Shape of Experience in Morrison\'s

Shape of Experience in Morrison's Sula

Experience shapes who we are and who we become. One of the reasons why we are so different from each other is because we have unique experiences that mold us into distinctive people. One novel that explores this phenomenon is Toni Morrison's Sula. We begin to understand how these two women, together, would make a complete woman by examining them as children and monitoring their growth into adulthood. Through their experiences we see how they become the grown women they are and why they are so incomplete as grown ups. Each girl walks away from a traumatic death with different emotions and this shapes how they think and who they become. Sula is wild and will not allow society to tame her while Nel is more conventional and laid back. While they are living their own lives, each seems to be perceived a certain way. One woman seems to be living what society would deem a fulfilling life while the other seems reckless in comparison. The truth is that both women are only partially alive because they are still trying to reconcile remorse and denial over an event in their childhood.

Each woman is shaped by their childhood experiences. Morrison gives us different impressions of the women with deifferent physical attributes. Nel is the color of "wet sandpaper-just dark enough to escape the blows of the pitch-black truebloods and the contempt of old women who worried about such things as bad blood mixtures" (Morrison 52). Sula is a "heavy brown with large quiet eyes, one of which featured a birthmark that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose" (52). One of the most significant events that changes how the two girls view life and themselves is Chicken Little's death. While there can be no denying that Sula threw the boy in the water, it cannot be denied that Nel encouraged her to run away. We also need to remember that while Sula stood in shock over what she did, Nel told her she was not at fault. The event gets lost as the girls grow up, but it influences how Sula sees the world and herself. One of the most important things she takes away from the experience is the fact that she feels as though she cannot depend upon anyone and she could not count on herself, either. She has "no center, no speck around which to grow . . . She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments - no ego. For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself" (119). Sula has no sense of who she is at the core. With real sense of self, she will have a skewed look at the world around her. In her eyes, she is empty, as is the world.

Nel is grounded but this does not mean she is complete. Sula is labeled a wild child because she is not conventional like those around her. She moves to get herself away from Bottom and has several casual affairs with men. When she returns, the townspeople view her as wicked. Those in her town call her a "roach" (112) and "bitch" (112) and her death is a welcome relief. She has an affair with Nel's husband, which makes Nel look like nothing short of an angel in the novel. Sula's life was not nice and neat. Nel married and had children, which was something of a traditional lifestyle for a woman. In short, Nel conforms to what society expects of women. Sula decided not to choose this road. Sula fell into bouts of pessimism at times while Nel was more controlled, albeit she was controlling at times. These women could not have lived lives that were more different from one another and what this shows us is that there must be more to life than what these women had because, in the end, they were not complete individuals. One life was spent living in the shadow of guilt while the other lived behind the veil of denial. As such, no life can be complete or fulfilling.