Sula

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Sula puts Eva in a rest home because she feels threatened by her. The two women are independent, strong, and concerned with self-preservation. When they love or hate, they do so fiercely and deeply. The two women are too much alike to live amiably within the same household. Eva’s love is the toughest of love. She is consistent and honest in the way she lives. Her name connects her to Eve, the first woman. She is the first and the last, the matriarch of the Peace women. Farmer to me, this book was absolute perfection when it was focused on the childhood friendship of sula and nel, but it lost something once they grew up. which is a shame, because the childhood parts were SO GOOD. she writes the intensity of nel and sula's intertwining perfectly: These values are…particularly important thematically in her first and second novels, The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973), in which the dramatic tension arises from the community’s efforts to coexist peacefully with the threat posed to its survival by evil and madness. The pattern that madness assumes…is a loss of self-identity, a separation of the self from itself” (732).

Ajax is an intelligent and attractively lazy man who loves women and treats them well. When Nel and Sula walk to Edna Finch’s Mellow House for ice cream cones, they have to walk past the group of young men that hang around the businesses on Carpenter’s Road. The young men in cream-colored trousers and lemon-yellow gabardines comment on the girls walking past, and the one who is best able to manipulate his language is Ajax. He is a beautiful young man, and the girls are delighted when he pays them the compliment of saying “pigmeat” as they walk by. Years later, Sula falls in love with him, and by the time of his departure, she has become possessive. This new desire for ownership seems to instigate the decline in her health that eventually leads to her death. The big old eyes in your head would a been two holes full of maggots if I hadn’t” (Morrison, 1998, p. 68)The soldiers on the train are first sympathetic and then scornful of Helene when she smiles at the abusive and racist conductor. Nel is ashamed of her mother after seeing the looks in their eyes. Boy Boy Sula stood with a worn slip of paper in her fingers and said aloud to no one, “I didn’t even know his name. And if I didn’t know his name, then there is nothing I did know and I have known nothing ever at all since the one thing I wanted was to know his name so how could he help but leave me since he was making love to a woman who didn’t even know his name.

McDowell, Deborah E. “Boundaries: Or Distant Relations and Close Kin.” Afro-American Literary Studies in the 1990s, edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989: 51-70.Like Nel, Sula is an only child. The two girls have distinct upbringings. Nel is raised in a conventional household while Sula lives in a busy and hectic household, full of lodgers, alcoholics, and her mother and grandmother’s lovers. These differences and their dissatisfaction with their lives is part of what draws the two girls together. Sula and Nel are such close friends that Sula cuts off the tip of her own finger trying to protect Nel from white bullies. Sula is all of these possibilities, every line of light on a dew-lined web. But no matter how many times I reread Sula, analyze her names, untangle her threads, the light of her slips through my fingers. Some small thing that lives in my chest and has a bell for a tongue knows the truth of the matter: Sula is Sula. Helene Wright: Nel's strait-laced and clean mother. Though the daughter of a prostitute, she was raised by her devoutly religious grandmother, Cecile. Ralph (Plum) Peace: Sula's uncle; Eva's son and youngest child. Plum was a WWI veteran and a heroin addict. Eva burns him alive with kerosene because of his mental instability.

In completing the loop of [a] circle of sorrow, and by emphasizing the plurality of the circles of sorrow, Morrison throws into relief the fact that Sula is metanarrative, a story about stories. These include all of the stories contained within the text of Sula, and as I will argue, a set of foundational texts upon which Sula is written in a kind of postmodern palimpsest” (116). Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter New York Times

Hannah is a diluted, more relaxed version of Eva. She teaches Sula her views on sex, but Sula takes them, along with everything else she learns from the women of her family, to a new and different level. Of the three women, Hannah has the weakest, most passive personality. Helene Sabat Wright Helene is not very visible for the rest of the novel, but she influences Nel and how Nel relates to Sula and the rest of the world. Nel has seen strange places and people, but most of all she has seen that her controlling mother is not the powerful figure Nel thought she was. After her return home, Nel realizes that she is not defined by her mother—that she is not just her parents’ daughter, but that she is herself. Feminist and Afro-American Literary Criticism have challenged the traditional Western notion of a unified self. Sula…offers us a journey to the epicenter of the human soul, depicting the post-modernist dilemma of multiple incoherent selves” (114).