In that mercury mood of July...

Since its publication, Sula has received waves of comments from different schools of literary criticism and applauses from common readers as well. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1975 and established Toni Morrison as a literary force. Morrison admits that it is “after she had written Sula” that she “knew she had been a writer.”

The themes of the novel interweave love and betrayal, racism and struggle, converging into an audacious quest for self identity. Living in split communities, characters in this novel are mostly bounded in split families, having split personalities. Eva was suspected of disabling herself to get the insurance in order to support her shattered family. Hannah’s husband died when their daughter Sula was three years old and Hannah moved back to Eva’s big house. Women of the three generation, though living under the same roof, shared different perspectives upon life, but Sula was the one who truly stirred black women’s existence.

Sula left Medallion for ten years after her good friend Nel got married and came back with little mention of her experience and with a plague of robins. She was taken as the incarnation of evil spirit knowing that she was pariah in people’s eye but paid little attention to it. She slept with men as frequently as she could and seldom bothered to remember their names. Sex, for Sula, was not at all aesthetic, but her deep protest against the oppression towards women. The conversation between Eva and Sula fully reveals her conflicts with social expectation:

“Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you…”

“Whatever’s burning in me is mine!”

“Amen!”

“And I’ll split this town in two and everything in it before I’ll let you put it out!”

“Pride goeth before a fall.”

“What the hell do I care about falling?”

“Amazing Grace.”

“You sold your life for twenty-three dollars a month.”

“You throwed yours away.”

“It’ s mine to throw.” (93)

After Sula put Eva in Sunnydale, she seemed to be more vicious than people thought, especially when people believed Sula had slept with some white man. They alienated Sula in the way of warding off evil spirits: they laid broomsticks across their doors at night and sprinkled salt on porch steps. Reason failed when things happened in any unusual way, for example, when Mr. Finley sat on his porch sucking chicken bones as he usually did in the past thirteen years, the sight of Sula choked him and took his life. People related strange things with the birthmark over Sula’s eye, interpreting it as Hannah’s ashes which marked her from the very beginning. The birthmark over Sula’s eye is a metaphor of permanency. “The birthmark over her eye was getting darker and looked more and more like a stem and rose.” But generally speaking, birthmark is ineradicable, representing Sula’s doubt in change. As Sula lay dying, pictures of the past drifted through her head.

“Nothing was ever different. They were all the same. All of the words and all of the smiles, every tear and every gag just something to do.”

Sula created her own realities and set her own objectives, which makes her seem callous and indifferent. She was even found watching Hannah burn not with horror but out of interest, when her mother Hannah committed suicide by burning herself. She voiced her protest against social unfairness by defying the “ideal” life pursued by black women and broke the tradition by refusing to perform an obedient and subordinate role of a woman. She never constrained herself with social conventions: she slept with men in the community and abandoned them. Sula, like her grandmother Eva, was bold enough to practice her creativity and also inherited Hannah’s craving for men, thinking that “sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.” In fact, “Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her.”

Interestingly, People in Bottom, while taking Sula as a witch, were changed in mysterious ways. They stood firmly at the side of social conventions by cherishing their husbands and wives, protecting their children, repairing their homes and being filial to their parents. However, after Sula’s death, women found cracks in their obedience to social obligations. Literally, Sula, though distant from women in the community, is always haunting them for performing out their true self. The most typical example lies in the relationship between Sula and Nel. Nel, who differs much in personality from Sula, felt a mysterious kinship for her since her childhood. For Nel, Sula is the one who “made her see old things with new eyes.” Living through Sula’ past and sharing her perceptions, Nel feels that talking to Sula “had always been a conversation with herself.” To some extent, we can say Nel is Sula. When she discovered the affair between Sula and her husband Jude, the impotence of hatred Nel casts upon Sula could serve to be another proof of the inseparability of the two friends.

The language in Sula is characterized by use of parallel structure which not only enforces the wretchedness of black women but invites readers’ strong resonation. For example, in the end of the novel, people in Bottom unaccountably accepted the celebration of National Suicide Day, and their reminiscence flew back during the long march:

Called to them to come out and play in the sunshine——as though the sunshine would last, as though there really hope. The same hope thatkeptthem picking beans for other farmers;keptthem from finally leaving as they talked of doing; keptthem knee-deep in other people’s dirt;keptthem excited about other people’s wars; kept them solicitous of white people’s children; keptthem convinced that some magic “government” was going to life them up, out and away from that dirt, those beans, those wars. (160)

The weight Morrison’s language carries is from her heavy concern about black people. She is good at enlivening the deep-buried vigor in the English language, making it an unstopped current unyieldingly taking its own course, adding to it anindigenous flavor and narrating one more layer of American history.