle down, and have children. This is the path Nel chooses as she marries Jude, an immature and unfulfilled man who believes that marriage will restore the manhood he feels deprived of as a result of racism. Nel’s choice reinforces the norms of her community and is therefore sanctioned and defined as the right path. On the other hand, Sula chooses to spend her young adulthood in college and then traveling and exploring the country. When she returns to the Bottom after 10 years of absence, Sula represents an alternative to the traditional life of women and is therefore perceived as negative, the embodiment of evil. The town uses Sula and her behavior as a way of demonstrating its moral superiority.

Sula returns to the Bottom and to Nel with her definition of their friendship intact. The girls have always shared everything and so Sula believes that she can share Jude, Nel’s husband. Jude and Sula have sex and Nel catches them during the act. Rather than trying to understand Sula’s action in terms of the girls’ lifelong friendship, Nel decides to judge the act in a way that supports her own understanding of herself as superior to Sula. Nel’s assessment of the situation leads her to adopt martyrdom following the affair and Jude’s abandonment of their marriage and children. After Jude leaves Nel, she has a feeling that reminds her of “mud and dead leaves” (107). This feeling connects Nel’s response to Sula and Jude’s affair with Chicken Little, his death and funeral, and her lost girlhood and innocence.

The negative associations the town holds of Sula are permanent, like dirt that cannot be washed away. She becomes the bottom of Medallion’s moral hierarchy. She refuses to conform to the traditional expectations of women, such as caretaking, and places her grandmother in a home rather than nurse the woman herself. Sula is a woman out-ofsync with the time in which she lives. There is no place for her consistent refusal to obey the rules. Her lack of sexual inhibition is damning in the eyes of the town. One member of the community finds her independence intriguing and appealing. Sula’s seeming self-possession attracts Ajax as it reminds him of his mother who is also a marginalized, yet powerful woman.

The relationship between Sula and Ajax is mutually satisfying until the experience of a love relationship with a man leads Sula to try to enter into a more conventional definition. This shift alienates Ajax and he leaves. In her desperation to keep Ajax, Sula characterizes him as water that needs to be mixed with loam to achieve stability. She is afraid, however, that she might instead make mud. This reference to mud is the nadir, or bottom, for Sula as, at that moment, she relinquishes her defining autonomy and independence and begins a rapid decline upon Ajax’s departure. As she lies on her deathbed Sula acknowledges her humanity and lack of shame as she tells Nel that she is unperturbed by her own dirt. At the end of her life, Sula comes to terms with her own humanity. Nel refuses to understand and characterizes Sula’s behavior in Medallion, the affairs with various men in the town, the lost friendships, and the relationship with Eva, as dirty. She still needs to define Sula as the bottom so that she can remain superior.

Years later, after defining her existence around the fact of Jude’s abandonment and Sula’s betrayal, Nel has an epiphany. She realizes that the relationship between the two women should have been beyond evaluation through simple judgments of right and wrong. Instead, the women should have been able to love and nurture their friendship without the imposition of the expectations of the community. The gray ball that Nel feels dissipating when she recognizes this reality is the remnants of her decision after Chicken Little’s death that the incident was Sula’s fault. As Nel takes responsibility, not only for the boy’s death, but also for her inability to forgive Sula’s affair with Jude, she begins to mourn the one real connection in her life, her relationship with Sula. Preserving the relationship, she learns too late, was much more important than deciding who was right and who was wrong. Like the nightshade that flourishes in the Bottom, Nel’s awareness is both devastating and healing. At the end of the novel she has the ability to experience her life without the limitations of judgment, but she also realizes the profundity of the loss of Sula.

SOME IMPORTANT THEMES AND SYMBOLS IN SULA

The mystery of shadrack.

Sula both begins and ends with Shadrack. The entire second chapter of the book is devoted to this character and, yet, throughout the rest of the novel, although he is always around, he is on the outskirts of the narrative. Like his biblical namesake, Shadrack has survived the ravages of war, yet the scars of his experiences on the battleground leave him unable to communicate fully with others. Shadrack’s psychic instability is rooted in the nonorganic world. When reconnected to the natural world or earth, he comes close to reassembling his fragmented psyche. When he exits the psychiatric hospital, the trees do not threaten him because they are embedded in the earth. Although his psyche seems fragmented, fundamentally he is rooted and senses essential truth.

Shadrack is alienated and isolated, yet is an integral member of the Bottom community. Shadrack understands the permanence of death and the destructive power human beings can render. His solution, National Suicide Day, is but a temporary containment of the inevitable, but from his perspective it eases the terror of the knowledge he has acquired. His annual ritual serves as a warning and reminder of the inevitabilities the residents of the Bottom face themselves, yet they do not understand the seriousness of the message delivered by a man they consider to be a familiar and harmless madman until the final National Suicide Day, when the realities Shadrack understands firsthand become tangible to the whole community. Shadrack’s mysterious promise to Sula, “always,” points toward his intimate understanding of the omnipresent reality of death.

The Sacrifices of Motherhood

Motherhood is a complicated and multidimensional experience as depicted throughout Morrison’s canon, and Sula is no exception. Through the dilemmas of its characters, Sula asks the reader to consider the roles and responsibilities of motherhood. Rather than foregrounding a patriarch as the head of a family group, Sula exposes the particular dilemma of Eva, a single mother struggling to raise her children alone without resources. Although the exact nature of her sacrifice is not detailed, in her desperation, Eva abandons her children to the care of a generous neighbor. After some time, Eva returns to her children with money, but no leg. Eva’s sacrifice obviously comes at great personal cost, but the ultimate value of her willing mutilation comes into question as her children become adults. Although they have material security, Eva’s children have emotional and psychological damage.

Eva’s son, Plum, returns from his service in the military addicted to heroin. After observing her son’s addiction, convinced that he will not recover, Eva takes his life by setting her son on fire. Eva does not feel that she kills her son but that she rescues him from a terrible fate.

Eva’s daughter Hannah does not have the same interpretation of the events as her mother. Hannah does not understand her mother’s actions as loving and asks Eva if she ever loved them. Eva does not understand what Hannah means by the question and responds with anger. Eva believes that her sacrifice speaks for itself and that she does not need to justify her love for her children. Nonetheless, Hannah clearly is uncertain about her mother’s feelings.

Unwittingly, Hannah puts that love to the test when, shortly after the conversation about maternal love, she catches on fire while boiling water to wash clothes. Eva sees her daughter burning and leaps out of the window in an attempt to put out the fire by landing on her daughter. Eva does not reach the burning woman and Hannah dies from her injuries. Eva is badly hurt, but survives.

This question of what it means to be a mother also affects the next generation of the Peace family. Hannah herself has a tentative and uncertain relationship with her own daughter, Sula. Right before the death of Chicken Little, Sula overhears her mother talking to a friend. Hannah says of her daughter that she loves her but does not like her. This devastating revelation hurts Sula and adds permanent ambivalence to their interactions. When Hannah catches on fire, Sula watches her mother burn.

Sula’s best friend Nel also has an uncertain relationship with her own mother, Helene Wright. Helene is the daughter of a prostitute. She is ashamed of her history and so tries to conform to what she understands as the proper way for a woman to behave. Helene imposes these expectations on her daughter, and grooms Nel for domesticity. Helene’s need for respectability imposes on her daughter the ideal of romance rather than more practical information about self-awareness and personal development. Helene needs her daughter’s life to vindicate the legacy of her mother’s occupation. As a result, Nel enters into an unfulfilling marriage and wastes most of her adult life mourning its loss.

In turn, after her marriage fails, Nel turns to her children for emotional fulfillment they cannot provide. Her children are eager to escape into adulthood, away from her needy over-attentiveness.

Sula presents the complex sacrifices of motherhood without idealizing them. Each of the mothers in the text feels that she is doing what is necessary to provide for her child what she needs, and yet none of them succeed in passing on to their daughters what they actually need.

The Impacts of Shame

Throughout the novel, Sula is the primary focus of the town’s various attempts to find a scapegoat to shame. Shame in the Bottom is expressed in relation to Sula. Shame is attributed by the weak-hearted to those who do not feel shame. The townspeople believe that their judgments of Sula will create in her a sense of shame. People in the community so associate her with what is wrong, that they refuse to look at her or to interact with her in the same way that they would with each other. Despite her many judgments, even Nel feels compassion for Sula’s “shamed” eyes, but Sula’s independence and freedom do not permit her to feel shame herself. Jude is also associated with shame in Nel’s assessment. Jude does not seem ashamed himself, even when Nel witnesses his and Sula’s affair. In fact, neither Jude nor Sula feel shame at that moment.

Nel is the only character in the novel who openly admits her own shame. She feels shame when Jude leaves her. Nel feels this shame because her status as a wife and mother is destroyed. Her inability to conform to the community’s expectations causes Nel to feel ashamed.

Before Sula throws Chicken Little into the river, his cries of delight alarm the birds. When Sula returns to Medallion after 10 years’ absence, robins and other birds overwhelm the town. The residents of Medallion perceive the presence of the birds, and by association, Sula, as a plague of biblical significance. Eva remarks that the unusual number of birds is a sign of Sula’s return. The birds’ departure creates a magical absence in Medallion, a delight in their non-being. This feeling Nel expresses lends ambiguity to the meaning and significance of Sula’s return.

Often the night seems to have a protective function for the residents of Medallion. Morrison compares Shadrack’s desire to see his own face to moonlight sneaking under a window shade. Helene sews late into the night to make herself a dress of heavy velvet to wear for her return to the South. Nel makes the discovery of individual selfhood, separate from her mother, at night. Eva relieves Plum of his constipation during a late winter night.

Night also functions in the novel as a time of fear and destruction. When her children are young, Eva can find work only at night, which forces her to leave them alone. Eva burns Plum to death at night. A bargeman finds Chicken Little’s body in the river at night.

Sula and Nel’s climactic digging in the earth before Sula’s accidental flinging of Chicken Little into the river has sexual, possibly lesbian overtones. This climactic moment results in their discarding what they perceive as waste, items that are, perhaps, symbolic of their lost innocence during the scene that immediately precedes Chicken Little’s death. Although Chicken Little’s body is found and buried, the earth cannot contain his memory and its presence in Nel and Sula’s lives. After Jude leaves Nel, she has a feeling that reminds her of “mud and dead leaves.” This feeling is associated for Nel with Chicken Little, his death and funeral, and her lost girlhood and innocence. (107) Nel also associates mud with her characterization of the sexual relationship between Sula and Jude as dirty.

The Free Fall

In Sula, Morrison defines one of the central themes that repeat throughout her canon. After Jude leaves Nel, she closes off her life to possibility and clings to a past that can never be recovered. The narrator says that she becomes like an insect clinging to a wall to avoid the inevitable plummet to the bottom. The narrator suggests that, as the fall is inevitable, the more graceful and fulfilling thing to do would be to give into the free fall, the unavoidable end of life—death. This passage contains one of the first articulations of Morrison’s ruminations on the difficult human reality of accepting death. This passage suggests that, since one cannot avoid death, the best strategy is an artful acceptance of that truth and the full embrace of life, no matter how brief.

Ajax (A. Jacks, Albert Jacks)

Ajax is an intelligent and attractively lazy man who loves women and treats them well. When Nel and Sula walk to Edna Finch’s Mellow House for ice cream cones, they have to walk past the group of young men that hang around the businesses on Carpenter’s Road. The young men in cream-colored trousers and lemon-yellow gabardines comment on the girls walking past, and the one who is best able to manipulate his language is Ajax. He is a beautiful young man, and the girls are delighted when he pays them the compliment of saying “pigmeat” as they walk by. Years later, Sula falls in love with him, and by the time of his departure, she has become possessive. This new desire for ownership seems to instigate the decline in her health that eventually leads to her death.

Sula proposes that women often fall in love with men and, when they do, find themselves desirous of possessing them, but Ajax does not want to be tied down. He has an affair with Sula because he is attracted to her independence and aloofness. Once she begins to fall in love with him, however, he leaves her.

As previously mentioned, Ajax, the man in the yellow gabardine pants, is an object of sexual desire for Sula from early age. Morrison characterizes him as gold. His name also suggests the similarly named Trojan warrior who was a good soldier but was also very arrogant. Ajax loves airplanes. He brings Sula milk, but she won’t drink it; she just admires the bottles it comes in. He also is the only man who really talks to Sula. The mythological Ajax is like Ajax, Morrison’s character, particularly with respect to his sexual prowess and to his ability to leave women easily. Ajax defends the helpless. He is reputed to shoot at Mr. Finley when he learns that the man shoots at his own dog.

The irony of his name manifests in the fact that his real name is Albert Jacks, A. Jacks, and that Sula never knows his real name until she finds his driver’s license. Sula misses Ajax after he has left. Once she discovers that his real name is Albert Jacks, however, she seems to realize that she never could have loved him because she did not even know him.

Ajax’s Mother

Ajax’s mother is described as a beautiful, neglectful, toothless, evil conjure woman who has seven sons that worship her and bring her the items she needs—the detritus of humanity—for her work, witchcraft. Her sons are open and respectful of women and they adore and admire her above, and perhaps to the exclusion of, all other women.

She ignores standards of beauty but, according to the narrator, if she took care of herself she would be a beautiful woman. She does not care about such superficial concerns as beauty. Ajax loves his mother and her independence deeply. It is Sula’s similarity to his mother in this respect that initially attracts Ajax to her. Ajax’s mother is an incarnation of the black, traditionally mystical conjure woman in African-American literature. bargeman

The white bargeman finds Chicken Little’s body after Sula accidentally throws it into the river. When he finds the boy’s body, he puts it in a sack for several days. He regrets having picked up the body because he does not want to return the two miles downriver to Medallion to find the family of the boy. The bargeman and the sheriff of the neighboring town give the body to the ferryman to return to Medallion.

Nel has a brief relationship with a bartender at a hotel in Medallion, but the tryst does not develop into anything lasting.

Betty (Teapot’s Mamma)

Betty is the neglectful and irresponsible mother of a little boy named Teapot. The woman has a drinking problem and a reputation as a bad mother, until Sula returns to town and the town turns against her. When Teapot falls on Sula’s stairs, the town believes Betty’s story that Sula was responsible for the boy’s accident, transforming Betty into a good mother. She does a little dance in celebration when she learns of Sula’s death. After Sula’s death, Betty returns to her original, neglectful patterns of mothering.

Black Soldiers on Train

The soldiers on the train are first sympathetic and then scornful of Helene when she smiles at the abusive and racist conductor. Nel is ashamed of her mother after seeing the looks in their eyes.

Boy Boy is Eva’s husband. He leaves his wife and three children after five years of an unsatisfactory marriage in which he has been unfaithful and abusive. After a few years he returns to visit Eva. He arrives looking smug and prosperous rather than regretful. He has expensive city clothes and an easy, pleasant manner. The entire time he visits with Eva, he does not ask her about their children. His new city girlfriend waits outside for him.

After he leaves, Eva realizes that she will always hate Boy Boy and that this hatred will be her obsession in this life. At this point, Eva also begins to retreat into her bedroom and to live a reclusive life.

Boy Boy’s name sets him up as an immature, irresponsible father who abandons his children to pursue his own boyish and selfish pleasures. He is nowhere near a match for Eva when it comes to responsibility and adulthood. Boy Boy may represent the losses inherent in the move toward the North and the city, as he leaves behind his family and heritage. Eva’s response to his abandonment also may demonstrate that hatred, as much as love, can keep a person from moving forward in life.

Cecile Sabat

Cecile Sabat is Helene’s grandmother and the woman who raises her. Cecile rescues Helene from her mother Rochelle’s brothel when Helene is a little girl. The description of the soft lights and colors in Sundown House where Rochelle lives and works compared with the restrictive religious conventions of Cecile’s house makes Helene’s rescue seem ambiguous.

Although it would not have been proper, Helene probably would have found more love and pleasure in the easygoing arms of her mother than she did in the strict embrace of her grandmother. This possibility illustrates another theme in Sula, the idea that what is thought of as right and proper behavior can be arbitrary and may not necessarily be the best course of action.

Cecile disapproves of her daughter’s actions and instills in Helene a conservative outlook on life as well as shame about her past. Cecile raises Helene to be on guard always for signs of “her mother’s wild blood.” When Cecile’s middle-aged nephew Wiley comes for a visit, Cecile marries Helen off to him to get her as far away from her mother’s background as possible.

Chicken Little

Chicken Little is the little child Sula throws into the water and who subsequently drowns. Sula does not intend to murder Chicken Little. She is merely playing with him when the accident happens. Before the accident, she helps him climb a tree and, when she unintentionally lets go of the boy, she is swinging him in circles for fun.

Neither Sula nor Nel tell anybody about Chicken Little’s death because they are frightened of the ramifications. The boy is found by a bargeman three days after the accident and is unrecognizable by the time of the funeral. The events surrounding Chicken Little’s death demonstrate the indifference with which the world treats the life and death of a young black boy.

This incident with Chicken Little occurs shortly after Sula overhears her mother saying she does not like her. This day seems pivotal in Sula’s life because she is shocked to find out that she cannot count on her mother’s love, and then she finds that she cannot count on herself either, since she accidentally killed someone. These revelations free her to the point where she has no center anymore and so she is left to invent herself.

Although Chicken Little’s body is found and buried, the earth cannot contain his memory and its presence in Nel and Sula’s lives.

China is “the most rambunctious whore in town,” whose death evokes more sympathy from the town than when Sula dies. She has a black son and a white son, neither of whom cares when they are told that their mother is dying. China is also a character in The Bluest Eye .

As Helene and Nel board the train for New Orleans and Helene’s grandmother’s funeral, the conductor questions Helene for walking through the white car. Although he is rude and abusive, Helene smiles at him. Nel sees her mother differently after that smile.

Dessie gossips with Cora about Sula after seeing Shadrack tip his hat to her.

Dessie represents an average member of the Medallion community. She lives downstairs from her friend Ivy. Dessie is a Big Elk daughter and is therefore seen as an authority. Dessie says that she sees Shadrack tip an imaginary hat to Sula, which is proof of Sula’s wickedness. She is the first to see Shadrack coming down the road on the last and fatal National Suicide Day. She laughs at his presence because she can see death approaching in the sunshine and feels unafraid. She, like many others, Tar Baby, the Deweys, dies in the tunnel that day. The people of Medallion argue about whether she was the first one to come out and join Shadrack.

Eva names three children that she takes in Dewey, although they are nothing alike. They are a year or two apart in age and, although they all have different skin and eye coloring, they grow to be so much the same in everyone’s mind that no one can tell them apart.

Eva uses the term “dewey” as a generic word for them, effectively canceling their individualities. They differ in appearance, age, and temperament; however, the similarity of their names causes the boys to develop a deep and intense bond. Soon, no one can tell the three boys apart. They are mischievous and, although they grow older, they remain forever childlike. The mysterious trinity of characters with the name Dewey repeatedly drinks milk after they arrive at the Peace house. The Deweys’ milk consumption may represent their status as orphans, motherless children who cannot find the nurturance they need in order to transcend childhood.

The Deweys demonstrate the power of naming and the resiliency of friendship. They are reborn when they move into Eva’s house and are all considered the same age, as if nothing happened to them before they came to her house. The boys do not grow. They all remain 48 inches tall and are said to have gorgeous teeth. Although no one ever finds their bodies, the town assumes that they die in the tunnel on the last National Suicide Day.

Edna Finch is the owner of the Mellow House, Medallion’s ice cream parlor.

Eva Peace is Sula’s grandmother. Eva marries young and has three children, but after five years of marriage, her husband leaves. Her children are Hannah, Pearl, and Plum. The baby boy, Plum, quit having bowel movements as a baby at a time when Eva had no food left. Eva uses the last of her lard to lubricate her finger to unclog his bowels. This experience brings her to the realization that she has to do something drastic to get food for her children.

She is left without the means to support herself or her three children and, therefore, leaves them with a neighbor, Mrs. Suggs, for 18 months. When Eve returns, she comes back without one of her legs but with enough money to survive. Whether she sticks the leg under a train and is paid off by the train company or whether she sold it to a hospital for $10,000 never is definitively known.

Eva is a strong, proud, and beautiful woman despite the missing leg. She has many lovers and opens her house to all sorts of boarders, vagrants, and children. Eva kills her own child, Plum, after he returns from the war mentally disturbed and addicted to heroin. She douses him with kerosene and sets him on fire because she believes, metaphorically speaking, that he is trying to crawl back into her womb.

On the other hand, she nearly kills herself jumping out a window in an attempt to quench the flames that ultimately kill her other child Hannah. Eva does these things out of love for her children.

Sula puts Eva in a rest home because she feels threatened by her. The two women are independent, strong, and concerned with self-preservation. When they love or hate, they do so fiercely and deeply. The two women are too much alike to live amiably within the same household. Eva’s love is the toughest of love. She is consistent and honest in the way she lives. Her name connects her to Eve, the first woman. She is the first and the last, the matriarch of the Peace women.

Sarcastically described as a good white farmer, this man promises his slave freedom and a piece of bottom land if the slave will perform some very difficult chores for him. When the slave has completed the tasks, this farmer convinces the slave that the less-than-desirable hilltop land is really better because it is at the bottom of heaven and so the spot comes to be called the Bottom.

Hannah Peace

Hannah is Eva’s oldest child and Sula’s mother. After her husband Rekus dies, Hannah has a string of lovers. She is free and easy with her sexuality because, like Eva, she likes maleness and men. She makes the men feel perfect as they are and she is therefore respected by her lovers. She has the attitude that making love to men is a pleasant but unremarkable activity and she does it whenever she feels the need or desire.

Hannah makes no demands at all of the men she loves—just accepts them as they are, so they bask and relax in her company. Sula adopts her mother’s attitude and believes that men are to be enjoyed whenever she feels like it. This philosophy contributes to and explains Sula’s ability as an adult to seduce Nel’s husband, Jude.

Hannah, like Helene, is a distant mother. She is so preoccupied with her lovers and friends that she does not nurture or coddle Sula. Sula even overhears her mother say that she does not like her, although she loves her. The distance between mother and child allows Sula to watch, disinterested, as her mother burns to death.

Hannah is a diluted, more relaxed version of Eva. She teaches Sula her views on sex, but Sula takes them, along with everything else she learns from the women of her family, to a new and different level. Of the three women, Hannah has the weakest, most passive personality.

Helene Sabat Wright

Helene is born to a Creole prostitute, Rochelle Sabat, but is raised by her grandmother, Cecile Sabat. After a short courtship, she marries Wiley Wright, a seaman and cousin who is absent for long periods of time due to his occupation as a seaman on the Great Lakes. After being married for nine years, Helene gives birth to her only child, Nel. Helene is a lot like Geraldine in The Bluest Eye. She is a proper, controlled AfricanAmerican woman who feels superior to the rest of her community and enjoys controlling the “funkiness” in her daughter Nel.

Helene is embarrassed and ashamed of her own blackness, as evidenced by her ingratiating encounter with a white train conductor. This shame and embarrassment of her heritage is also symbolized by Helene’s encounter with her mother, Rochelle Sabat, when Nel and Helene return to New Orleans after Cecile Sabat dies. Helene refuses to allow Nel to speak or learn Creole, her native language. Helene’s oppressive wish to shed her poor black roots leads to Nel’s ignorance of her own heritage and to the death of language. Nel’s mother, upstanding and powerful in the community, wellmannered, conservative, and often emotionless, manages to suppress the desires of her daughter Nel.

Helene is described as an impressive woman who is convinced that she has the authority as social arbiter in Medallion. She holds sway both in her social and church activities and over her husband and daughter, whom she manipulates to suit herself.

Henri Martin

Henri Martin is a resident of New Orleans and, apparently, a friend or acquaintance of Cecile Sabat. He writes a letter to Helen informing her about her grandmother’s illness and urging Helene to return to New Orleans immediately. Herrod Brothers, the The Herrod Brothers join Shadrack’s parade on the last National Suicide Day.

Hester is the daughter of one of Hannah’s friends, Valentine or Patsy. In 1922, Hester is grown and out of the house and her mother says that she is not sure that she loves her daughter. Hannah replies with her feelings about loving but not liking Sula.

The hovering gray ball

This ball appears to Nel, or would have appeared had she allowed herself to look at it. After the appearance of the gray ball, Nel finds she cannot allow herself to let out her personal howl of pain following the loss of Jude and her marriage. She feels the howl coming but it will not come. When she stands up, she believes that it is hovering just to the right of her in the air, just out of view.

It takes great effort for Nel not to look at the gray ball, so she is careful not to turn her head. The gray ball begins hovering in 1937, and it is not until 1965 that Nel is able to deal with the gray ball and all that it represents.

At the end of the book, a combination of events finally clarifies what the gray ball is. Nel visits with Eva who accuses her of Chicken Little’s death and tells her that she and Sula were the same. Nel flees the woman and walks past the cemetery where Sula is buried and then, after she has been thinking back about her complicity in Chicken Little’s death, Shadrack passes by and reminds her of that day. Nel is finally able to let out her cry of pain, as she realizes the gray ball is the pain of her longing, not for Jude, but for Sula.

Irene is the owner of Irene’s House of Cosmetology.

Ivy lives upstairs from Dessie. Dessie says that Ivy is the only person she tells about witnessing Shadrack tip his hat to Sula. Dessie says that Shadrack’s gesture is definitive proof that Sula is evil. Ivy dies on the last National Suicide Day when the river tunnel collapses.

Jake Freeman

Jake Freeman is one of the boys that Nel remembers as being beautiful in 1921. Jake has a brother, Paul Freeman.

John L. is a high school companion of Nel and Sula’s who is rumored to have attempted to have sex with a woman’s hip.

Jude Greene

Jude Greene is Nel’s husband. Jude Greene works at the Hotel Medallion as a waiter to help out his parents and their seven other children. Jude wants to work on the road crew, but they do not hire black workers. He really wants the job and all that it entails—the work clothes, the ability to say he built the road—the markers of masculinity in his world. It is his rage at not receiving the job and his determination to take on a man’s role that inspires him to ask Nel to marry him. In his disappointment, he finds that Nel can comfort him as he believes a wife should, so he presses her to marry him. He wants someone to nurture him, care for him, and soothe his wounded pride. Nel’s reluctance to marry is also an added incentive. Her reluctance makes the actual marriage seem like a conquest to Jude. Although Jude seems to Nel to be a model man at first, he cannot take the loss of manhood that racism precipitates. Eventually, Nel and Jude have three children together, two boys and a girl.

When Sula returns 10 years after their wedding, she seduces Jude. This act instigates the break in the women’s friendship that is never repaired. Nel cannot understand why Sula sleeps with Jude, and Sula cannot understand why Nel makes such a big deal about a sexual act and why Nel does not forgive her. In the very long run, Jude is merely an obstacle in Sula and Nel’s relationship. Sula feels she is doing Nel a favor by ruining her draining marriage, but it is only after Sula’s death that Nel realizes this.

After Sula leaves Medallion, Laura cooks for Eva out of the goodness of her heart. When Sula returns, she sends Laura away because she says she does not belong in the house. Sula tells Nel that she believes that Laura is stealing things from Eva’s house.

L.P. is one of the boys that Nel remembers as being beautiful in 1921. Mr. Buckland Reed Mr. Buckland Reed points out to Eva that the Deweys are different ages when Eva decides to send them to school. He reminds Eva that the youngest Dewey is only four, but Eva sends the boys to school together anyway.

Mr. Finley is known for beating his dog. Ajax shoots at him for his meanness toward the animal. Indulging in his 13-year tradition of sucking chicken bones on his front porch, Mr. Finley chokes and dies when he looks up and sees Sula.

Mr. and Mrs. Hodges

Mr. and Mrs. Hodges are the cemetery’s gravediggers who assist with Sula’s funeral. They also run a funeral parlor. Shadrack is cleaning leaves for the couple when he sees Sula’s body. This sight sends him into despair and leads to the final National Suicide Day.

Mrs. Buckland Reed

Mrs. Buckland Reed is a neighbor of the Peace family. Mrs. Jackson When Eva has no money, Mrs. Jackson lets her have milk from her cow. Mrs. Jackson eats ice. She is also described as greedy as she continues to make preserves in 1923 when she still has stores of preserves from 1920.

Mrs. Reed is the woman who takes the Deweys to school and registers them all for kindergarten. She tells the teacher that they are all cousins, that they are all six years old, and that all of their names are Dewey King.

Mrs. Scott’s twins

Mrs. Scott’s twins are two of the boys Nel remembers as being beautiful in 1921.

The otherwise undistinguished Nathan brings food to Sula when she is ill and near to death. He also gets her medicine and is the only one willing to care for her while she is an invalid. Nathan finds Sula’s body after her death. He knows she is dead because her mouth is open.

Nel Wright is the daughter of Helene and Wiley Wright. As a child Nel resolves to leave Medallion and travel, but her trip to New Orleans for Cecil’s funeral is the only time she ever leaves Medallion. Nel is changed by her trip to her greatgrandmother’s funeral. Her great-grandmother dies before they arrive. This trip is symbolic and sets up a frame for how the rest of the journeys in the story will work. It also sets up the dichotomies between North and South, life and death, truth and lies, and mothers and daughters.

Helene is not very visible for the rest of the novel, but she influences Nel and how Nel relates to Sula and the rest of the world. Nel has seen strange places and people, but most of all she has seen that her controlling mother is not the powerful figure Nel thought she was. After her return home, Nel realizes that she is not defined by her mother—that she is not just her parents’ daughter, but that she is herself.

This sense of “Me-ness” she experiences prepares the way for her to act on her impulse to be friends with Sula Peace, whom she noticed at school but knew her mother would not approve of. After the trip, Nel knows that she has some control over herself and has the courage to initiate friendship with Sula, a friendship that her mother Helene comes to approve of eventually.

Nel becomes best friends with Sula Peace. They develop a profound and intense friendship. Nel is with Sula when Sula accidentally throws Chicken Little in the lake, causing him to drown. Neither girl panics and Nel stands steadfastly by her friend.

Nel eventually marries Jude, has children, and settles down in Medallion. After a few years, her marriage with Jude becomes oppressive and burdensome. This burden is somewhat relieved when Sula returns to Medallion and the two once again resume their friendship. This renewed friendship is abruptly cut short when Nel finds Sula and Jude in bed together. Jude leaves Nel and she has to find a job to support her family.

Not until long after Sula dies does Nel realize that it is not Jude she has been mourning all those years. It was her friend Sula. Unlike Sula, Nel is an example of a woman overly dependent on others, namely, a man, for her own satisfaction. She is representative of the woman who marries early, never leaves her home town, and never truly discovers her own wants, needs, ideas, and feelings.

Nel is supposedly the good member of the Nel and Sula partnership. The way that she is raised causes her to lose sight of her dreams of being her own person, traveling, and of having a self-defined identity. Together, Sula and Nel have a complete, well-rounded life. They lost parts of themselves when they lost each other.

In the hospital where Shadrack is treated after returning shell-shocked from World War I, the male nurse is very unsympathetic to Shadrack’s condition and insists that he feed himself. Shadrack cannot manage the task because he thinks his hands have begun to grow gigantic and out-of-control and he cannot take them out from under the covers.

Shadrack becomes violent and is put in a straitjacket. Shadrack is so disoriented that he does not know who or what he is. A directive is issued that hospital space is needed, so Shadrack is dismissed from the army and from the hospital without having received the kind of treatment he needs to enable him to resume a normal life in society.

Old Willy Fields

Old Willy Fields is an orderly who notices Eva bleeding unattended in the hospital and gets the dying woman help. Afterward, Willy boasts that he saved Eva’s life. Eva did not want to be saved and curses Willy every day for the next 37 years.

Patsy and Valentine are Hannah’s friends. Sula overhears them talking about motherhood and children and hears her mother tell them she loves Sula, but does not like her—a defining moment in Sula’s maturation. Shortly after this revelation, Sula accidentally throws Chicken Little, and the innocence of childhood, into the river. After Sula becomes a grown woman and Hannah has died, Patsy turns against Sula and gossips, saying that Sula does not burp when she drinks beer.

Paul Freeman

Paul Freeman is one of the boys that Nel remembers as being beautiful in 1921. He has a brother, Jake Freeman.

Pearl (Eva Peace)

Pearl is Eva and Boy Boy’s second oldest child, the one Eva names after herself. Pearl marries at 14 and moves to Flint, Michigan. She sends her mother whiny, uninteresting letters about her husband, children, and minor troubles and encloses $2.

Plum Peace (Ralph)

Plum is Eva’s youngest child. Eva’s behavior toward Plum represents the extent of a mother’s love. As a child, Plum suffers from severe constipation. Eva uses the last bit of food she has to soften her fingers as she inserts them in his rectum to physically remove the hard stools from his bowels.

After returning from World War I, Plum becomes addicted to drugs. He does not wash. He steals and he sleeps for days. Out of love for him and sympathy for his unhappiness, Eva holds him tight one last time and then sets him on fire. She loves him enough to try to save his life as a child and enough not to watch him waste his life as an adult.

The police see Shadrack sitting next to the road and, making the assumption that he is drunk instead of sick, take him to jail. In the jail cell, Shadrack manages to see his own reflection in the toilet water and he begins to have some idea of who he is. The next day the sheriff reads his discharge papers from the army and arranges for someone to drop him off in Medallion.

Terrified by the unexpectedness of death and dying, Shadrack establishes National Suicide Day, January 3, as the day that everyone can kill either himself or someone else and get it all over with on the one day, thus removing the uncertainty from death and making it manageable in Shadrack’s mind.

Reba joins in on Shadrack’s parade on the last National Suicide Day.

Rekus is Sula’s father. Described as a laughing man, he dies when Sula is three years old, leaving both Hannah and Sula alone. Sula grows up without a father and this childhood loneliness provides part of the basis for her friendship with Nel. Rekus is really significant only because he is absent and therefore the Peace house is comprised mostly of women.

Reverend Deal

Reverend Deal is the religious and moral voice in Bottom. He denounces National Suicide Day and he delivers the moving sermon at Chicken Little’s funeral.

Rochelle Sabat

Rochelle Sabat is Helene’s mother and a prostitute at the Sundown House in New Orleans. Cecile Sabat, Rochelle’s mother, takes Helene from Rochelle because she feels that Rochelle’s occupation makes her an unfit parent. Rochelle and Helene see each other, for the first time in many years, at Cecile’s house before her funeral. Rochelle is dressed all in yellow, soft and smelling like gardenias. Nel finds her attractive and warm, yet the behavior between Rochelle and Helene is decidedly cool. Rochelle represents everything Helene wants to distance herself from— her poor, black, Creole heritage.

Rochelle seems free-spirited and affectionate. She seems to be like Sula and Hannah, which is why both Helene and Cecile do not wish to be associated with her. Interestingly, Nel finds her grandmother attractive and young-looking. Rochelle shows no discernible affection for her daughter, but holds her granddaughter tightly when she meets her.

Rudy is the child of either Valentine or Patsy. Rudy is wild with his mother, but behaves with his father. His mother says she will be glad when he is grown and gone, although she says she loves him.

During World War II, Nel has an affair with an unnamed sergeant. The relationship does not last.

Shadrack is a young soldier who returns from combat in World War I psychologically scarred. He believes that his hands grow to a monstrous size whenever he looks at them. This belief symbolizes the lack of control Shadrack feels over his own body and the world around him. Although everything seems orderly on the outside—his hands do not really grow uncontrollably—on the inside he is a jumble of confused emotions and feelings.

Shadrack’s psychic instability is rooted in the nonorganic world. When reconnected to the natural world or earth he comes close to reassembling his fragmented psyche. When he exits the psychiatric hospital, the trees do not threaten him because they are embedded in the earth.

The same is true of life. Although everything seems orderly and controlled, this is not always the case. Shadrack declares National Suicide Day on January 3rd of each year in order to control his fear of death. He figures that by devoting one day a year to death the “rest of the year would be safe and free.” National Suicide Day reflects an important theme in Morrison’s fiction, the necessity of accepting the inevitability of death in order to truly live life. National Suicide Day becomes a normal addition to life in Medallion. It is on this holiday that Shadrack inadvertently leads many Medallion residents to their deaths in the tunnel that holds the false hope of employment for the community.

Shadrack also witnesses Sula and Nel’s involvement in Chicken Little’s death. Although Sula was frightened by this knowledge throughout her life, Shadrack merely thought fondly of her as the one woman to visit his home. Cryptically, he says “Always” to her when she runs to his house. He keeps her purple and white belt with its liturgical colors. It is an encounter with Shadrack toward the end of the novel that brings about Nel’s epiphany that Sula is the single most important person in her life. (For information on the biblical Shadrack, see Part III.)

The police see Shadrack sitting next to the road and, assuming that he is drunk instead of sick, take him to jail. In the jail cell, Shadrack manages to see his own reflection in the toilet water, and he begins to have some idea of who he is. The next day the sheriff reads his discharge papers from the army and arranges for someone to drop him off in Meridian.

Terrified by the unexpectedness of death and dying, Shadrack establishes National Suicide Day, January 3, as the day that everyone can kill either himself or someone else and get it all over with on the one day. For Shadrack, National Suicide Day removes the uncertainty from death and makes it manageable.

Shirley is a girl in Nel and Sula’s graduating class who they think is sexually unappealing.

The slave in the story at the novel’s beginning lets himself be fooled by the farmer into accepting the higher hilly land for payment. Later, when an African-American community grows up on the slave’s land, they have to endure the problems of the slave’s choice—the land is hard to work and rocky, the winds batter their homes, they receive the full brunt of winter and storms—while the white town of Medallion below is protected by the slope of the valley. The farmer tells the slave that the land is the bottom of heaven. In the long run, the land becomes valuable.

The Suggs are Eva Peace’s neighbors. After Boy Boy leaves her, the Suggs and other members of the community provide her with the food, milk, and necessities she and the children need to survive. When the baby, Plum, gets constipated, Mrs. Suggs gives Eva castor oil. Eva leaves her children with the Suggs for 18 months and returns with the money and motivation she needs to raise her family. The Suggs represent the helpful and charitable nature of members within a self-sustaining community. Eva and her children could not have survived without their assistance.

Sula Mae Peace

Sula lives in a large house belonging to her grandmother, Eva, along with her mother, Hannah, adopted little boys, and several assorted borders. The house is disorderly, reflecting in its physical characteristics the casually promiscuous attitudes of both Eva and Hannah, who enjoy maleness without apology.

Like Nel, Sula is an only child. The two girls have distinct upbringings. Nel is raised in a conventional household while Sula lives in a busy and hectic household, full of lodgers, alcoholics, and her mother and grandmother’s lovers. These differences and their dissatisfaction with their lives is part of what draws the two girls together. Sula and Nel are such close friends that Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger trying to protect Nel from white bullies.

Even as a girl, Sula never fit into the Medallion community. The birthmark of a rose over her eye, her indifference to the opinions of others, her aloofness toward others besides Nel, sets her apart from the rest of Medallion society.

Sula accidentally throws Chicken Little into a river and watches her own mother burn to death. Sula seems primarily concerned with self-preservation but understands the inevitability of death. Sula leaves Medallion after Nel marries, goes to college, lives in a city, and then returns many years later. Her return is accompanied by a plague of robins and is viewed by the community as an evil omen.

Sula places her grandmother in Sunnydale, a home for older people, and sleeps with many men, indifferently. She has a significant affair with Ajax, but after he leaves her, she loses her independence and self-assurance. In the wake of Ajax’s departure, Sula contracts an undetermined fatal illness and dies. Her last thoughts are of Nel and the need to tell her that death does not hurt.

Sula is representative of an independent, strong, and proud black woman; however, her pride and her independence seem to leave her without enough empathy for other people and cause her ostracism from the community. A compromise between Nel’s dependence and Sula’s independence seems to be the novel’s suggestion for achieving the right balance for a happy and full life.

Sula fears and, at times, despises both Hannah and Eva because of the way these two women influenced her. Sula stands and watches Hannah burn to death. She puts Eva in a nursing home. These two actions demonstrate her need for control. Her sexual relationships also show her as a demanding and dominant woman. Sula has a birthmark above one of her eyes that other people say looks like a rose, a copperhead, and Hannah’s ashes, all in the same story.

Sula is disconnected from her mother and grandmother and seems genuinely attached only to Nel. She does not sleep with Nel’s husband, Jude, to be malicious. She is merely curious about the man. She does not expect that the relationship with Jude will change her friendship with Nel. A

fter Sula dies, the people of Medallion do not come to wash and dress her body, as is the custom. Eventually, Nel calls the police and Sula’s body is taken to the Hodges funeral home in a police van. After the funeral, the Hodges begin to bury Sula, and black members of the town come and sing “Shall We Gather At the River.”

Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie)

Tar Baby is a boarder who lives in Eva’s house. He is a beautiful and quiet man who never raises his voice. Eva is convinced that he is all white, but teasingly calls him Tar Baby. The white policemen from the valley also believe that he is white. They physically abuse him for being a white man who chooses to live in a black community.

Tar Baby is a mountain boy. He lives as a recluse and is determined to drink himself to death. Although he is a drunk, he does not bother anyone and is therefore tolerated. Tar Baby has a beautiful singing voice and makes the women cry, especially when he sings “In the Sweet By and By.” The people of Medallion do not think to try to help Tar Baby out of his depression and alcoholism. Tar Baby, like Shadrack, is obsessed with death but not willing to commit suicide. Significantly, he and the Deweys are the first ones to join Shadrack’s National Suicide Day parade the year that the tragedy occurs. He dies that day when the shifting earth from the river tunnel project collapses. (For more information on the Tar Baby stereotype, see Part III.)

The teacher is the Deweys’ first instructor. She is annoyed that the boys are registered under the same name and the same age, but is sure that she will be able to distinguish them from each other. Much to her surprise, she confuses the boys and has trouble distinguishing them from each other.

The five-year-old son of an indifferent mother, Teapot knocks on Sula’s door looking for bottles. After Sula denies his request, the boy accidentally falls down the steps. After this incident, his drunken and indifferent mother, Betty, exhibits motherly concern and love. She begins to feed him regular meals and nurture him. After Sula’s death, however, he is soon neglected and beaten again by his mother. Teapot represents the vulnerability and dependence of a young child on parents. More importantly, he demonstrates the extent to which the Bottom needs Sula to have a benchmark for evil and bad behavior.

Teapot’s Mamma (Betty)

Betty is known as Teapot’s Mamma because of her failure as a mother. After witnessing Teapot’s fall down Sula’s steps, however, she becomes devoted to her maternal duties. The imagined threat that Sula poses to her son and the sympathy she receives from the community inspire her to drink less and provide for her son. After Sula’s death, Teapot’s Mamma returns to her drinking and to abusing Teapot. Teapot’s Mamma demonstrates the beneficial influence Sula had upon the Medallion community because her difference provides the townspeople with inspiration to rally together and become better, more charitable people.

Train depot lady and children

Since there are no colored restrooms in the southern train depots, the train depot lady and her children show Helene and Nel how to pee in a field during their trip to New Orleans.

Uncle Paul is the man who brings Kentucky Wonders, a kind of green beans, to Hannah for canning. He tells Hannah that he has two bushels of the beans for her, but he has not brought them to her by the time she and Eva are snapping the beans.

Patsy and Valentine are Hannah’s friends. Sula overhears them talking about motherhood and children and hears her mother tell them she loves Sula, but doesn’t like her—a defining moment in Sula’s maturation. Shortly after this revelation, Sula accidentally throws Chicken Little and the innocence of childhood into the river. Valentine joins Shadrack’s parade on the last National Suicide Day and dies that day when the shifting earth from the river tunnel project collapses.

Wiley Wright

Wiley Wright is Nel’s father and Helene’s husband. He is a seaman and he is gone for long lengths of time. Wiley marries Helene, at the urging of his Great Aunt Cecile who is also Helene’s grandmother. Although he is substantially older than her, Wiley Wright finds Helene well-mannered, powerful, and mature. It never seems to be an issue that the two are cousins. Wiley Wright works on a ship on the Great Lakes lines and travels for long stretches of time, but Helene is quite content in his absence, especially after her daughter is born. Wiley Wright does not play a large role in the novel or the lives of the women in his life.

Toni Morrison (Photo by Deborah Feingold/Corbis via Getty Images)

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

F URTHER READING Angelis, Rose De. “Morrison’s Sula,” Explicator 60, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 172–175. Closser, Raleen. “Morrison’s Sula,” Explicator 63, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 111. Cohen, Tom “Politics of the Pre-figural: Sula, Blackness, and the Precession of Trope,” Parallax 8, no. 1 (January 2002): 5–17. Galehouse, Maggie. “New World Woman: Toni Morrison’s Sula,” Papers on Language and Literature 35, no. 4 (Fall 1999): 339–363. Mayberry, Susan Neal. “Something Other Than a Family Quarrel: The Beautiful Boys in Morrison’s Sula,” African American Review 37, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 517–534. Miller, D. Quentin. “Making a Place for Fear: Toni Morrison’s First Redefinition of Dante’s Hell in Sula,” English Language Notes 37, no. 3 (March 2000): 68–77. Nissen, Axel. “Form Matters: Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Ethics of Narrative,” Contemporary Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 263–286. Novak, Phillip. “Circles and Circles of Sorrow: In the Wake of Morrison’s Sula,” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 114, no. 2 (March 1999): 184–194. Thompson, Carlyle V. “Circles and Circles of Sorrow: Decapitation in Toni Morrison’s Sula,” CLA Journal 47, no. 2 (December 2003): 137–175. Source: Gillespie, C. (2008). Critical companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Facts On File.

"Sula": Critical Overview

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Toni Morrison

Literature Notes
Motifs in Sula
Book Summary
Character List
Summary and Analysis
Part 1: Prologue
Part 1: 1919
Part 1: 1920
Part 1: 1921
Part 1: 1922
Part 1: 1923
Part 1: 1927
Part 2: 1937
Part 2: 1939
Part 2: 1940
Part 2: 1941
Part 2: 1965
Character Analysis
Nel Wright Greene
Toni Morrison Biography
Critical Essays
Black Soldiers in World War I
Full Glossary for Sula
Essay Questions
Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Motifs in Sula

Inverted World Order

At the beginning of the novel, the Bottom is a black community situated atop a hill, above the valley town of Medallion, where the white community lives. Although the Bottom is geographically higher than Medallion, socially and economically the black community is considered lower than their white counterparts, as were all blacks in the early twentieth century, when the novel begins. Ironically, when the novel ends, the black community will have moved down into the valley, and the white people will have bought property and moved up onto the hilltop.

Morrison creates situations in which characters behave differently from what we might expect. For example, in 1927, at Nel's wedding celebration, the old people dance with the young people, and the church women drink the spiked punch. Nel's mother, the staid and conservative Helene Wright, is so calm and relaxed — from drinking — that she doesn't seem to mind the damage being done to her immaculate house by the revelers.

Morrison repeats this theme of inversion by having seemingly negative characters cause positive reactions in people. After Sula's return in 1937, the Bottom's black community abandons its negative ways and adopts positive counterparts. Teapot's previously abusive mother, for example, suddenly becomes caring and nurturing, and women who formerly neglected their husbands now shower them with affection. Ironically, after Sula's death, the old order of negativity returns; the townspeople resume their previous, unhealthy behavior.

With very few exceptions, Morrison's female characters are fiercely independent and subvert the traditionally assigned roles of dutiful wife, mother, and daughter. Of this category, Sula and Eva are the most prominent. Nel, who is raised by her mother to accept without question the passive roles of wife, mother, and daughter, comes to recognize the power of womanhood by the novel's end, although it remains unclear just what she will do with this newfound knowledge.

Sula and Nel come to realize at an early age that because they are neither white nor male, most freedoms and triumphs will be denied them throughout their lives. When Sula returns to the Bottom after having experienced life in many large cities across the country, she notes how dismal the lives of the black women in the community are; she sees "how the years had dusted their bronze with ash," and that "Those [women] with husbands had folded themselves into starched coffins, their sides bursting other people's skinned dreams and bony regrets." Sula's feminist spirit makes her refuse to settle for a woman's traditional lot of marriage and child raising. The Bottom's women hate her because she is the antithesis of their own dreadful lives of resignation. Economically, the women are unable to leave the Bottom, but those who do — like Sula — are likely to return to the black community, for from it they gain the little power afforded them in a racist society.

Sula is the most determined, carefree woman of all the novel's female characters. Her attraction to Ajax originates from her need to have someone more free-wheeling and independent than she. Ajax seems to be the warrior his name suggests, especially when he brings her the bottles of milk. Sula excitedly believes that he must have "done something dangerous to get them," which she greatly appreciates. However, her sole attempt at domesticity sounds the death knell of the relationship. Detecting the scent of the nest, Ajax realizes that Sula is becoming the antithesis of the free-spirited, independent woman whom he was initially attracted to.

Throughout the novel, women's perceptions of love are ambiguous and never clearly defined. For example, to Eva, love is being patriarchally maternal; it gives her license to kill the drug-addicted Plum and possibly Hannah. Eva is the biblical Eve, the mother of all living things, which explains the variety of people living in her home. Although only some of the inhabitants are boarders, Eva still involves herself maternally in their lives. She constantly offers unsolicited advice to new brides on keeping a man. Even with her physical disability, she flirts unashamedly with all the men who surround her. However, these relationships are never consummated, which contrasts to the sexual behavior of her daughter Hannah, who consummates her liaisons with her many gentlemen admirers — and without discretion.

In contrast to Sula's self-assured feminism, Nel represses her self-expression and yields to the oppression of white society and black men. Her loss of Jude results in essentially the loss of her own identity because the vast majority of women of this era believed that a husband gave a woman her place in the community. Growing up, Nel, whose imagination was systematically driven underground by her pretentious and staid mother, Helene Wright, seeks emotional solace from Sula, who defers to no one. The girls rejoice in the sexually charged attention they get from the community's men, who tauntingly call them "pig meat." However, after the dissolution of her marriage, Nel never actively seeks the company of men — giving up after only a few lukewarm attempts at a relationship. Instead, she resigns herself to devoting the rest of her life to her children. She allows herself to be chosen by men, while Sula does her own choosing. By the end of the novel, when Nel cries out to Sula, she laments not only for her long-lost friend but also for her own wasted potential, recognizing that she has lost the chance to develop into the fullness of her own womanhood.

The effects of racism upon black American life is a major ingredient in all of Morrison's novels, as she explores the differences between the races' humanity and cultural values. Racism, in all its myriad forms, whether blatant or subliminal, is a part of every scene in Sula, with every aspect of the novel expressing some color of racism. Even the laughter of the Bottom is a laughter born of pain — a series of cruel jokes directed against the laughers themselves.

One example of the Bottom's own racism is Helene Wright's concern over her daughter Nel's physical features. Although Helene does not want Nel to be as fair skinned as she is — this so-called advantage can mean trouble in a color-conscious society — she still forces her daughter to pull her nose in order to make it more narrow. And yet Helene herself is the victim of racism, for having grown up in New Orleans, she knows the dangers of breaking Jim Crow laws, the mandates that segregated white society from black. Returning by train to New Orleans for her grandmother's funeral, Helene realizes immediately that she has accidentally stepped over the line that separates the two races when a white conductor catches her in a Whites Only car.

Another example of the white society's racist attitudes occurs later in the novel when a white bargeman finds Chicken Little's corpse washed ashore at the river's edge. Annoyed at the inconvenience of having to tote the black child's body to the sheriff, the bargeman reacts as though it is not a human life that has been lost. He cannot identify with the blacks of the Bottom as being as human as he is. He even believes that the blacks are so savage that they would kill their own children, which, to him, explains Chicken Little's body being in the river.

In a society that segregates its healthcare facilities, many of which did not allow blacks to step inside their doors, it is not surprising that even those individuals whose skin is white but who have ethnic backgrounds other than Anglo-Saxon are treated better than the Bottom's black residents. One of the key points Morrison makes in this novel is that newcomers — white immigrants — are given preferential treatment for menial jobs, while blacks, with their long history of living in the valley, are mistreated — even by the white immigrants, who, ironically, are themselves looked down on by the established white community; unfortunately, one of the ways that they regain their self-respect is by harassing blacks.

Fire and Water

Throughout Sula, the combative elements of fire and water are closely linked to the ever-present motif of death. As a result of the constant references to these elements, the novel projects qualities of creativity and destructiveness that continually transform the images of nature. Among the many motifs, fire is perhaps referred to most frequently.

The first character to die from fire is Plum, whom Eva sets ablaze. The nature of his death is foretold in how he gets high from drugs: His bent spoon is black from "steady cooking." When Plum is burning in his room from the fire that Eva set, it is Hannah who says to Eva, "He's burning, Mamma!" Eva casually responds in false disbelief, "Is? My baby? Burning?" And, on the day that Hannah dies by fire, there is an unnatural, intense heat as Eva rationalizes her role in Plum's burning.

Sula's return to the Bottom after a ten-year absence portends death associated with fire. She confronts Eva and threatens her with the same means of death as happened to Plum, whom Sula knows Eva set on fire. Sula says to Eva, ". . . maybe I'll just tip on up here with some kerosene and — who knows — you may make the brightest flame of them all." Later, when Sula visits Nel, Nel asks her if she wants a cool drink. Sula answers, "Mmmm. Lots of ice, I'm burnin' up," foreshadowing her eventual death by a fever that is described as a "kind of burning." And just prior to Sula's dying, when she wakes from a dream, she is "gagging and overwhelmed with the smell of smoke," although nothing in the house is on fire. Ironically, as Sula dies, she experiences "liquid pain"; she remembers, in death, the promise of a "sleep of water always," and how she would "know the water was near, and she would curl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always." Sula and Plum are the only characters in the novel who so completely embody the images of fire and water at their deaths. Generally, the women in Sula die of fire, traditionally a masculine element, and the men in the novel die of water, a feminine element.

Although his death is from fire, Plum, a passive character, figuratively drowns. As Eva holds him in her arms just before killing him, her face is awash with tears as she remembers Plum as a child in the bathtub, dripping water playfully onto her bosom. Plum, clearly Eva's favorite, is described as having "floated in a constant swaddle of love and affection . . ." Eva immerses him in kerosene, and just before he dies, he perceives that he is floating, womb-like, and drowning. Morrison describes his death, although by fire, as "some kind of wet light traveling over his legs and stomach with a deeply attractive smell . . . splashing and running into his skin . . . Some kind of baptism, some kind of blessing, he thought."

Shadrack is also associated with water, although the biblical Shadrack, in Daniel 3:8–18, is cast into a fiery furnace but emerges unscathed by the flames. Sula's Shadrack, a fisherman by trade, is the only witness to Chicken Little's watery death, and it is he who unknowingly leads many members of the black community to their deaths by drowning. Now living in a shack on the riverbank, when he first saw himself after being released from the military hospital after World War I, he looked into a distorted, watery reflection in water. He wanted water most of all, so much so that when he left the hospital, he immediately sought to know where the river was.

At the end of the novel, many people die of drowning on National Suicide Day, having followed Shadrack to the New River Road tunnel. Tar Baby and the deweys die there, as does Mrs. Jackson, partly because of the ice that she had craved and eaten all her life. Ironically, the hymn "Shall We Gather at the River" will probably be sung at the many funerals to follow, as it was at Sula's.

Another instance of death by drowning is Chicken Little's accidental death in the river. In describing this death, Morrison notes that "the water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank." The phrase "the closed place in the water" becomes a metaphor for death.

Many minor examples of water associated with men are scattered throughout the novel. These include Nel's father, Wiley Wright, who is a ship's cook on one of the Great Lakes shipping lines; Ajax's idea of bliss on earth as a hot bath; the deweys' wildly fighting against the threat of being bathed — a fear that foreshadows their deaths by drowning; and, on seeing Hannah burning in the yard, the reaction of Mr. and Mrs. Suggs, who together "hoisted up their tub of water in which tight red tomatoes floated and threw it on the smoke-and-flame-bound woman" — the water puts out the flames, but the resulting steam sears all that is left of the once-beautiful Hannah.

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Toni Morrison

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Toni Morrison's Sula . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Sula: Introduction

Sula: plot summary, sula: detailed summary & analysis, sula: themes, sula: quotes, sula: characters, sula: symbols, sula: theme wheel, brief biography of toni morrison.

Historical Context of Sula

Other books related to sula.

Full Title: Sula
Where Written: Washington D.C.
When Published: November 1973
Literary Period: 1970s Feminism, postmodernism, Magical Realism
Genre: Generational saga, family drama
Setting: Medallion, Ohio
Climax: The mass death at the New River Road on January 3, 1941
Antagonist: It’s hard to pin down any definite antagonist in Sula : all the characters have their vices and virtues. However, one could certainly say that racism functions as a kind of general antagonist impacting all of the characters.
Point of View: Third person limited—the novel is told from the perspectives of many different characters, including Nel, Sula, Eva, Shadrack, and Jude.

Extra Credit for Sula

Renaissance Woman: Toni Morrison isn’t afraid to say that she’s talented. When she appeared on The Colbert Report in 2014, she told Stephen Colbert that she’d recently re-read her 1987 masterpiece, Beloved . Her conclusion? It was “very, very good.”

Awards, awards, awards :Morrison has won virtually every honor available for an American writer: the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, etc. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. As of 2015, she is the most recent American, the only American woman, and the only African-American to win this honor.

Analysis of “Sula” by Toni Morrison

In her novel called Sula , Toni Morrison challenges the reader’s perception of good and evil. The book narrates the story of a small black community in Ohio, which takes place after World War I. Sula and Nel are the main characters of the novel, and, by depicting their lives, the author describes racial and gender relationships in postwar segregated America of the twentieth century. This paper aims at exploring the differences between Sula and Nel and prove that, despite the distinctions, these girls have much in common.

At first sight, Nel seems to be a positive character, and Sula appears as a negative one. However, the girls are “two parts of one consciousness,” meaning that their differences complement each other and could have made an integrated personality (Alfaqir 67). The analysis of these characters shows that they are quite similar, but their surroundings have led them to demonstrate different behaviors and attitudes to life.

Sula and Nel seem to have entirely different views on conformity with rules and societal norms. Sula was disobedient, nonconformist, and indecent, and it makes it difficult for readers to identify with her (Abbas 121). On the contrary, Nel lived a traditional life: she obeyed her mother, married, and raised her children, which makes her a positive character. This crucial difference in their behaviors stems from their childhood. Nel was raised in strict obedience, and her mother “drove her daughter’s imagination underground” (Morrison 25). Sula’s mother, on the other hand, neglected any rules in the community and liked to attract men’s attention, which influenced Sula’s young mind (Alfaqir 68).

However, both girls seemed to be discontent with their surroundings. Sula was more comfortable in Nel’s neat house where she could sit “for ten to twenty minutes at a time—still as dawn” (Morrison 34). Nel liked “Sula’s woolly house” more because Sula’s mother “never scolded or gave directions” (Morrison 34). Thus, deep inside, Sula wanted to be obedient like Nel, and Nel desired to be self-willed like Sula, but their surroundings forced them to become quite the opposite.

At first sight, Sula is cruel, and Nel is kind, but both of them possess evil. When Sula came back to her town after a ten-year absence, she was seen as a “devouring evil” (Morrison 9). It was mainly because she proclaimed the financial and sexual freedom of women, which was contrary to the established norms within the community (Morrison 8). Furthermore, she was considered cruel because, in childhood, she watched her mother burn alive without trying to help her (Abbas 120).

The fact that she betrayed Nel by sleeping with her husband also set people against Sula. However, Sula herself did not consider her affair with Nel’s husband to be wrongdoing because, in her worldview, sexual contacts meant nothing (Abbas 121). As for Nel, her nature also embodied evil; it can be seen in the episode when she realized that she enjoyed the moment of Chicken Little’s drowning (Morrison 152). Hence, Sula was considered evil because her worldview differed from that of society. Nel also could be evil but hid her cruelty deep inside because she had to conform to social norms.

Both Sula and Nel craved love and family, but their surroundings led them to different outcomes. Since Nel was raised in conformity to social norms, she followed the standard path of a woman, namely, married Jude Greene, gave birth to children, and became an obedient housewife. Sula’s upbringing was different, and, therefore, she did not follow that pattern. After the incident with Chicken Little and overhearing her mother’s conversation about mothering, she realized that people had little control over life, and human emotions were unstable and treacherous (Alfaqir 69). These experiences led her to reject the thought of having children: “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself” (Morrison 85).

Although Sula followed her mother’s steps by having sexual relationships with many men, she was ready to renounce her freedom and create a family with Ajax (Alfaqir 70). However, he left her, and Sula had nothing to do but return to her individualistic life (Alfaqir 73). Overall, both women had a chance to have a family, but while Nel used this opportunity, Sula missed it because she was obsessed with nonconformity.

To sum up, Nel and Sula can indeed be called two parts of one personality. Their behaviors and values are different, but it was their surroundings that shaped their characters. Their similarities are mostly seen in childhood when their personalities were under development. Sula could be calm and thoughtful, and Nel could be disobedient and willful, which is evident from their childish experiences at each other’s houses. Both of them had evil, but in Nel, this trait was restricted by social norms. Finally, both women could create a family in adulthood, but Sula’s worldview hindered her from becoming an obedient housewife. Thus, it may be assumed that the book shows how people with similar tempers may evolve differently depending on their environment.

Works Cited

Abbas, Ahmed Hashim. “New Issues of Women Characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula .” Journal of Basra Researches for Human Sciences , vol. 43, no. 1, 2018, pp. 113-124.

Alfaqir, Najd F. “Positive Liberty and Black Female Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Sula .” International Journal of Social Science Studies , vol. 6, no. 6, 2018, pp. 67-75.

Morrison, Toni. Sula . Vintage International, 2004.

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A Critical Analysis Essay On Sula By Toni Morrison

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The novel Sula is comprised of many themes. One of the major themes being the opposition of good versus evil and love versus hate. Toni Morrison provides us with many different characters to show good versus evil themes. The dynamic relationship between Sula and Nel encompassed good versus evil, love versus hate and many other oppositions. Both characters had very different up brings and that was shown in their adulthood. However, as readers we can see the tug and pull between good and evil progressing into a hatred as they develop into their ways from childhood to adulthood. From the beginning of this novel Nel was portrayed as better off and more put together being the more innocent of her and Sula, even though in reality she is the most evil out of the two. While Sula was considered to be the daredevil and independent, she is her true self and hides from no one. She is blunt and intentional with her words. Sula grew up in a nontraditional household with majority women in charge. Her mother made sacrifices to make ends meet that weren’t necessarily conventional. While Nel was raised in a neat home, with a very involved mother. Nels family was respected and attended church regularly making them appear as a nice traditional family. The stages of evil in the novel Sula is described in one quote, “The presence of evil was something to first be recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over” (Morrison 118). In this critical analysis I will provide examples and quotes that provide explanation of why good versus evil is a major theme within the novel, Sula. I will also discuss why the traditional upbringing of Nel caused her to become the evil between her and Sula, and why Sula is the most true and good.

Sula’s household may not have been traditional in the sense of having two parents and a neat and tidy home, however she was raised by women who taught her to live her days, exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her” (Morrison 118). Sula was raised to be a free spirit just the same as her mother Hannah, and grandmother Eva that raised her. Sula’s home was a place where Nel felt comfortable and free. Possibly because she grew up feeling like she had to be a version of herself that wasn’t true to her, and in Sula’s home that wasn’t the case. Her home was chaotic, and the women brought in and loved men just as quickly as they left. Her house was free of shame and judgment. The women of Sula’s home were independent, liberated, and good to themselves. Nel seemed to be a person who pleased others and did things to remain respected. Nel dreamed of freedom but could never grasp it.

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Nel, an only child, sat on the steps of her back porch surrounded by the high silence of her mother’s incredibly orderly house, feeling the neatness pointing at her back, she studied the poplars and fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached her but never quite arrived. But always watching the dream along with her, were some smiling empathetic eye. (Morrison 51).

Nel dreamed of the sexual and independent freedom the Peace women had but could never attain it as easily as they did. Sula also being an only child had similar but different pictures of herself.

Similarly, Sula also and only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of doors spent hours in the attic behind a roll of linoleum galloping through her own mind on a gray and white horse tasting sugar and smelling roses in full view of someone who shared both the taste and the speed. (Morrison 52).

Morrison describes how Nel’s vision of her freedom to being as open and expressive as the Peace family is within her view but will never grasp it. Her evil comes from her inability to express herself. While Sula, just as young and inexperienced as Nel is, can already honor and be present in her true self.

Sula hurt Nel by sleeping with her husband, Jude. However, she did it not intending to cause her pain. She did it because they grew up sharing the love of boys and thought nothing of it with Jude. After Sula caused Nel and Jude to split, the town looked to Sula as a homewrecker and the wives kept watch on their husbands in fear that Sula would take them also. Sula is described as being,

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. (Morrison 119)

Sula only felt the need to be dominant when it came to men as explained, “and there was utmost irony and outrage in lying under someone, in a position of surrender feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power” (Morrison 123). Being raised in a home where she watched the women in charge bring in men so frivolously, she saw no value or ownership of a man and always felt the need to be detached from others. Still, when she became intimate with them, she realized she was just lonely saying, “there in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound that the word itself had no meaning” (Morrison 123). Sula was capable of feeling emotions. As heartless and floozy everyone thought she was, she was capable of feeling ashamed and guilty of things. Once she felt love from Ajax, she was able to understand Nel’s pain. Sula was a good person who acted on the ways she was raised. She spoke referring to Ajax saying, “I will put my hand deep into your soil lift it, sift it with my fingers, feel it’s warm surface and dewy chill below” (Morrison 131). While acknowledging her love for Ajax she’s also dwelling on her lost friendship with Nel. “Carefully they [Sula and Nel] replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass” (Morrison 59). As Sula came to terms with what she had done she realized Nel was the only person who uncovered her true self to Sula. Sula loved Nel for that because now in her time of seclusion she could see she had no one.

Nel was the only person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. Now she wanted everything, and all because of that. 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 made it possible to stretch it to its limits” (Morrison 119-120).

Sula felt guilty for what she had done but also discovered her love for who Nel had been to her. While Nel discovered her hatred for Sula. Nel was just as withdrawn as Sula was. Fearing the talk of the town more than she had feared the one person who put her in the situation, Sula.

Lastly, Sula lives through her life believing she is evil for her mistake of killing Chicken Little. Sula took full responsibility of the horrible thing she had done and blamed herself for his death. Nel did not think to convince her otherwise and in the end deemed herself good and Sula as bad. They both lived their lives according to what type of person they were. Sula being unconventional, and Nel being the proper decent one. However, Nel felt happiness believing that she was the better out of the two because she didn’t kill Chicken. She lived her life being hypocritical and judgmental.

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by Toni Morrison

Sula essay questions.

How is motherhood portrayed in the novel?

The relationship between mother and daughter is often tense in this novel. Rochelle and Helene, Sula and Hannah, and Nel and Helene all experience their own tense moments. Sula is pained when she hears that her mother does not like her, though she claims to love her. Sula is confined by the strict rule of her mother and Helene is shamed of her mother’s employment as a prostitute. What is common about these mother-daughter relationships? How does motherhood change across generations?

Look at the fathers in the novel. What do they have in common? What separates them?

Many of the men in the novel who father children abandon their families. Even those who stick around like Wiley Wright are not wholly present because they are frequently traveling and away from home. The fathers in Sula appear to be unified in this absence.

Discuss Sula’s birthmark as a symbol in the novel.

Sula’s birthmark is said by all to resemble something found in nature. Be it ashes, a snake, or a rose and stem, this characteristic mark on Sula is the subject of frequent remarks. As she grows older, the mark grows darker, and when Sula becomes scorned by society, people begin to see it as a mark of death.

Sula and Nel dig a hole and fill it with stems while playing together. How do you interpret this scene?

The scene is read by some as an example of the two girls coming into sexual maturity. The hole in the earth representing the opening of a woman’s sex and the clutter the girls throw into it a representation of all the pre-existing complications that impede a woman’s sexuality. The scene is also said to foreshadow the sexual transgression that corrupts Sula and Nel’s friendship.

Explain the theme of death and dying in the novel.

Death strikes frequently and suddenly in the novel. It is feared by some characters like Shadrack and sought by others like Tar Baby and Plum. Eva considers it an act of mercy when she gives death to her son Plum.

Why does Morrison begin by describing the destruction of the Bottom?

Morrison sets up expectations in the preface of the novel. By beginning with the destruction of the Bottom, she tells the reader that everything she will describe will soon fall away. The preface explaining the destruction of the Bottom also buffers the harsh introduction to Shadrack’s plight.

Why do you think Morrison names the novel after the character Sula?

Sula is the social pariah of the novel. She does not follow societal conventions or traditional roles for women. As the only truly unique character of the novel, she receives the honor of the book’s title.

Explain the symbolism of National Suicide Day.

National Suicide Day is founded by Shadrack to confront what he considers the most fearful part of death, its unexpectedness. Suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Shadrack boldly marches down the main road in the Bottom encouraging people to kill themselves or one another. The end of National Suicide Day is symbolic when Shadrack begins to realize the true effects of death and the loneliness it brings.

How does Race affect the characters in the novel?

The Bottom is a town that is segregated from the mostly white town in the Valley. The effects of discrimination and segregation are felt throughout the novel when blacks living in the Bottom are unable to find employment. Explicit violence is enacted against Tar Baby because he is perceived to be a white man living amongst blacks. Both communities disparage racial mixing between white and blacks, and the people of the Bottom consider it a nasty insult when they accuse Sula of sleeping with white men.

Discuss the role that nature plays in the novel.

The people of the Bottom are used to experiencing excesses of nature. They have a plague of robins of pigeons, extreme heat and cold as well as drought and floods. After Jude leaves her, Nel has a feeling of “leaves and mud.” Dramatic events in the novel, like Hannah’s death, coincide with extreme changes in nature. A windstorm occurs the night before Hannah burns, and an extreme frost covers the Bottom just after Sula’s death.

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Sula Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Sula is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

How does Eva fit the description of "outlaw woman"?

Morrison uses the term "outlaw woman" to describe women who live outside of societal boundaries and traditional expectations, choosing instead, to act independently and according to their own wishes. Eva fills this role in that she chooses to...

Which central character leaves home yet finds that home remains significant?

Sula is the character who leaves home, and although she returns to find home (the place) far different than the place she left, she continues to feel a strong bond with the people.

Hannah, Sula's mother, dies in a tragic fire accident.

Study Guide for Sula

Sula study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

Sula Summary
Character List

Essays for Sula

Sula essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison.

Evil and Conformity in Toni Morrison's Sula
Toni Morrison: The Manifestation of Tough Love in Sula
Reclaiming Identity in Toni Morrison's Sula
Destructive Heterosexuality in Sula
The Effect of Death on Different Characters in Sula

Lesson Plan for Sula

About the Author
Study Objectives
Common Core Standards
Introduction to Sula
Relationship to Other Books
Bringing in Technology
Notes to the Teacher
Related Links
Sula Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Sula

Introduction
Plot summary
Major themes
Literary significance and criticism

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Critical analysis of Toni Morison’s novel Sula
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Analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula
Analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on January 19, 2021 • ( 0). Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison's second published novel. Like The Bluest Eye, the novel is a story of two girls coming of age.As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of a whole, often seeming to complete each other in opposition.
Sula Critical Essays
c. Saw mark as copperhead. 2. Saw Sula differently after she talked and made noise (rattled danger signal) a. Believed she could stir man's mind but not body. b. Believed she had an odd way of ...
Sula Analysis
Essays and criticism on Toni Morrison's Sula - Analysis. In Sula, the concept of class and its relation to sex and race occupies much of Morrison's attention as she chronicles the development of ...
"Sula": Critical Overview
Because Sula is a novel and not a treatise, potential answers to these questions await the reader in the form of character and situation rather than explicit philosophical argument" (264)."Because Sula is the kind of experimental, complex, writerly narrative we often call modernist, the demands on the reader as interpreter and judge are ...
When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula
When Communities Fall: A Critical Analysis of Toni Morrison's Sula. When women dare to self-actualize they frequently face barriers that tear their spirits down, leading to guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy. For the lineage of women in Toni Morrison's Sula, these consequences are fatal for everyone. As these factors thwart ...
Sula Essays and Criticism
Source: Kelly Winters, Critical Essay on Sula, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2002. Winters is a freelance writer and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. Cite this ...
Motifs in Sula
Throughout Sula, the combative elements of fire and water are closely linked to the ever-present motif of death. As a result of the constant references to these elements, the novel projects qualities of creativity and destructiveness that continually transform the images of nature. Among the many motifs, fire is perhaps referred to most frequently.
Sula Study Guide
In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. As of 2015, she is the most recent American, the only American woman, and the only African-American to win this honor. The best study guide to Sula on the planet, from the creators of SparkNotes. Get the summaries, analysis, and quotes you need.
Analysis of "Sula" by Toni Morrison
Analysis of "Sula" by Toni Morrison. Words: 831 Pages: 3. In her novel called Sula, Toni Morrison challenges the reader's perception of good and evil. The book narrates the story of a small black community in Ohio, which takes place after World War I. Sula and Nel are the main characters of the novel, and, by depicting their lives, the ...
A Critical Analysis Essay On Sula By Toni Morrison
The stages of evil in the novel Sula is described in one quote, "The presence of evil was something to first be recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over" (Morrison 118). In this critical analysis I will provide examples and quotes that provide explanation of why good versus evil is a major theme within the novel, Sula.
Sula 1965 Summary and Analysis
Sula Summary and Analysis of 1965. Summary. Although the Black people of Medallion now have access to jobs as cashiers and teachers, Nel remains nostalgic about life in the past. She reminisces on how much cuter the boys were when she was growing up and how much better all things were before 1965. What was known as the Bottom now houses new ...
Sula Study Guide
Essays for Sula. Sula essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison. Evil and Conformity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Toni Morrison: The Manifestation of Tough Love in Sula; Reclaiming Identity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Destructive Heterosexuality in Sula
Sula Analysis
Dive deep into Toni Morrison's Sula with extended analysis, commentary, and discussion. ... 1999. This is a compendium of critical essays on Sula. Carabi, Angels, "Toni Morrison," in Belles ...
Sula Summary
Essays for Sula. Sula essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison. Evil and Conformity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Toni Morrison: The Manifestation of Tough Love in Sula; Reclaiming Identity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Destructive Heterosexuality in Sula
Sula Part I: Prologue-1920 Summary & Analysis
A summary of Part I: Prologue-1920 in Toni Morrison's Sula. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Sula and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
Literary Analysis Of Sula By Toni Morrison
Professor Delcourt. English 265. 20 November 2017. Literary Analysis: Sula. Toni Morrison is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels and a professor at Princeton University. In 1998, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved, and then, in 1993, received the Nobel Prize in literature. In ...
Sula Critical Context
Critical Context. PDF Cite Share. Toni Morrison's reputation has risen with the publication of each of her novels. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), gained little public attention. Sula ...
Essay on Sula by Toni Morrison
Good Essays. 1521 Words. 7 Pages. Open Document. Sula by Toni Morrison In the novel Sula, by Toni Morrison we follow the life of Sula Peace through out her childhood in the twenties until her death in 1941. The novel surrounds the black community in Medallion, specifically "the bottom". By reading the story of Sula's life, and the life of the ...
Sula Essay Questions
Essays for Sula. Sula essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison. Evil and Conformity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Toni Morrison: The Manifestation of Tough Love in Sula; Reclaiming Identity in Toni Morrison's Sula; Destructive Heterosexuality in Sula
Postmodernism in Toni Morrison's Sula: Critical Analysis
Postmodernism in Toni Morrison's Sula: Critical Analysis. This essay sample was donated by a student to help the academic community. Papers provided by EduBirdie writers usually outdo students' samples. The purpose of post structuralism is to identify the disunity of the work. The binary oppositions show disunity of the novel in two ways ...
Sula Critical Evaluation
The conversation between Sula and Nel, when Nel visits Sula on her deathbed, is a reconstruction of verbal devices used by African American women. The symbolism of fire is used when Eva burns Plum ...
Critical Literary Analysis of Sula
Critical Literary Analysis The novel that I read is called "Sula" written by Toni Morrison. This novel is about the lives of two women named Sula Peace, and Nel Wright. They became friends while living in the black community called "The Bottom" outside of Medallion, Ohio. They go through many obstacles together throughout the novel.

Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

SOME IMPORTANT THEMES AND SYMBOLS IN SULA

The Sacrifices of Motherhood

The Impacts of Shame

The Free Fall

Ajax (A. Jacks, Albert Jacks)

Ajax’s Mother

Betty (Teapot’s Mamma)

Black Soldiers on Train

Cecile Sabat

Chicken Little

Hannah Peace

Helene Sabat Wright

Henri Martin

The hovering gray ball

Jake Freeman

Jude Greene

Mr. and Mrs. Hodges

Mrs. Buckland Reed

Mrs. Scott’s twins

Old Willy Fields

Paul Freeman

Pearl (Eva Peace)

Plum Peace (Ralph)

Reverend Deal

Rochelle Sabat

Sula Mae Peace

Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie)

Teapot’s Mamma (Betty)

Train depot lady and children

Wiley Wright

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