FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN TONI MORRISON'S SULA PDF

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About Us | Editorial Board |Submission Guidelines |Call for Paper Paper Submission | FAQ |Terms & Condition | More……. IJELLH Volume V, Issue XII, December 2017 2 Dr. M. Ravichand Associate Professor of English Dept. of BS&H Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College Tirupathi FEMALE FRIENDSHIP I...

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IJELLH

Volume V, Issue XII, December 2017

Dr. M. Ravichand Associate Professor of English Dept. of BS&H Sree Vidyanikethan Engineering College Tirupathi

FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN TONI MORRISON'S SULA

ABSTRACT This paper explores the issue of female friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula. Race and class as patriarchal institutions represent a danger to female friendship. Black women's common experience of oppression urges them to form bonds in order to fight back the impact of race, class and gender. Female friendship can possibly function as a protection where they can find soothe and safety and repair the wounds resulting from discrimination. As findings this paper foregrounds the healing powers of female bonding, which allows women to overcome prejudice and survive, to enjoy female empowerment, and to extend female friendship into female solidarity that participates in nation building.

KEY WORDS: Female friendship, Female bonding, Female solidarity, Female Empowerment

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FEMALE FRIENDSHIP IN TONI MORRISON'S SULA This paper explores the issue of female friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula. Black women's common experience of oppression urges them to form bonds in order to fight back the impact of race, class and gender. Female friendship not only helps women work against the effects of patriarchy but it also provides them with soothe, safety and even curing. Sula Peace and Nel Wright in Sula form bonds in their girlhood that allows them to nurture each other and soothe the pain of patriarchal oppression. Nel and Sula represent the true nature of female friendship in the sense that they struggle to develop and cultivate a sisterhood that allows them to care for one another as well as give and offer moral and material support. Each helps the other in difficult times and encourages her to make constructive changes that allow her to face the challenges. Because they go through similar experiences, they recognize and understand each other. Thus, friendship gives them a chance to strengthen their connection. Female friendship is a relationship between women based on giving and getting moral support, sharing stories and experiences, compassionate and encouraging each other. This form of association may occur between any women and does not necessarily involve sibling or mother-daughter relations. Women friends provide for each other reliability that goes beyond the concern for self and aims at reaching out to sisters in an attempt to help and promote them. In the fiction Morrison presents common women. These women form bonds; they may not even believe in feminist ideology, but their experiences or surroundings urge them toward female friendship. The race subject is linked to the problem of class since the majority of black women belong to the lower class. Class is also an agent which oppresses women and causes them much pain. Race and class as patriarchal institutions symbolize a danger to female

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friendship. These agents disclose a certain disparity in the society that translates into a form of tyranny. The tough financial condition of black women transforms them into substandard citizens, and female friendship can possibly function as a shelter where they can find soothe and safety and make well the wounds resulting from discrimination. Sula and Nel went to the same school and nurture up in the same neighborhood. Having to live in the Bottom, a society named from a joke about a master tricking his slave into accommodating a hilly land, they form bonds. This bonding allows them to battle against the force of patriarchal cruelty and helps them cure their common wounds. Racial separation was intended to keep Blacks subjugated. Other forms of associations exist that may involve two or more women who care and take care of each other. For instance, in Africa, women's associations work principally to offer economic freedom to women. They comprehend that they have to work in accord, serenity and harmony in order to achieve their dreams. This cooperative dedication to the same purpose results in a strong sisterhood that benefits not only the women themselves but also the society as a whole. This form of female friendship works well because in addition to compassionate and fostering, the material aspect keeps relations strong and eliminates or minimizes pecuniary reliance on men. Without a doubt, in Sula, Nel and Sula's girlhood bonding turns into a bitter relationship that keeps them alienated for the rest of their lives. When Sula sleeps with Nel's husband, Jude, she not only hurts her buddy but also puts an end to their friendship. Their close bonding turns immediately into an alienated relationship. Coulis reflects, “The marriage of Nel and Jude demonstrates the crippling effects of several types of oppression: Both are victims in the racist war against black people.” (7) In Africa, women are often likely to move into their husband's houses, where they find sisters-in-law and other womanly relatives. These women do not always co-exist serenely and may connect in rivalries in order to uphold their role in the family. The

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comprehensive nature of the African family fills it with many women who do not necessarily share the same viewpoints and priorities. These conflicts of concern set up real rivalries within families, as sisters-in-law battle and daughters and mothers-in-law fight. Any endeavor to force all women to see themselves as sisters will be unsuccessful because women have first to admit the significance of female bonding that cannot be forced. In Sula, the friendship between Sula and Nel gives them the chance to attain a harmony connecting self and other that empowers them in the visage of failed mother/daughter relations. The novel demonstrates how female friendship helps these girls face challenges related to race, class and gender domination. As presented in the novel, female bonding proves helpful to young girls because it gives them an occasion to share experiences, give and take counseling, care for and secure each other, and help change their views about their homes. Undeniably, Sula and Nel's girlhood friendship is so influential that they feel like the same person, and this strong relation benefits them both. Sula and Nel's friendship not only allows them to give power to each other, it also helps them build up new sense of self. Nel's first familiarity of self-awareness occurs in the trip she makes with her mother to the South. This trip introduces her to racial discrimination. In the segregated train that takes Nel and Helene to New Orleans, Nel finds her mother's limitation and decides from then on to maintain her selfhood. When Helene understands the mistake she makes by entering the white part of the train, she laughs which causes not only the fury of the conductor but also the annoyance of the black soldiers. This incident gives Nel a new consciousness of her mother's personality as a black woman, who faces the challenge of living in both a racially segregated world. As a result, the incident in the New Orleans train becomes a critical moment of development for Nel regarding both racial and gender distinctiveness. She disassociates herself

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from her parents because of the humiliation her mother causes her. She just wants to be herself, not the daughter of this lady whose infirmity she has just identified. The event on the train is not the only understanding that alienates Nel from her mother. Throughout Nel's early days, Helene imposes on her daughter a notion of beauty clear in terms of the overriding white culture and racial characteristics. Helene causes a severe problem of identity in her daughter by denying the quintessence of her blackness, making her daughter consider that her nose is too broad and therefore unattractive. Helene continuously encourages Nel to pull on and restyle her nose, even giving her a clothespin to use for this reason. Luckily, Nel's congregation with Sula helps her understand that she does not have to follow her mother's desires that she keep pulling her nose in order to straighten it. Nel's disobedience of her mother in befriending Sula is satisfying because through it she learns to be her own self in spite of the different challenges she faces. The lure Nel and Sula find in each other's home reflects how they match each other and shows the difference in their family setting. Nel is suffocated in her mother's too organized house but finds console in Eva's big and muddled home, whereas Sula is awestruck with the orderliness of Helene's home. This shared admiration of each other's home makes each look at her home with new eyes. Unlike Sula, Nel does not live with her grandmother, and the view of this onelegged and authoritative woman Eva impresses her. As for Sula, she is overwhelmed with Helene, who organizes and controls everything in her house, as well as her own daughter. Through the dissimilarity of the two homes, Morrison shows the difference between the two families who dwell in them. The free and unruly manners of Hannah disagree considerably from the systematic and scrupulous ways of Helene. Because Sula and Nel do not like their homes, the friendship provides them with a prospect to enjoy each other's home. Sula not only likes Helene's home, she also brings good affluence to it through her simple existence. Nel's obligation to run

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away the imprisonment of her house and her authoritarian rearing overwhelm her mother's yearning to keep her away from Sula. Each finds in the others house the comfort and protection she is looking for; this complementary admiration reveals a difference of finding between them which finally enriches their bond. This difference also illustrates their balancing selves since each completes the other's perceptions and opinions and changes her for the best. Beyond family issues, female friendship also helps Sula and Nel to muddle with other important matters in their social background. conscious of the oppression going on in their society but not capable to resolve it directly, Sula and Nel take advantage of the nurturing and caring aspects of their friendship that provide them with safety and console. They come to realize their misfortunes connected to gender and race and to find something in their friendship which nobody can refute them but themselves. A significant event in the novel, Chicken Little's drowning, is main in the girls' bonding because it seals a promise of confidentiality between them. One in which, Nel decides to share conscientiousness for a crime committed by Sula. Sula and Nel first play while digging holes in the sand before getting diverted by the arrival of Chicken Little. The boy draws their concentration and they start to play with him by swinging him from a tree. Unluckily, Chicken loses his steadiness and gets thrown far into the river. This astonishing event causes fear especially in Sula, who is answerable for the act. After a minute of bewilderment, both Sula and Nel head home, leaving behind them their buddy, who drowns. Without prior dialogue or understanding, they decide to remain quiet. Indeed, Nel is bothered about her friendship with Sula and had not reported the matter to the police. She is not worried about an ultimate guilty conscience for sharing the secret of the death of a child, but is more concerned about guarding the bond with her friend.

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Chicken Little is buried but the secret of his death secures the friendship between Sula and Nel. This particular event of Chicken Little's drowning represents the strongest moment of their understanding. The most excellent friends are not those who sling around in joyful times, but the ones who stay during hard periods. Sula and Nel share and keep their secret, thus representing a notable sense of unity. The fortuitous death of Chicken Little leads Sula to serious indication on the nature of her selfhood, and these reflections ultimately point to the vital issue raised in Morrison's portrayal of girlhood friendship. The mutual happiness their friendship provides changes their lives for the best and prepares them for adulthood. Sula's homecoming illuminates Nel's life, and they both enjoy their summit. Sula's ten years of traveling fail to provide her with a substitution for Nel, the only friend she ever has, and her return fills Nel with joy. Sula shows a girlhood friendship that allows Nel and Sula to develop sisterhood. Their association offers them an opening to build new identities, develop new consideration of the relationship between self and other, take care of and care for one another, guard and defend each other, and share not only joys but also sorrows. Commenting on Nel and Sula's relationship, Stephanie Demetrakopoulos says, - It is to other women that we go for the deepest understanding, for the most uncontingent love. Women without female bonds are, in my opinion, the most lost and alienated of human beings (51). Their friendship allows them to state their womanhood and fight against the harmful impact of race, gender and class tyranny in their community. The unity between them provides them with a prospect to cure the wounds related to discrimination and fills them with an optimism of survival. In Sula, patriarchal patterns prevail over the nurturing quality of female friendship. In particular, racism, class and marriage terrorize female friendship and eventually bring about its obliteration. Even though Sula's sleeping with Nel's husband forms the obvious reason why the

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friendship breaks, a change in the exceptional relationship between self and other represented by the girls' friendship is another motive for its stoppage. Nel thinks that Sula's disloyalty of the friendship ruins her marriage; she does not recognize that the marriage actually causes the breakdown of the friendship. If Nel's marriage does not make her complete, however, Sula's liberty also fails to alternate for female friendship, she in due course lives and dies alone, alienated from her group of people. From Sula's viewpoint, her friendship with Nel starts to end the day Nel marries Jude. The marriage precipitates Sula's going away and justifies her ten-year stay away from the Bottom. Sula's resolution to leave the Bottom right after the reception in order to attend college out of state shows her concerns about Nel's choice to marry; but her long journey also brings about a change of character in Sula. Rejecting Nel's choice, Sula engages in a self-building project and keeps her away from family life and motherhood. Sula does not deem it necessary to get married or have children being so busy. Sula is treacherously free, and only her own liberty matters. She discards any form of obstruction to her freedom and does not take into deliberation any honest judgment on her. She makes her decisions according to her own wishes, and she violates the rules of the community with a purpose. Nel accepts all the laws of that society. She is the community. She believes in its principles. Sula does not. She does not consider in any of those laws and breaks them all. For this cause, she does not care about the ethical issues involved in her sleeping with her friend's husband, Jude. She does not feel any embarrassment or doubts and certainly does not understand Nel's pain because she does not accept any wrongdoing. She grants herself the freedom to sleep with Jude, but denies Nel the sovereignty to get annoyed. In reality, Sula and Nel's dissimilar upbringings may validate the different paths they follow. Sula grows up in a family circle without men, where her grandmother Eva and her

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mother, Hannah, amuse men according to their will. She inherits her sexual freedom from these women. Conceivably this explains why Sula finds it easy to sleep with her best and only friend's husband without humiliation or doubts. Regardless of her damaged childhood relationship with her mother, she looks up to her mother as a model and follows her easy ways. Hannah does not develop female friendship because she sleeps with the husbands of the women who are her friends. Her morally wrong behavior represents a danger to female bonding and a blow to female friendship since she causes women's pain instead of giving comfort and security. Sula does not value wedding because she believes in sexual liberty. Sula's first concern is to please her, and because she links Nel with herself, she thinks whatever makes her happy also pleases Nel. The community of the Bottom despises Sula because of her morally wrong behavior; however, it tolerates her status as a witch. For this reason, even though people protect themselves and their children from her, they do not hurt her or even throw her out of the society. They respect her relationship in the society even if they condemn her conduct. This paper explains the predicament of women who suffer diverse forms of repression and represent female friendship as an approach for combating back against discrimination. The characters in Sula give up the unity of self and other they built during their girlhood friendship and build up a type of narcissism which contributes to the collapse of their bonding. They also highlight how female bonding extends to participate in national building. Patriarchal agent causes women much problem by keeping them exploited. This paper largely focuses on the fostering, caring, interactions, and sharing experiences. The friendship impacts the lives and helps them resolve all sorts of tribulations.

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REFERENCES Abel, Elizabeth. (E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendships in Contemporary Fiction By Women. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6 (1981): 413-35. Coulis, Shari. The Impossibility of Choice: Gender and Genre in Mariama Bâ‘s So Long aLetter.‖ Emerging Perspectives on Mariama Bâ: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Postmodernism. Ed. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo. Trenton: Africa World P, 2003. Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A ― Sula and the Primacy of Woman-to-Woman Bonds. New Dimensions of Spirituality: A Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. Ed. Karla F.C Holloway and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. New York: Greenwood P, 1987. 51-66. Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973....