Sula

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Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. Terrifying, comic and tragic, Sula overflows with love and life, friendship and betrayal. Read more Look Inside Details Main Claim:“Morrison’s chosen form contains implicit answers to broad ethical questions concerning how human beings might best live together in a community and confront the danger and emptiness in life, and that discovering these answers will involve the reader in an interpretive process that reflects the difficulties and uncertainties of making ethical judgments in our everyday lives. Ultimately, Sula may be seen to conduct a debate as to whether individual experience or general ethical principles are the sounder basis for personal ethics” (265).

Exemplary... The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy Newsweek 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. right from the get-go, i was smitten. it was all the things i loved - it was Winesburg, Ohio, it was grit lit, it was smalltown gossip and neighborly scrutiny, it was the ingenuity of the disenfranchised, it was the sun rising like a hot white bitch, and best of all, it was FUN! but, like, my kind of fun, where people get set on fire and playtime ends in a body count. this is v.c. andrews without the incest!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. “1939” If you can be named for something you’re not, for somebody other than yourself, are you real, are you truly yourself? If your name can dissolve and recombine into another name, who are you anyway?

The inference is that Sula believed she and Nel were identical. Consequently, she may have believed that while Jude belonged to Nel, he also belonged to her. Even as an adult, she does not seem to have attained selfhood. That is, the ability to feel independent indicates a genuine recognition of one’s uniqueness in relation to others. Regardless of how strongly she is dedicated to other people’s pleasure or pain, they are not her, and she is not them. Soon after Nel’s visitation, Sula dies from an apparent medication overdose, lying isolated in the fetal posture on Eva’s bed. Here, Sula and Eva are portrayed as having striking parallels. They employ drastic steps such as slicing pieces of themselves to send a message that they will live and stay as intact as possible. Interestingly, the two ladies endure their last years isolated and dismembered, separated from each other and the family ties they have. Another important kind of feminine bond in Sula, arguably even more important than motherhood, is friendship—the paramount example being the close friendship between Sula Peace and Nel Wright. And yet there’s always an implicit problem in the friendships between women and other women. Too often, women—certainly the women of the Bottom—are taught that they must find a husband, or else always be “incomplete.” We can see this dynamic at work when Sula and Nel, only twelve years old, go off to find “beautiful boys”—an episode of their lives that ultimately drives them apart and spoils their friendship. Years later, Sula, convinced that she must find love and understanding through sex, sleeps with Nel’s husband, Jude Green, destroying Nel’s marriage and ending their friendship for good. When women are convinced that finding a man is their ultimate purpose in life, they will consider their friendships with other women to be only of secondary importance—and as a result, female friendships face the danger of being torn apart by competition for “beautiful boys.” 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. Davis, Angela. “The Legacy of Slavery: Standards of a New Womanhood.” Women, Race, and Class. New York: Knopf, 1983. 3-29.They never quarreled, those two, the way some girlfriends did over boys, or competed against each other for them. In those days, a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other. Sula is a real character, as we say. Sula is incomparable, matchless, singular. There is nobody like Sula. And yet. I’ve seen Sula in my days, in my sisters, my aunts, my friends, a stranger crossing the road. Morrison saw Sula in someone, too, before she wrote her: If I could guarantee that I could stay in this small white room with dirty tile and gurgling water in the pipes and my head on the cool rim of this bathtub without ever having to leave, I would be content. If I could guarantee that I would never have to get up to flush the toilet, enter the kitchen, see my children grow and die, or see my food eaten on my plate…” (Morrison, 1998, p. 108). Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie): A quiet, cowardly, and reserved partially or possibly fully white man who rents out one of the rooms in the Peace household. It is believed that Tar Baby has come up to the Bottom to drink himself to death.

Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. In the fictional world of Toni Morrison’s novels, the moment before the disjunction, or ‘caesura,’ when the man of madness moves apart from the man of reason exists in time always as the past and is spatially defined by the idea of community, or the ‘village’” (732). Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. In 1923, Hannah Peace is burned alive, for reasons that nobody can understand. In the days leading up to her death, she confronts Eva about killing Plum. Eva doesn’t deny what she did, but explains that she couldn’t stand to see someone she loved so much in pain. A few days later, Eva sees Hannah standing outside the house, her dress on fire. Without hesitation, Eva pushes herself through the second-story window of her house (trying to protect Hannah) and falls to the ground below. Both Eva and Hannah are rushed to the hospital—Eva survives her fall, but Hannah doesn’t survive her burns. Before she’s taken off to the hospital, Eva notices Sula, quietly watching her own mother burn. Eva comes to hate Sula because of this. 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 Martinand now i understand why this book kept injuring me - Sula does NOT play nice. it is a rough book full of rough things too potent to be contained between the covers of the book itself. or maybe the book was just trying to get my attention because it knew i would like it so much. either way, it was worth the price of a few battle scars marking me like sula herself, whose birthmark gives her face a broken excitement. They moved toward the ice-cream parlor like tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome. Somewhere beneath all of t 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. Keywords: Narrative, Interlinear reading, Paradox, Identity, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Self, Other