Toni Morrison s Sula and its Ending

Sula: The Meaning of the Ending

At the ending of Toni Morrison’s Sula, a novel that focuses on the lives of two African American women (despite the novel taking the name of only one of them as its title), the more conventional of the two woman has an emotional breakdown. “’We was girls together,” says Nel, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (Morrison 174) Although Sula was in many ways a terrible friend, stealing Nel’s husband Jude from her, and making a spectacle of herself in the community to the point of becoming a pariah, the ending suggests that the two women are essentially two sides of the same coin, neither complete. They represent two available identities for Black women, either the highly sexualized Sula or the maternal Nel. But neither is whole without the other, as the blurring of the word ‘girl’ suggests.

This is seen from the very beginning, when Nel “relishes the casual disorder of Sula’s household” as a child, even while in adulthood she is pressured to confirm to her mother’s dictates about cleanliness, chastity, and order (Nigro 727). Nel marries upon completing her schooling, but Sula, ever restless, goes off to college, seeking masculine attributes in the form of knowledge as well as men. Throughout the novel, Sula is portrayed as being closer to nature, “accompanied by a plague of robins” at one point, that leave bird guano everywhere (Morrison 89). Sula represents dirt and desire. Dirt and desire for the sake of herself is something Nel attempts to reject, but ultimately, she continues to find herself drawn into Sula’s orbit, even while she rejects the idea of Sula’s sexual availability as a model for herself.

The fact that Sula seduces Jude is the event which ultimately and understandably causes a rift between the two women until the final poignant scene. But it can also be viewed as an attempt by Sula to possess all that Nel symbolizes that she does not have herself—a husband, a stable home, and respectability. When the two of them were children, during one of the most traumatic incidents in the novel, the two girls accidentally participate in an event that results in a young boy named Chicken Little falling to his death. Sula was the one who lost her grip, so she blames herself, and Nel feels a sense of relief that it was not her fault. However, both girls were still participating in the same action.

Once again, this highlights how the two women are the part of the same, enclosed circle of guilt, even though Nel tries to distance herself from blame, sexual desire, and involvement. Since the incident was accidentally, in reality, none of the women were to blame. Nel’s final memory of the girlhood they shared implicitly recalls this incident, even though periodically throughout the novel she has tended to ascribe negative motives to her friend (fairly and unfairly). This is also true even of Sula’s own grandmother, who believes, “Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested” (Morrison 78).