"What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval?"
These, as Morrison explains in her Foreword, are some of the questions she set out to explore in Sula. The story focuses on Nel and Sula – what stuff they’re made of and what they do with their lives after making each other’s acquaintance in a small, black town in the 1920s, the only children of distant mothers and absent fathers. The context is complex and important, even if at least one of the two girls goes on to transcend her background (in that she goes to college and travels around the country for 10 years). In Morrison’s other novels – The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Jazz – part of the context is white violence or at the very least the internalized white gaze. In all these books, there are violent exposures to the white-dominated politics of the day which can surely corrode anyone. In Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, two young girls had exhibited violent reactions against the white “norm” which their friend Pecola Breedlove aspired to. But Sula has more to do with the aftermath of stressful events, the nature of evil, personality and boundaries in relationships. Morrison explores these themes by placing the political question secondary to the “aesthetics only” criterion of merit. She says in the Foreword to the novel:
"In 1970, when I began writing Sula, I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, The Bluest Eye, by both black and white reviewers that – with two exceptions – had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. The judgment was based on whether “Black people are – or are not – like this.” This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored the shallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed."
The worst is not now. Eva Peace says “Just ‘cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl.... Niggers was dying like flies” The characters are living in the aftermath of the time when “Things was bad.” While the characters in Sula are constrained and pained by the larger politics that dominate their lives –
“a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes…. A valley man… might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk… and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve....”
unlike Beloved or Song of Solomon where violence from whites wreaks havoc in the lives of the victims and their generations, the white presence in Sula is more thwarting in nature and life-threatening only potentially. Other factors have the upper hand in the residents’ lives.
"The black people… were mightily preoccupied with earthly things – and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom."
The characters are also dominated by factors like their innate characteristics, their families and above all their friendships. Morrison creates a world, stressed post-traumatically, where active white violence is not a factor for the main characters – two young women. They experience racial politics twice removed through male characters who abdicate, leave.
As for patriarchy, the homes of the girls are dominated by women. The male gaze comes filtered through other characters. Nel had vowed never to let any man look at her the way the black soldiers looked when her light-skinned mother had ended a humiliating exchange with a white conductor with a coquettish display of pretty teeth. Sula was aware of how a woman like her mother, who managed to get “some touching every day” was perceived “outside the house.”
These, as Morrison explains in her Foreword, are some of the questions she set out to explore in Sula. The story focuses on Nel and Sula – what stuff they’re made of and what they do with their lives after making each other’s acquaintance in a small, black town in the 1920s, the only children of distant mothers and absent fathers. The context is complex and important, even if at least one of the two girls goes on to transcend her background (in that she goes to college and travels around the country for 10 years). In Morrison’s other novels – The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Jazz – part of the context is white violence or at the very least the internalized white gaze. In all these books, there are violent exposures to the white-dominated politics of the day which can surely corrode anyone. In Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, two young girls had exhibited violent reactions against the white “norm” which their friend Pecola Breedlove aspired to. But Sula has more to do with the aftermath of stressful events, the nature of evil, personality and boundaries in relationships. Morrison explores these themes by placing the political question secondary to the “aesthetics only” criterion of merit. She says in the Foreword to the novel:
"In 1970, when I began writing Sula, I had already had the depressing experience of reading commentary on my first novel, The Bluest Eye, by both black and white reviewers that – with two exceptions – had little merit since the evaluation ignored precisely the “aesthetics only” criteria it championed. If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics; if it was bad, it was because it was faithless to them. The judgment was based on whether “Black people are – or are not – like this.” This time out, I returned the compliment and ignored the shallowness of such views and, again, rooted the narrative in a landscape already tainted by the fact that it existed."
The worst is not now. Eva Peace says “Just ‘cause you got it good now you think it was always this good? 1895 was a killer, girl.... Niggers was dying like flies” The characters are living in the aftermath of the time when “Things was bad.” While the characters in Sula are constrained and pained by the larger politics that dominate their lives –
“a neighborhood where on quiet days people in valley houses could hear singing sometimes, banjos sometimes…. A valley man… might see a dark woman in a flowered dress doing a bit of cakewalk… and it would be easy for the valley man to hear the laughter and not notice the adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids, somewhere under their head rags and soft felt hats, somewhere in the palm of the hand, somewhere behind the frayed lapels, somewhere in the sinew’s curve....”
unlike Beloved or Song of Solomon where violence from whites wreaks havoc in the lives of the victims and their generations, the white presence in Sula is more thwarting in nature and life-threatening only potentially. Other factors have the upper hand in the residents’ lives.
"The black people… were mightily preoccupied with earthly things – and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom."
The characters are also dominated by factors like their innate characteristics, their families and above all their friendships. Morrison creates a world, stressed post-traumatically, where active white violence is not a factor for the main characters – two young women. They experience racial politics twice removed through male characters who abdicate, leave.
As for patriarchy, the homes of the girls are dominated by women. The male gaze comes filtered through other characters. Nel had vowed never to let any man look at her the way the black soldiers looked when her light-skinned mother had ended a humiliating exchange with a white conductor with a coquettish display of pretty teeth. Sula was aware of how a woman like her mother, who managed to get “some touching every day” was perceived “outside the house.”
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