Rating: 4/5, good
Sula is a modern classic. It was published in 1973 and is Morrison’s second novel after The Bluest Eye.
I tried to read Beloved in college (it was assigned for Helene Moglen’s Gothic Imagination class – by the way, there’s a colloquium in her honor happening in March) but I just couldn’t get into it. It seemed too sad and I couldn’t figure out what was going on in the first couple pages (I had also left it til the last minute, so there’s that :P).
Sula was definitely a more straight-forward experience. The chapters go in order of year, but there are a lot of flashbacks and events told out of order. The narrative flows really well though and isn’t too hard to understand. Sula is a novel about friendship as much as the struggles of black people, so I get the sense this is probably a little lighter than some of her other work, though there’s still a lot of death in it.
Sula is about a girl named Nel who grows up with a really strict mother. Nel befriends a girl named Sula who grew up in kind of a nontraditional household with her mother, Hannah, and grandmother, Eva (Eva’s husband left and Hannah’s husband had died). Eva and Hannah both have a lot of gentleman callers but don’t remarry. The absence of black fathers is a theme in this book – Nel’s father is a fisherman who only comes home once or twice a month.
Nel loves Sula for her spontaneity and Sula loves Nel because she’s responsible and stable. They fill in each other’s flaws and play off each other in the way friends do. Sula defends Nel if anyone comes for her and Nel helps Sula figure out what to do in tricky situations.
Later in the book, though, [spoiler text: Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband and he leaves her, then Sula discards him] something gets in between them and Nel stops seeing Sula.
Sula is a unique character. Where Nel follows most social conventions, Sula just does whatever she wants without regard to what any of the nosy, superstitious small-town folk of the Bottom think of her. She sleeps with men as she likes and then moves on when she gets bored.
Something I didn’t know about black culture before I started this book was that it’s considered taboo for a black woman to sleep with white men. I don’t know if it’s as big of a deal for black men to sleep with white women, but it seems like men of any race get especially mad when women of their race sleep with men of a different race (patriarchal entitlement). Because I wasn’t aware of that there’s a scene that went over my head the first time where Nel’s mother accidentally walks through the white train cabin on the way to the black train car and gets stopped by the white conductor, flirts to get by him, and a couple black men in the next car see and glare at her. I got it on the second pass, but on the first read through I was like “What’s going on? Why are they mad at her?” Haha. I feel like that was kind of naive now. (the narrator explains this in more detail on page 113)
Sula explores the pros and cons of conforming vs following your passions. The former can be stifling, but the latter can hurt others. Nel tends to be dutiful and push her desires down, but Sula can be too selfish and disconnected.
The world the book is set in (the Bottom, actually up in the hills, which has an interesting origin story) is very well-realized and beautifully described. From the plague of robins that accompanies Sula’s return to the cold winter that follows [spoiler text: Sula’s death] the natural world feels full of significance and the ways of the people are well-articulated enough that it feels like you’re transported to 1920s small town America. It makes me wonder at how different things are and how much easier people today have it.
One of my favorite scenes is when Hannah (Sula’s mom) asks Eva (Sula’s grandmother) if she ever loved her children. Eva basically says not in the way she’s thinking, because there wasn’t time with trying to support them and keep them healthy by herself. “You settin’ here with your healthy-ass self and ax me did I love you? Them big old eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I hadn’t.” This is just so on the nose to how some parents can be it hurts, but it’s also true that you can’t fault them for not paying more attention because sometimes just keeping kids alive is a feat in itself.
In the prologue, Morrison writes, “Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.” She also analyzes Sula, saying that each of the major female characters are like points of a cross: Hannah is both envied and put down for her sexual freedom, but not censured in the way Sula is because she’s not threatening the other women’s livelihoods. Eva sacrifices her leg for economic and sexual freedom. Nel gives up her sexual freedom for economic freedom. Sula refuses to sacrifice anything.
Past here is going to be all spoilers, but before that I’d just like to say that this is a really good book but I can’t say I really enjoyed it. I had to push myself to keep reading it. It’s so dense I had to read it twice to feel like I really understood it, and it seems designed for at least two reads (there is some foreshadowing that doesn’t register if you’re reading it for the first time). However, the ideas are really deep, the characters are interesting, and the scenes are memorable.
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On to the spoilers:
I wonder why Morrison had Sula die? A person doesn’t really need a reason to get sick in real life, but in a novel I wonder what was the significance of Sula’s death? Is it making a statement women who are both sexually and economically free can’t exist? That feels uncharitable, though… When Sula’s dying, Nel says Sula can’t have it all, meaning no work and no man, but Sula says, “I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?” I don’t know what she means by that… what can she do? She went to college but we never learned what she studied. She traveled and slept around but returned to the Bottom to live at Eva’s house.
There’s a kind of parallelism between Plum being burnt and Sula returning and putting Eva in an old folks’ home. Eva burned Plum so he wouldn’t crawl back up inside her, but Sula came home and lives in Eva’s house, on Eva’s money, without Eva. There’s the sense that there can be only one: parent or child. There’s a lot of weird grudges in the Peace family – Hannah and later Sula are scared of Eva for burning Plum, but Eva is scared of Sula for watching Hannah burn. Maybe Eva and Sula are more alike than they think…
However, Sula respects Nel for being calm while watching Chicken Little sink because she didn’t realize that Nel was also fascinated by death in the same way she would later be during Hannah’s death.
What is this book trying to say about death?
Deaths:
- Chicken Little – Sula cries, Nel watches. Chicken Little is picked up by the bargeman, a white man who thinks Chicken’s parents must have killed him (racist). Innocence of childhood maybe blunts the impact of the death for Nel, making it more of a spectacle that doesn’t completely hit home? It becomes shared childhood trauma that Nel and Sula bond over, though the town is shocked and grieved by it. At the time, Nel thinks their outpouring of grief is overdone, but when she experiences grief of her own, she understands.
- Plum – Eva burns Plum because he’s addicted to heroin and she doesn’t have the emotional space to nurture him back to health. Eva still grieves for Plum, calling out his name when Hannah brings it up with her. Hannah and Sula fear Eva for her actions.
- Hannah – burns in a freak accident. Eva jumps out the window to try and save her, Sula just watches. Eva is afraid of Sula for the way she watched with interest.
- Sula – dies alone. Says it doesn’t hurt and wishes she could tell Nel.
- The Pied Piper crew – all the people who were dancing behind Shadrack died in the tunnel cave-in (technically Shadrack’s war comrade was the first death).
Maybe there’s a disconnect between the socially acceptable way to process death and how we actually feel about death. Is it bad to see death as a spectacle? To be fascinated instead of afraid or sad? Maybe the right word is “awe” rather than fascination? Maybe death is so incomprehensible that it goes beyond feelings, that no feeling can quite encompass it?
Or if we feel numb or don’t grieve when someone dies, does that just mean we didn’t have a close relationship with that person? Sula and Nel weren’t close with Chicken Little and don’t really grieve him though his death scars them. Eva was close to Plum and she grieves him. Sula knew Hannah didn’t love (or “like” her), so you could argue they weren’t close and that’s why Sula doesn’t grieve her.
Sula dies alone and for someone who cares mainly about herself and her mind she accepts death surprisingly serenely. She’s losing herself, but she’s infinitely curious about experience, and death is something she hasn’t experienced yet. It’s odd though that throughout her life she wanted to be self-determined and let nothing stand in her way, yet at the end she’s comforted by the finality of the boarded-up window and the water of death. Maybe it’s because she witnessed death at such an early age and realizes it’s the end of all life that she’s not afraid of it?
After the Pied Piper crew dies, Shadrack stands there ringing his bell, having forgotten the rope and the song. Hard to know what’s going on in his head – numbness, awe, insanity? When his comrade dies in front of him in the war he loses his grip on reality (literally, when he looks at his hands the fingers stretch and wiggle on their own). On the way back to Medallion:
“Shadrack began a struggle that was to last for twelve days, a struggle to order and focus experience. It had to do with making a place for fear as a way of controlling it. He knew the smell of death and was terrified of it, for he could not anticipate it. It was not death or dying that frightened him, but the unexpectedness of both. In sorting it all out, he hit on the notion that if one day a year were devoted to it, everybody could get it out of the way and the rest of the year would be safe and free. In this manner he instituted National Suicide Day.” (14)
What scares Shadrack about death is its disorderliness and unpredictability. He tries to contain death with National Suicide Day.
After Sula dies, Shadrack thinks back to the day he met Sula when she came to his house after Chicken Little drowned:
“But when he looked at her face he had seen also the skull beneath, and thinking she saw it too—knew it was there and was afraid—he tried to think of something to say to comfort her, something to stop the hurt from spilling out of her eyes. So he had said ‘always,’ so she would not have to be afraid of the change—the falling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood, and the exposure of bone underneath. He had said ‘always’ to convince her, assure her, of permanency.” (157)
Shadrack’s afraid of change, and he’s trying to tell Sula that she won’t change, but it’s not clear whether he sees Sula (and everyone’s) permanent state as alive or dead. Is he saying “Don’t worry, you’ll never die” or “Don’t worry, death is natural and painless”?
When Sula was dying, she thought, “the water was near, and she would crawl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always. Always. Who said that? She tried hard to think. Who was it that had promised her a sleep of water always?” (149)
It seems like Sula interpreted that always as the latter. It’s hard to say what Shadrack meant by it, though. Did he really believe that he could will the world not to change? He is crazy, willing to believe impossible things. I feel like in his conscious mind he believes if he does certain rituals he can control death, but on a deeper level he knows that death is the final and permanent state of all beings.
It’s interesting how most of the characters in Sula die by either fire or water… Chicken Little, Sula, and the Pied Piper crew all die by water, and Plum and Hannah die by fire. It reminds me of the Unetanneh Tokef prayer Jews say on Yom Kippur. I wonder if there’s anything in the Christian tradition like that? A couple of times in the book they sing “Shall We Gather at the River”, a Christian hymn.
I can see why this book would be taught in schools because there’s so much symbolism and so many repeated motifs you could pull out to write essays about. I’m a little overwhelmed by the complexity. I might come back and write more later, but for now I’m signing off.
If you’ve read it, let me know what you think!
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