Toni Morrison's Sula: Evil, Identity, and Non-Conformity

Introduction: Sula as an Unconventional Heroine

Toni Morrison's Sula is one of her masterpieces and a work that established her as one of the most powerful African-American writers of our time. What strikes readers about Morrison's protagonist is Sula's non-conformist, modern consciousness, which turns her into an evil figure and an unsuitable heroine. For a novel of this stature, many readers expect a heroine they can identify with — someone fundamentally good despite minor flaws and occasional mistakes, someone like Nel. But that is not to be. Sula is the protagonist of the novel, and she is by no means a traditional heroine. For many, she is an evil woman who refuses to conform to societal expectations and does truly inexcusable things, such as sleeping with her best friend's husband.

Sula is the story of two Black women coming of age in Ohio sometime during the two world wars. Sula is a wild and aggressive woman with an individualistic streak and a strong desire to break free from tradition and rules. Nel, on the other hand, is the compassionate, gentle figure who can best be described as a "nice" person. Sula, however, has no interest in being the conformist.

The Bottom: Place as Character

Sula is an independent woman whose personality is largely shaped by the place she grew up in. It is for this reason that Morrison devotes several pages to describing that area, known as the Bottom. The Bottom is a hard land given to Black slaves as a supposed gift from white masters, who claimed it was the best land around:

"See those hills? That's bottom land, rich and fertile."
"But it's high up in the hills," said the slave.
"High up from us," said the master, "but when God looks down, it's the bottom... of heaven — best land there is" (5).

The Bottom was not even half as good as it was made out to be. It was harder to cultivate, and to survive in such a place, one needed to develop strength — to be as hard as the land itself. Sula certainly had that hardiness in her personality. Like the land that refused to change despite numerous efforts to cultivate it, Sula also refused to accept other people's influence on her life. She was content just as she was, and even though she becomes an evil figure by the middle of the novel, there is no significant change in her until the very end.

Formative Traumas and the Making of Sula's Self

Sula knew that in order to survive, she had only herself to rely on: "there was no other you could count on… no self to count on either." Two incidents played an especially important role in her development: her mother's careless words and her friend Chicken Little's death. When Sula overheard her mother Hannah say, "I love Sula. I just don't like her" (57), it must have done irreparable damage to her sense of self and made her realize she had no one to turn to but herself.

The second formative incident was Chicken Little's death, in which Sula inadvertently played a role. The passage below, drawn from the novel, captures how both experiences crystallized Sula's philosophy:

"She [Sula] lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full rein, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, hers was an experimental life — ever since her mother's remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had 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 — be consistent with herself." (118–19)

References

Badt, Karen Luisa. "The Roots of the Body in Toni Morrison: A Matter of 'Ancient Properties.'" African-American Review 29 (1995): 567–77.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985.

Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition." Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women. Ed. Cheryl A. Wall. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989. 16–37.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: A Plume Book/New American Library, 1973.