Scientia Sexualis in African-American Communities
As The Scarlett Letter was written in the Victorian Era about the Puritan Era, Sula was written about an older period of time through the lens of an more recent one. To what extent might Sula be superficially set in an older period of time, but actually concerned with society at the time the book was written? I don’t know much about African-American culture and society during the first half of the twentieth century, but the universality with which the Medallion community looked down on Sula for possibly sleeping with white men surprised me.
Morrison writes, “They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. In that way, they regarded integration with precisely the same venom that white people did” (133). I don’t at all doubt that this was a generally accepted attitude, only that it was universally accepted (with Sula possibly being the only exception). Rather than revealing truth about the period it was set in, Sula seems more to me like an allegory about the development of sexuality leading to Morrison’s present day, in spite of any historical truth it may hold. The opening passage describing Medallion rings with a tone of nostalgia as it recounts a place of community, singing, and enduring suffering. This description makes it clear that the story is not aiming for a historical account of a town from earlier times, but for an allegory instead.
Just as the institution of marriage was transformed rather than lost in the transition from alliance to sexuality, we see in Sula how the power relations that African-Americans developed within slavery have been transformed, and not lost in the white power structure of post-slavery America.
Stevenson describes a landscape in which matrifocality and polygamy coexist as forms of resistance to the power of the slave masters, and ways to exercise individual power to shape one’s own life. In Sula, we see these two ideas begin to separate, as they become different kinds of power expressions.
Having multiple partners becomes transformed into an identity, which we see in the way the Medallion community view Sula and Hannah. The focus on marriage, which during slavery could allow a man some limited freedom, also becomes something different in the hands of Jude. He marries Nel after being continually rejected to work on the roads, thinking that it will allow him a degree of dignity: “Without that someone he was a waiter hanging around a kitchen like a woman. With her he was head of a household pinned to an unsatisfactory job out of necessity. The two of them together would make one Jude” (Morrison 83). Similar to the act of resistance that Stevenson decribes marriage as, Jude’s decision differs in that Jude makes the decision based on how his identity, rather than his circumstances, will change. This coincides with the shift from alliance to sexuality, and is one example of how the power devices developed under slavery and alliance continued to be utilized and developed afterwards.
Tags: African-American, Power, Scientia-Sexualis, slavery, Sula
