Sula & Sexuality

To me, Sula is the only work so far that I believe can be analyzed beside all the other works we’ve read and examined thus far, plus the readings. The Scarlet Letter, like another student previously mentioned, is ripe with parallels to Sula in regards to the perception of adultery, sensuality, sexuality, child-rearing, and more. The essay about Addie and Rebecca and their complex, changing relationship recalled to me the vast differences between the ways in which Sula and Nel both handled growing up, sex, marriage, and family. Lastly, the article on the families, marriages and sexualities of slaves shaped the way I viewed the novel in the end, and reminded me of the origins of the town of Bottom in the first place – land given to a slave by his own, a trick played on him and his future community.

In Hansen’s essay, as I read I found myself continually noting similarities between Addie and Sula. Addie was described in the essay as singular, assertive and contentious, while Sula’s actions proved her to be just that, as well. Addie, throughout the correspondence and the essay as well, is more vocal in regards to her dissenting opinions – just as Sula was vocal in her rebuttals to those in the community who saw her as evil.

In regards to The Scarlet Letter, the most obvious similarities are between the way adultery is handled and perceived within the two communities. In Bottom, Hannah Pearce is known to be able to break up a marriage before it has even really begun, but there is not a great deal of animosity towards Hannah because she has a very sexual “aura”. When it comes to Sula, however, her promiscuity and nonchalance in the face of the norms for sexually active young women, in addition to a slowly building myth that she is a bringer of bad luck, causes the town of Bottom to reject her when she returns in adulthood. Hester is rejected by her community, as well, shunned and outcast, made to literally wear her sin on her outer clothing, but she does maintain a position of importance to the others in regards to her needlework.

Intimacy and sexuality are handled in particular ways in The Scarlet Letter and Sula. The two works both show the prudish side, the ‘normal’ side, represented by the community at large (Bottom, the colony) as well as the more impassioned, seemingly volatile and consequential side by the two protagonists in question. Adultery literally becomes Hester’s identity in The Scarlet Letter, whereas in Sula, adultery is the sin that makes up Sula’s identity to the other residents of the Bottom – that is, they know there is more to her than simply her sleeping with more men than the other women in the town, they know what a strange past she has, but her sexual activity is the lynchpin of people’s critique of her. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester as well as her daughter Pearl possess strange qualities that set them apart from other women in the town and they are described as especially beautiful, fair and powerful. Pearl has a great effect on Dimmesdale, which, although not necessarily sexual or sensual, is worth noting. In Sula, there are three generations of women who have seduced people or the gaze of the community as a whole in different ways: Eva with her missing leg, Hannah with the ebb and flow of her sexual energy and Sula with her temperament and the things she says.

Finally, I’d like to mention some things about this week’s novel that really stuck with me. While a great deal of focus was placed, in Hansen’s essay, on the fact that many individuals had to get permission from their owners to wed, have children or co-habitate, and I know this might be a stretch, but that phenomenon was contrasted in my mind starkly with the fact that Sula and Nel, throughout their whole friendship as young girls, did not ask permission of anyone to do anything. They were fearless together, but incomplete apart. The deep, unending love they had for each other reminded me of the type of friendship described as having taken place in the early 19th century, the type that we struggled to define in class and ultimately decided was rare today. On page 52, Morrison writes that Sula and Nel bonded so intimately and intensely because they were both neither white nor male, and that “freedom and triumph” were forbidden from them – did they bond most over being outsiders, or was it something more organic than that?

I’m also excited to tackle Sula’s description of when people will “love” her – after x has slept with y, after this group has done the unheard of to that group, etc. I have my own thoughts about what Sula meant by this but I’m eager to hear the analysis from the class.

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