In this context, what do the two main characters – women – do? Is it now a world that will allow them to express themselves, be themselves? Morrison suggests that when stressful shaping factors are turned off they don’t cease to exert influence on their subjects. In the Foreword, Morrison reveals what she was thinking of when she was writing Sula:
'In that atmosphere of “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” I began to think about just what that kind of license would have been like for us black women forty years earlier.'
With nothing to stop her, Eva gets her leg cut for pecuniary reasons and burns her son alive when he becomes a liability. Her daughter, Hannah beds other women’s husbands. Her granddaughter, Sula, watches her mother burn, gets an education, does some traveling, but returns home to break up her best friend’s marriage and institutionalize her grandmother. She is the woman who for society is an “outlaw”, a free woman. In the Foreword, Morrison sets out what she wanted to explore through such a figure.
"Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation."
Acting as a foil to Sula, the free woman in the novel, is Nel – the wronged wife and the “good woman”. Morrison says, “…Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard.”
Speaking to Betty Jean Parker in 1979, Morrison said the two girls were “like a Janus’ head.” She said:
… there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something that the other one had.[1]
The two girls had started from very similar points as 10-year-old girls in the Bottom. There is a “fallen woman” in both their families. Nel’s grandmother was a “Creole whore” and Sula’s mother Hannah “simply refused to live without the attentions of a man, and… had a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of their friends and neighbors.” Speaking about why Nel had to have a grandmother with “questionable roots” and how that led to what she later becomes, Morrison, speaking to the Massachusetts Review in 1976, said:
"Nel’s grandmother just means that there’s that kind of life from which Nel comes; that’s another woman who was a hustler; that part is already in Nel and accounts for her attraction to Sula….[2]"
Nel and Sula had become friends when they were “unshaped, formless things”. Nel “seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.” The fact is both girls are passive, rendered so by parental words and attitudes. There is a degree of powerlessness in their lives. Sula is sent “flying up the stairs” by her mother’s words, “…I love Sula. I just don’t like her.” And Nel’s parents “had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had…. During all of her girlhood the only respite Nel had had from her stern and undemonstrative parents was Sula.” The two children first meet in their dreams.
"…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream... Nel … fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs…. Similarly, Sula… 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 a someone who shared both the taste and the speed."
This passage is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in “The Young Girl” chapter of which she talks about the passive eroticism and narcissism of young girls who, doomed to immanence, day-dream about a romantic, mysterious male.
[1] From Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women in Sturdy Black Bridges, Ed. Roseann Bell et al. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979:251-57; In Conversations with Toni Morrison
[2] From Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison by Robert Stepto in the Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 473-89; Conversations with Toni Morrison
'In that atmosphere of “What would you be doing or thinking if there was no gaze or hand to stop you?” I began to think about just what that kind of license would have been like for us black women forty years earlier.'
With nothing to stop her, Eva gets her leg cut for pecuniary reasons and burns her son alive when he becomes a liability. Her daughter, Hannah beds other women’s husbands. Her granddaughter, Sula, watches her mother burn, gets an education, does some traveling, but returns home to break up her best friend’s marriage and institutionalize her grandmother. She is the woman who for society is an “outlaw”, a free woman. In the Foreword, Morrison sets out what she wanted to explore through such a figure.
"Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when – especially when – it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peace was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female – envy coupled with amused approbation."
Acting as a foil to Sula, the free woman in the novel, is Nel – the wronged wife and the “good woman”. Morrison says, “…Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard.”
Speaking to Betty Jean Parker in 1979, Morrison said the two girls were “like a Janus’ head.” She said:
… there was a little bit of both in each of those two women, and that if they had been one person, I suppose they would have been a rather marvelous person. But each one lacked something that the other one had.[1]
The two girls had started from very similar points as 10-year-old girls in the Bottom. There is a “fallen woman” in both their families. Nel’s grandmother was a “Creole whore” and Sula’s mother Hannah “simply refused to live without the attentions of a man, and… had a steady sequence of lovers, mostly the husbands of their friends and neighbors.” Speaking about why Nel had to have a grandmother with “questionable roots” and how that led to what she later becomes, Morrison, speaking to the Massachusetts Review in 1976, said:
"Nel’s grandmother just means that there’s that kind of life from which Nel comes; that’s another woman who was a hustler; that part is already in Nel and accounts for her attraction to Sula….[2]"
Nel and Sula had become friends when they were “unshaped, formless things”. Nel “seemed stronger and more consistent than Sula, who could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes.” The fact is both girls are passive, rendered so by parental words and attitudes. There is a degree of powerlessness in their lives. Sula is sent “flying up the stairs” by her mother’s words, “…I love Sula. I just don’t like her.” And Nel’s parents “had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had…. During all of her girlhood the only respite Nel had had from her stern and undemonstrative parents was Sula.” The two children first meet in their dreams.
"…they had already made each other’s acquaintance in the delirium of their noon dreams. They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream... Nel … fell easily into a picture of herself lying on a flowered bed, tangled in her own hair, waiting for some fiery prince. He approached but never quite arrived. But always, watching the dream along with her, were some smiling sympathetic eyes. Someone as interested as she herself in the flow of her imagined hair, the thickness of the mattress of flowers, the voile sleeves that closed below her elbows in gold-threaded cuffs…. Similarly, Sula… 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 a someone who shared both the taste and the speed."
This passage is reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in “The Young Girl” chapter of which she talks about the passive eroticism and narcissism of young girls who, doomed to immanence, day-dream about a romantic, mysterious male.
[1] From Complexity: Toni Morrison’s Women in Sturdy Black Bridges, Ed. Roseann Bell et al. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979:251-57; In Conversations with Toni Morrison
[2] From Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison by Robert Stepto in the Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 473-89; Conversations with Toni Morrison
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