Wright and Peace
The tale behind the friendship of Sula and Nel begins in 1919, in the post-bellum period. History may help to explain the pervasive strong female figures reflected throughout the novel. In each family, the male figures are mainly absent or drug- addicted. It is the women who rule over their households, by both supporting the family and rearing the children. Despite her husband’s abandonment, Eva, Sula’s grandmother and the true family matriarch, still revels in her love of men to the point where she chastises other women for not taking good enough care of their husbands. This love never translates to a physical love, as Eva’s daughter Hannah’s emotions do. However, the Peace women seem to objectify men to the point where the women are sexist, as they believe that men need not be held accountable for their families’ well beings. As historian Brenda Stevenson explains in her “Slave Marriage and Family Relations,” “Slave men traditionally applauded their sexual potency, celebrating it in song, dance, jokes, and heroic tales. Unlike slave women, men did not have to restrict their sexual activity to marital or procreative duties” (169). It is possible to argue that the Peace women do not regard men as responsible for their sexuality and the consequences they create through the free use of it because of the slave mentality and the way in which a male slave’s sexuality was viewed.
On the other side of the spectrum, Nel is crushed when she learns that her husband, Jude, cheats on her with Sula, whom she considers her best friend. To a certain extent, Nel also holds little respect for men, as she blames Sula entirely for her husband’s betrayal and desertion. However, despite a few brief moments of empowerment, Nel mainly lives her life according to her mother’s notions of how a respectable woman should live, by marrying early and fulfilling the conventional role of a wife. Nel’s dreams of a stable family unit are dashed when her husband leaves her, and she is forced to step into the shoes of a matriarchal figure, the way her mother and Hannah did in the previous generation.
In each of the three generations in both the Peace and Wright families, it was up to the women to step in and lead their families along their chosen pathways. These paths were drastically divergent; the Wright family, which is shrewdly named, chooses the path of traditional respectability, while the Peace family chooses an unconventional lifestyle that brings peace to the townsfolk, despite their distress of the impact that the “sooty” (Morrison 29) Peace women will have on their families. To a modern reader, Sula’s assertion of her independence and desire to live according to her own verdicts is laudable. However, equally commendable is Nel’s stepping into the role of a family clanswoman, despite her desire for a traditional family structure with both a mother and father figure. As her life unfolds, Nel ironically begins to fill a similar role that both her mother and Sula’s scandalous mother held: that of the family matriarch.
-Ariella Medows
Pages: 1 2
Tags: Matriarch, Matrifocal, Sula
