11 thoughts on “Sula Response”

  1. One striking image in the Toni Morrison novel “Sula” is Hannah sleeping, laying down next to the fire. She put the “… Kentucky Wonders over the fire and, struck by sudden sleepiness, she went off to lie down in the front room. It was even hotter there, for the windows were shut to keep out the sunlight. Hannah straightened the shawl that draped the couch and lay down.” (Morrison 73). I chose this image because of its foreshadowing for the following events in the play. Morrison uses the parallels of fire and Hannah’s clothing to hint at her eventual fate. Hannah dies by burning to death, with bystanders but no one doing enough to help her. In the scene on pg. 73, Hannah lies down, a euphemism for being laid to rest. The words “even hotter there” imply that Hannah liked the heat and the warmth but in a cruel juxtaposition was killed by it later on. She became sleepy and gave into comfort, such as how people walk into the light. The shawl-like Hannah’s fiery dress wraps around her until the very end. All of these words are clearly chosen by Morrison to give insight into the death to follow, which will jolt Sula’s family. Hannah is the bridge that connects Sula and Eva, by being the mother of Sula and daughter of Eva; a middle path so with her gone, the granddaughter-grandmother relationship falls to shambles.

  2. I think that the most significant image that presents itself in Toni Morrison’s “Sula” would have to be that of water and the relationship that it molds and breaks between Nel and Sula, as well as how it is water which is what takes Chicken Little’s life. Looking at the loss of Chicken Little’s life as the pivotal moment which water is so relevant, the way he drowns and the way he’s engulfed by the water established something known for fostering life and cleansing being so vicious and unforgiving. One of the biggest connections that I made with the death being caused by water was just thinking how water is all around us and how easily it can be and always eventually is part of our lives made me conclude all the same things can be said about death. Delving further into the novel, it is interesting how water is something that follows Sula and haunts her because it is an indicator that childhood innocence is gone and that death is a very strong reality. Going back to the idea of water having molded and broken the relationship between Nel and Sula, it is interesting to me that Nel and Sula were brought together in the immediate aftermath of this traumatic incidence, but as again the novel drifted on they moved apart and water could represent in some ways the space in between them.

  3. The most striking image that seemed to reoccur throughout the entire novel was death, and specifically death by fire, and its relationship to the complexities of love. When Eva decides kill her heroin addict son Plum by setting him ablaze, her actions are propelled by feelings of love that leave her unable to watch her son suffer. It is clear that Eva loves Plum, as she rocks him in her arms before burning him. Despite the fact that Plum was Eva’s favorite child, her actions prove that her love is somewhat demented, selfish, and complex, resulting in the killing of Plum as a way to put an end to his downward spiral with a heroin addiction. The topic of death by fire comes up again when Eva’s daughter Hannah tells Eva of her dream, but Eva is too distracted by her granddaughter to give it any attention, resulting in Hannah’s dress catching on fire. Eva then tries to help Hannah who is up in flames, and the Suggs’ throw water on Hannah to put the fire out, but she is brutally scarred. The complexities of love appear again as Eva and Hannah go into the ambulance together, but Hannah is dead on arrival to the hostpial, bringing up the question of whether or not Eva had killed her daughter in the ambulance out of love, in order to stop her suffering. Finally, Sula’s death in the end of the novel reconnects Nel’s extreme feelings of love that she had for Sula, despite all of the turmoil that happened between them in the past. Nel finally comes to terms with this, and regrets some of her life choices up to this point now that her true best friend is gone.

  4. The image of Sula’s birthmark, stretching from her eyelid to her eyebrow, pervades Toni Morrison’s Sula. When introduced, the birthmark is compared to a “stemmed rose” (52). Such a rose, alluring yet retaining its thorny stem, foreshadows the “excitement” and “threat” Sula brings to the Bottom, to its familial structures and traditional proprieties, upon her return to it (52). She sleeps with husbands, ousts and forsakes an elder, and forgoes pleasantries to bluntly question even strangers. Ultimately, Sula pricks the community with her disruption and disregard of the social frameworks to which they cling. Still, her threat excites desperate affection, as wives coddle their husbands, daughters their mothers, and mothers their sons. The community of the Bottom unites against the threat of Sula. They clutch to their unspoken social norms.

    The birthmark also transforms throughout the novel. It grows “darker as the years passed” (53). When Sula is thirteen, the birthmark becomes “darker” and looks “more and more like a stem and rose” (74). When Sula returns to the Bottom and first sees Nel, the birthmark is “darker” still (96). It suggests a “startled pleasure”; Sula seeks the sharp thrill of new sensations (96). To Shadrack, the birthmark is “a tadpole” and identifies Sula as a friend (156). To Jude, it is “a copperhead”, a biting yet entrancing snake (103). To the community of Bottom, it’s her mother “Hannah’s ashes”, a break of bond between mother and daughter, a daughter’s murder of her mother (114). As Nel gazes on Sula, sick in bed just before death, the birthmark is again a “dark rose”, “very dark” (139, 144). It morphs for whoever looks upon it and ultimately is what Sula is to them rather than what she is. Perhaps Nel, closest to Sula, is best able to to see both the seductive rose petals and the razor-sharp thorny stem and to see Sula as she may truly be—a complexly human combination of beauty and evil and kindness and ugliness.

  5. I was struck, from the beginning of the novel, by the potent and recurring imagery of limbs, of movement, and of action. The description of Shadrack’s fitful hands was disturbing, but drew my attention to the theme of movement and doing. Throughout the novel, Morrison toys with each character’s actions through their movement. Morrison establishes early on that the black families of Medallion work their inhospitable land, while the white families watch. Helene’s entire life is spent in an uncomfortable conflict between putting her hands to work in the home, or feet to work, in relieving herself off the train, while Sula’s house is characterized by excited motion and engagement. While there is a juxtaposition within the people of the community Nel interacts with, I find the most striking image that cleaves her life and leads her astray from her family comes with the depiction of her great-grandmother, hands clasped and laying somberly flat and immobile. Nel is excited by her mystical grandmother, a woman she mistook for a hand, and what she posits in contrast to her own mother. Nel’s grandma speaks Creole, her lips flicking fast through a tongue Helene denounced, and she darkens her eyebrows with a burnt match, an action entirely adverse to Helene’s stoic principles. It is this action and excitement that, I feel, spurs Nel’s yearning for more action in her life. The contrast between hands at work, in this moment and beyond, and clasped, proper hands is emblematic of Nel’s disdain for Helene’s upkept way of life.

  6. One of the most striking images of the novel for me was the scene in which Hannah is burning, in particular when the neighbors attempt to put out her flames by dousing her in water. “They whispered “Jesus, Jesus,” and together they hoisted up their tub of water in which tight red tomatoes floated and threw it on the smoke-and-flame-bound woman. The water did put out the flames, but it also made steam, which seared to sealing all that was left of the beautiful Hannah Peace. She lay there on the wooden sidewalk planks, twitching lightly among the smashed tomatoes, her face a mask of agony so intense that for years the people who gathered ‘round would shake their heads at the recollection of it” (76). Their valiant attempt to save Hannah ends up being what really does her in. The steam from the water “seared” her, moving much deeper than the surficial flames to cause her even more pain and her eventual death. The idea of well-intentioned help gone wrong resonates throughout the whole novel, especially as it relates to death and destruction. This is evident in Eva’s reasoning to burn Plum, as she lays it out to Hannah prior to her death; she wanted him to die a dignified death, not crawl back into her womb and be strangled by the too-small death. She firmly believes that her choice was right, especially as she gave so much of herself to his survival as a child only for him to squander it after the war through drugs. The same feeling resurfaces at the end of the novel, as Nel goes to visit Eva in the home, only to be mistaken for Sula and harassed about the death of Chicken Little. Nel’s moment of goodwill as she makes the rounds of the home is interrupted by memories she has tried to suppress, both about the traumatic experience and, more generally, about Sula. Though this leads to a positive revelation for Nel, the engagement with Eva clearly seems to trigger something within the old woman, something regressive that ties her to the ghosts of her past more than the present. It seems that no good in the Bottom is ever rewarded with good; there is always some trick, some force that turns a situation bad (though not always to the extent of death). There is always some negative edge, one that the people of Bottom can never escape. This keeps their lives moving, a constant and almost cyclical procession through generations, as highlighted by the female protagonists of the novel and their engagements with each other and the town. No good deed remains pure; some form of corruption sneaks in at the edges, whether through direct action or some form of supposed higher intervention.

  7. The novel Sula by Toni Morrison uses descriptive language and imagery to show the relationship between two young women. Morrison’s imagery is both powerful and moving, specifically when she uses it to describe nature. During the scene where Nel and Sula are playing down by the river, Morrison describes two wooden twigs. Each girl uses their twig to play in the soil, but prior to digging up the earth, both Sula and Nel strip the bark off their twigs. Morrison describes the barren piece of wood saying, “…it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence” (58). This image perfectly describes what wood looks like when its bark is removed. Pure, smooth and firm, this material is soothing to the touch and caries and warm, pleasant scent. Morrison’s use of the words “creamy” and “innocence” allow her readers to create this image, and use their senses to both visually understand what this object looks like, but also what it feels like and smells like. Much like the twigs, both Nel and Sula are very innocent, vulnerable and pure at this point in the story. This being said, when Nel is playing with her twig, she breaks it in two. Morrison uses this to show that Nel herself has been “broken”, because she has been raised in an atmosphere which is much more orderly than Sula’s. Thus, when Nel meets her grandmother (a prostitute) at Sundown House, or visits Sula at her home on Carpenter Road, she is exposed impurity. This “breaks” Nel because it helps her to understand what society views as “right” and “wrong”. Sula on the other hand has grown up knowing nothing but chaos. She lives in a home with a homeless drunk, three orphaned boys, and a mother whom she has first-hand witnessed in bed with random men. My question becomes, how does Morrison use the theme of “Brokenness” to show ironical growth? Why do people like Nel, Shadrack, Tar Baby, and even the Deweys seem to have control over their misery while characters like Sula and Plum seem they do not?

  8. One of the striking scenes is when Sula had a conversation with Nel after she slept with Jude. Her monologue reveals her belief about the strong bonding of their friendship. Regarding the matter of Sula sleeping with Jude, Sula did not explain why she did that to Nel yet her monologue gave an explanation of her behavior. This monologue accounts for all the unreasonable events that had occurred in Sula’s life especially her betrayal of Nel. She once thought Nel and her were one and the same thing and they shared deeper connections than Nel and Jude, which made her not feel guilty about sleeping with Jude. For Sula, Jude is not someone that could step in between their friendship, despite he being Nel’s husband, the father of Nel’s children. Yet the scene echos more questions around the novel because Sula’s thought about Nel leaves with Sula and remains unknown to Nel. It opens the space for interpretation of the author’s creative process and her underlying purpose. As Toni Morrison writes, “Nel was the one person who had wanted nothing from her, who had accepted all aspects of her. Now she wanted everything, and all because of that,” the description of Sula’s mentality regarding friendship demonstrates the complex personality of Sula and contrasts with Nel’s questioning about Sula’s betrayal of their friendship.

  9. The most striking image to me in “Sula” was the visualization of the relief Sula experienced as she lay dying. Toni Morrison writes, “[S]he might draw her legs up to her chest, close her eyes, put her thumb in her mouth and float over and down the tunnels, just missing the dark walls, down, down until she met a rain scent and would know the water was near, and she would curl into its heavy softness and it would envelop her, carry her, and wash her tired flesh always. Always” (149). By drawing her legs up to her chest and sucking her thumb, Sula assumes a fetal position. The heavy softness that envelops her is akin to a womb. With this imagery, Morrison implies death is a return to a state of infancy, accompanied by a peace that was never experienced in the intervening years. The pain of expulsion from the Eden of childhood is the core theme of “Sula.” Morrison describes it as “the oldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood but the remembrance of it” (65). At the conclusion of the story, after Nel visits the supposedly senile Eva in the old folks home and is confronted with accusations about her first great trauma, the death of Chicken Little; she sees Shadrack, sole remaining witness to the event. Chicken Little still haunts her, even into old age. The pain the boy’s death continually wreaks represents the tragedy of the death of innocence which has been the great pain of Nel’s life. She has never escaped the death of Chicken Little, symbol of childhood, nor will she ever get over the loss of Sula, boon companion of her youth. Sexual awakening is the death of childhood, and it was sex that tore an irreparable rift between Sula and Nel, two once inseparable friends. Sula realizes that it was not her husband’s infidelity that really bothered her, it was the loss of pure, one might say unadulterated, childhood friendship due to lusty corruptions, “‘All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.’ And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. ‘We was girls together,’ she said as though explaining something. ‘O Lord, Sula,’ she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl” (174). As the striking image I initially recounted relates, the only release from the fallen state of adulthood is the return to the womb-like void that is death.

  10. One of the images that stood out to me was when the Bottom is taken over by robins. The townspeople viewed this period as the evil days in which it is just something one has to survive. During this time, Sula returns to the Bottom after being gone for 10 years. The scene is set up as being very depressing. The sky was black from all the birds and the ground was covered in bird poop. However, in May the birds suddenly left, and everything started to turn green and the daffodils blossomed. Nel contributes this magic to Sula returning to the Bottom even though no one else sees it. I thought the image of the birds engulfing the town in evil and then Sula returning and bringing happiness upon the town was interesting because the town views Sula as being destructive and evil. Nevertheless, in this case Nel believes that Sula did not bring evil to the town and reversed the curse. Later in the novel, Morrison eludes to the idea that Sula may not be that evil after all and that her mother Eva may be the evil one. I wonder if this Morrison way at starting to elude to this before Sula dies.

  11. One theme that remains prevalent throughout the novel is the constant juxtaposition between Nel and Sula. It seems that Nel is meant to resemble the good and conventional parts of life while Sula symbolizes a life filled with spontaneous and unorthodox acts. At least from the point of view of the bottom society, it would appear to be this way. However, one striking image that I analyzed seems to tell much more about the true personalities of the two girls. It is a common belief that individual’s true morals are revealed in times of distress and anguish. During the drowning of Chicken Little, Toni Morrison includes certain descriptions and quotations that show the true feelings and intentions of both Nel and Sula. Immediately after the five-year-old was submerged into the dark river, Nel was quick to speak as she stated, “Somebody saw”. Not only does this show that Nel was more worried about her own fate than that of the dying boy, but it also reveals that Nel is constantly worried about how people perceive her as well as her position in society. Unlike Nel, Sula was “collapsed in tears” as she sat on her knees beside the dark water. Ultimately, I believe that this image was included in the novel in order to show that although Nel is viewed as more stable than Sula through the entirety of the book, it may only appear that way because Nel’s actions and traits may be much less genuine.

Leave a Reply