Sula - A PDF

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Summary

An analysis of Sula by Tony Morrison...

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Sula by Toni Morrison Sula takes place in Ohio state, in a little community called Medallion, formed by African Americans. Two of the characters that we see, and that are the protagonists of the story, are Sula and Nel. Sula and Nel are characterized as one person. Against the opinions of the residents of the Bottom, Toni Morrison was able to successfully depict the parallelism between their personalities. Throughout the development of the story we see how this affect the actions and the consequences of these. Within the development of the story we are introduced to an array of characters; but the one that it is more recurrent and portrayed as the same as Sula is Nel. Sula Peace and Nel Wright are from different worlds. Nel came from a house with a paternal figure that was alive but almost never present at home, so she only had her mother with her. Her mom liked things to be neat and organized, and we can see this when they are describing Nel’s life: “...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…” In her life, everything was in order. There was not an object out of place and the house did not have a speck of dust. Sula, on the other hand, came from a house where there was only women, since her father died when she was three years old and her mom moved back with her grandmother. She lived in chaos. This we can see it when Morrison is contrasting their lives: “...Sula, also an only child, but wedged into a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, people, voices and the slamming of the doors…” There was not. Yet, in all these differences of ambient, they managed to find themselves similar to each other. They managed to find balance between each other's worlds.

At the age of 12, Sula and Nel find each other. The connection they feel is instant and strong, as if somehow they've known each for a long time but just got drifted apart because of destiny's games. They were both looking for something they couldn’t find in somebody else, longing to share a connection with someone that could understand. We can see this when they find each other and what they felt: “Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on…. They found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.” When they met each other, they were meant to find each other and grow together. They formed a special bond that led them to be seen as one. They were together most of the time. They went everywhere together, like the time they were going to Edna Finch’s Mellow House in the winter even though it was too cold for ice cream, just to demonstrate that they were not children anymore, but grown ladies that deserved respect and be the object of desire. Their bond was developing more and more with the passing time, and they could not image being separated from the other. In the little town of Medallion, everyone knows that Nel and Sula have a pretty strong bond when it comes to everything. They often saw them as just one person; Sula and Nel thought the same and understood what the other wanted to do without even having to say it out loud most of the time. It goes as far as sharing the same boys when they were younger, neither of them caring at all about this. We can see this when Sula was analyzing herself, looking for the reasons as to why Nel was reacting how she was reacting regarding the situation with Jude, and she says: ‘’They had always shared the affection of other people: compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other.’’ We can see that the way they were, the strongness of their relationship, didn’t allow them to be separate more time than the necessary they needed to, which was

almost nothing, excepting when they had to go to their respective homes. This is why Sula does not understand why Nel was reacting the way she was, especially not with her, and even accused Nel of becoming one of the women they had make fun years ago: housewives crazy about their husbands. Nevertheless, people in Medallion saw them as different people sometimes, somehow. Besides the obvious thing that everyone knew (that Sula grew up under chaos and Nel under obedience), when they were little, and still well into their adulthood, Sula was seen as the bad one and Nel the good one. Sula was judged based on her actions, like the time she slept with Nel’s husband and Nel was the victim, having to cope with all of these actions because they were friends. But the things that each one of them did differed from the other one. When Sula accidentally drowned Chicken Little, they reacted completely different. We can see it when they are in Chicken Little’s funeral: ‘’There was a space, a separateness, between them….Although she knew she had ‘done nothing,’ she felt convinced and hanged right there in the pew….Sula simply cried.’’ Some readers could interpret this as that Sula cried because she knew Chicken Little and grew up with him; but, Nel was also there and acted as though she had done nothing so she didn’t feel remorse for what happen. The question is: if Sula and she were really that connected to know each other’s thoughts and actions, shouldn’t she have feel the pain her friend was feeling, or some part of the guilt? What people don’t know is that, behind the image that each one of them conveyed, the good Nel and the bad Sula, the papers were reversed. When can see this at the beginning of chapter ‘’1939,’’ after the word got out about Sula putting Eva in a nursing home and also after people heard that Sula had slept with Jude, Nel’s husband: ‘’...the people in the Bottom shook their heads and Sula was a roach. Later, when they

saw how she took Jude…..said she was a bitch.’’ People in the Bottom saw Nel as the victim in all the damage that Sula had caused by doing what she did, and so people said that she was bad. Just as people never saw that when Teapot, a little boy that ran to Sula’s house and knocked on the door, was leaving, fell and Sula was trying to help, but instead just saw him on the floor and Sula beside him and immediately blamed her, people never saw Nel’s true demeanor. When can see part of the real her when she went to visit Sula while she was sick at her house and starts talking to her: ‘’....it hid from her the true motives of her charity, and, finally, it gave her voice the timbre she wanted to have: free of delight...with which the news of Sula’s illness had been received up in the Bottom-free of the least hint of retribution.’’ Nel was trying to hide the joy she somehow felt when Sula was sick, as if that’s what she deserved for taking away her husband and her children’s dad, for breaking her family, even though they were friends. As she says herself in the quote posted above, she saw her visit as some kind of retribution, and so was her illness. Another evidence for this is when Nel is thinking about Chicken Little’s death and she states that she was proud of the way she reacted when Chicken Little died: calm, collected, while she had to console Sula who was devastated and crying. As Nel says in the last chapter, ‘’The good feeling she had when Chicken’s hands slipped….‘Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?’ All these years she had been secretly proud of her calm, controlled behaviour when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes.’’ Thoghts like these were the things that people in Medallion could not see, and therefore could not see that there was more to Nel and Sula's relationship and their behavior when they were alone and when they were in front of others and the things they did. These

nuisances escaped their knowledge and they failed to categorize each one of them as such. Sula herself, revising her life, realizes that she and Nel were never the same, that the comfort and trust she found in Nel weren’t what she thought to be, and we can see this we she says: “She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing." Sula realized that, after everything that happened and how Nel treated her, they were definitely not the same. The fact that they had some things in common did not mean that they were equal at all; or at least in Sula’s head. Before that, Sula saw Nel as her equal, and as her equal, she felt the need to protect her. When four Irish boys moved to their neighborhood with their parents, they were always trying to pick on little black children to make fun of. This was what happened to Nel; they picked on her, and as a result, she changed the route she took to go to school. Sula then took the matters on her own hand. We can see this when she says to Nel to take the route they always did before they came to town and does something that instead of pleasing Nel, disgust her: “The one time she tried to protect Nel, she had cut off her own finger tip and earned not Nel’s gratitude but her disgust.” We can infer that most of Sula's actions, without the previous knowledge by Nel, molested her and instead of seeing that Sula was just trying to protect her and earn her some respect, Nel decides to overlook it. However, years after her death, Sula and Nel were linked together, being told that between them there was no difference whatsoever. The most notorious evidence of this is when Nel, 25 years after Sula’s death, goes to the Bottom to visit Eva, and Eva tells her that she had killed Chicken Little; but Nel denies it by saying that it wasn’t her but Sula

who killed him, and Eva, as sharp and blunt as she had always been, answers: ‘’You. Sula. What’s the difference?’’ And this seems to be even more supported by the fact that after Nel is leaving, Eva calls "Sula" after her. Sula and Nel were never that different, never that unique to be differentiated between the other. Eva knew them well, having seen their true self growing up; and even she had, by the end of the novel, portrayed them as just one, which leads to no doubts about them being As well established in the novel Nel and Sula were, in fact, complementary in their personas. While the book's title is Sula, the name of the main character, it closes with Nel realizing that her and Sula were not different at all. Their relationship is kind of like that of the Alpha and the Omega; the beginning and end....