Nel and Sula

Nel and Sula

Nel Greene (nee Wright) and Sula Peace seem as if they could not be more different than they are.  Nel is cool under pressure, rational, and, like her mother, Helene, retreats into rigid structures of tradition and custom when unsure of what to do.  Sula is the direct opposite: she is hot tempered, irrational, and rejects tradition and custom.  Yet the two women were best friends, and, at the closing of the novel (an emotionally powerful close if there ever was one), Nel finally realizes, while visiting Sula’s barren grave for the first time in years, that, “All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude,”; it was really Sula she had missed (174).  Sula is the woman who had sex with Nel’s husband, Jude, who caused an uproar when she returned to town after many years away only to commit the unspeakable act of sending her grandmother to a home, and whose behavior has been condemned by all to the point of her funeral featuring sparse attendance at best.  It would seem unusual, then, that this is the woman that Nel, lover of tradition and communal norms, had missed.

Sula and Nel, however, shared a bond that went far beyond that of friendships.  As in Stevenson’s essay, Nel and Sula both grew up in matrifocal households.  Nel’s father worked on a boat in the lake, and Sula, of course, grows up in a house devoid of strong male figures; Sula’s family is ruled with an iron fist by Eva, who sacrificed even her own leg for her family, and after such an act, commands the respect of her family.  Sula’s mother, Hannah, is sexually active yet finds no reason to commit to one person, preferring instead to have multiple lovers, and to leave them once the act is done.  Although Nel’s family may have been matrifocal along more traditional terms (the father away to work) and Sula’s more unconventional, both grew up not only in the care of women, but in a situation where men were not necessary for support, care, and love.

It would seem only natural, then, that these two women would find in each other the love they had not, and did not, find in traditional structures.  This is not to necessarily imply that what these women found in each other was sexual love, but it certainly went beyond the normal definition of friendship.  Sula and Nel share a bond that begins early in their lives, and is defined and forever enshrined in the death of Chicken Little, that stretches far beyond the relationship that Nel finds in Jude, or Sula in any of her lovers.  For the rest of Medallion, Sula is a pariah, a stain on the town and her family.  Nel sees beyond this, although she is still constrained by her cultural upbringing, and recognizes the person in Sula that others dismiss.  Nel is the only one to care about her death, the only person from the Bottom to attend her funeral.  To others, Sula may have been a threat to the structure of the community, but to Nel, she was not a threat, but a vital part of herself: this thought, disturbing to Nel, is voiced by Eva as she visits her at the nursing home, and tells her, “You. Sula. What’s the difference?” (168).  Perhaps their is none below the surface layer of conformance in Nel’s case, and rebellion in Sula’s.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Joseph Papa, Morrison: Sula, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.