Wright and Peace
Despite the vast differences between the upbringings of Sula Peace and Nel Wright, the two bosom buddies in Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula have one aspect in common: both were reared by overbearing maternal figures. For Nel, this controlling female comes in the form of her mother Helene, whose own parentage is so spotty, as her mother is a prostitute, that Helene leaves her hometown as a young bride in order to hide behind the respectability of an early marriage. Helene passes on her staid image to her daughter, Nel, and makes an effort to squash any symptoms of creativity before they emerge, to prevent Nel from deviating from the respectable path that Helene has chosen for herself and her offspring. Sula’s mother, Hannah, on the other hand, embraces a free-love lifestyle; consequently Hannah has few female friends, as she alienates them by sleeping with their husbands. Despite the polar opposites that these two women present to the townsfolk in the form of the moral versus the immoral female figures, Morrison presents strong families that are both multigenerational and matrifocal, regardless of the lifestyles that the women in the families choose for themselves and their progeny.
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Tags: Matriarch, Matrifocal, Sula
