Sexuality and American Culture

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Both of this week's readings provide unique insights into the relationship between individuals and their communities and how this relationship constructs and regulates sexuality and sexual relations. In Sula, the two main characters, Sula and Nel, form different conceptualizations of sexuality that come into conflict with one another in the latter half of the novel and break their friendship. Furthermore, Sula is criticized and ostracized by the community for her sexual practices.

            Sula, it seems, has no sexual inhibitions—she will have sex wherever, whenever, and with whomever she pleases. As exemplified in her final rift with Nel, She is individualistic and does not conform to community norms: “I can do it all, why can’t I have it all? . . . You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing. . . . Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world” (142-143). Morrison describes Sula as having, “no center, no speck around which to grow (119),” and this allows her to live life freely. In contrast, Nel became, “one of them . . . [she] belonged to the town and all of its ways” (120).  

Sula first comes into major conflict with the community when she returns to the Bottom after ten years of extravagant travels across the country. She puts her mother, Eva, in a nursing home, and this affords her the label of “roach.” Then she has sex with Nel’s husband Jude and receives the label of “bitch.” The action that leads the community to completely shun Sula is, “the unforgivable thing,” sleeping with white men: “All minds were closed to her when that word passed around. It made the old women draw their lips together; made children look away from her in shame; made young men fantasize elaborate torture for her . . . They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape” (Morrison 112-113). The community even develops rituals and superstitions around Sula’s promiscuity: “They laid broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkled salt on the porch steps. . . . Some of the men, who as boys had dated her, remembered that on picnics neither gnats nor mosquitoes would settle on her . . . [Patsy] had witnessed the fact that when Sula drank beer she never belched ” (113). Dessie remarks that a sty developed on her eye, (“And I ain’t never had no sty before. Never!”), after seeing Shadrack tip an invisible hat to Sula years ago, and her friends remark that the two are devils. The community also unites and transforms in interesting ways, “Once the source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another. They began to cherish their husbands and wives, protect their children, repair their homes and in general band together against the devil in their midst (117). After Sula’s death, however, the community returns to its former disunity without an object of criticism and blame, and by 1965, “the Bottom had collapsed” (165).

In terms of power relations and resistance, we can view Sula’s resistance, her unwillingness to conform to community norms, as actually a mechanism serving to reinforce those norms. Lacking a source of resistance, the power structure holding together the community of the Bottom actually falls apart.