Sexuality and American Culture

In Sula, Tony Morrison gives us a story full of contradictions, irony and excitement. The two central characters of the book are compared to each other throughout the book as if they were each one side of an equation. They equate to each other and yet are still different. If Nel is portrayed as this character, in constant search for order like her mother, Sula is portrayed as the opposite character loving her family’s disorder, her own agressivity and spontaneity. Nonetheless, in the first part of the book, the two girls are depicted as two halves, one completing the other until the accident causing the death of Chicken took them by surprise and changed their friendship. After the accident, the idea that Sula was the bad girl and Nel the good one settled in both girls’ minds and this idea will evolve throughout the novel with each character trying to show the righteousness of their actions.

         When Sula comes back to Medallion after her long absence, she is seen as this evil person although she has the characteristics of Hannah, her mother who was more or less accepted in the community. Strangely, Sula is not accepted at all and she is even criticized by Eva upon the fact that she is still unmarried. That is one thing that I wasn’t expecting coming from Eva, as this independent woman that was portrayed in the beginning of the book.

           Ironically, it seems that Sula’s breaking of the social conventions, draws the people in her community closer to each other and make them also more caring for each other. When Sula dies, the same chaotic and immoral atmosphere resurfaces in Medallion. She was seen as the bad girl and yet her personality was what gave the people of her community a sense of identity and motivated them to live in harmony.

             Another important aspect of the book is how Eva is portrayed.  She is portrayed as this highly respected woman in her community, head of the household with an undeniable authority. This relates to how Stevenson describes black women in slavery. We see the same sense of responsibility, sacrifice and authority in Eva. She sacrificed herself to feed her children and therefore she demands obedience and deference in return.  She kills Plum because he failed to fulfill her expectations. Tony Morrison sets Eva Peace on this pedestal throughout the book. The fact that Eva lived on the third floor suggests this position of power that she occupies in the family. She would give orders without being questioned. Stevenson refers to this type of household as “a matrifocal family”:

                     “Elderly slave women who had lived in the quarters for years, particularly where adult females where in the majority, were accorded great respect. Their long lives and the wisdom assumed derived from it, their years of service to their families, and their knowledge of their community’s history were the basis for their authority. Likewise, mothers who raised their children without paternal input commanded their children’s obedience and deference.”(Peiss 160)

          Stevenson also shows us the dominant role of the female in the matrifocal family with the following words: “ A woman’s role as head of a matrifocal family mandated that she make some of her family’s most vital decisions and suffer the consequences if her master or her abroad husband disagreed . It meant that she had to act protectively and aggressively for the sake of her dependents, often in open conflict with the owner.”(Peiss 165)

       In Sula, Eva is the depiction of the slave mother that Stevenson describes in his essay whereas Hannah and Sula are not the typical women that we would have expected black women to be according to how Slave women behaved in slavery and how they valued sexual relations in the matriarchy society.