Being “Girls Together”: Community and Varying Womanhood in Toni Morrison’s Sula

Banned Books: A Staff Piece by Mia Speller

Note on Banned Books:

Madison County Public Schools, Virginia

Kuna School District, Idaho

Grundy School District, Iowa

Nevada Community School District, Iowa

Southeast Polk Community School District, Iowa

Collier Public Schools, Florida

Toni Morrison’s work is subject to book banning across the country, with her 1973 novel Sula included in such a collection. According to EveryLibrary, Sula was banned or removed from library shelves in select school districts in Virginia, Idaho, Iowa, and Florida. Tennessee is no stranger to banning Morrison’s works either, as Rutherford County’s Board of Education voted to remove Beloved from shelves, and The Bluest Eye was restricted in some school districts. Regarding Sula specifically, school districts across the country challenge the book primarily because of its sexually charged scenes and references to sexual behavior. Sula is, among many things, a book about femininity, friendship, self-actualization in the face of marginalization, and more–any mentions of sexuality directly relate to the story's major themes.

About any sexuality discussed in Sula, Morrison writes in the novel’s foreword:

Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom. The sexual freedom of Hannah Peach was my entrance into the story, constructed from shreds of memory about the way local women regarded a certain kind of female—envy coupled with amused approbation. Against her fairly modest claims to personal liberty are placed conventional and anarchic ones: Eva’s physical sacrifice for economic freedom; Nel’s accommodation to the protection marriage promises; Sula’s resistance to either sacrifice or accommodation. Hannah’s claims are acceptable in her neighborhood because they are nonfinancial and nonthreatening; she does not disturb or deplete family resources. Because her dependence is on another woman, Eva, who has both money and authority, she is not competitive. But Sula, although she does nothing so horrendous as what Eva does, is seen by the townspeople as not just competitive, but devouring, evil. Nel, with the most minimal demands, is seen as the muted standard.

Being “Girls Together”: Community and Varying Womanhood in Toni Morrison’s Sula

In Toni Morrison’s introduction to her 1973 novel, Sula, she describes setting out to write a story exploring female friendship unhindered by masculinity, social restrictions, and expectations of individualism in homogenized settings (xiii). Morrison filters her quest for answers through the Bottom and its eclectic residents. However, she most potently answers her questions of femininity, liberty, and individuality through her central characters, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, whose “friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (83). Despite their youthful inseparability, Nel and Sula find themselves drawn to archetypes of womanhood separate from each other’s, but of similar variations to the examples set by their mothers; for Nel that means recreating Helene’s domesticity, and for Sula that means recreating Hannah’s unconventional independence. Nel marries as a young woman, has children, and becomes a pillar in the Bottom. Conversely, Sula never marries, and her sexual liberation renders her promiscuous in the eyes of the Bottom, which she leaves following Nel’s wedding, only to return and mutually reject and be rejected by the community. Sula’s narrative structure follows the girls’ changing relationship, as Part One illustrates them in their youth, with their monolithic friendship and intertwined development, and Part Two illustrates their separation, ever split from the moment others in the Bottom interfere in their connection (especially men). Morrison creates tension between unity and opposition in Sula and dissolves that tension across the narrative, continuously building to a resolution between Nel and Sula’s chasmic disconnection at the novel's end. Sula concludes with Nel crying in “circles and circles of sorrow” for her and Sula’s friendship, driven apart by personal hurt and social expectations but reunited by Sula’s grandmother, Eva’s, insistence on their unity (174). Nel and Sula’s friendship both suffers from their differing femininities, Nel’s built on principles of domesticity, and Sula’s on her search for individualist self-hood. Further, their search for self-hood lead to community perceptions that determine Nel’s fate in domestic womanhood and Sula’s ever-developing self-hood. In Sula, Morrison explores external impacts on womanhood as the Bottom enforces feminine standards upon Nel and Sula, ultimately positing circular development of communal feeling and individualism as a method for feminine self-actualization.

Through Nel, Morrison gives the Bottom the observer that she thinks the town deserves, and through Sula, she gives it the focus that she thinks it needs. She describes how the Bottom came to its name, recounting how a white farmer cheated a slave into taking “the hilly land, where planting was backbreaking, where the soil slid down and washed away the seeds, and where the wind lingered all through the winter” (5), telling him that the hill was called the Bottom because “it’s the bottom of heaven—the best land there is” (5). So, Morrison continues to tell readers through her narrator that “[the Bottom was] mightily preoccupied with earthly things—and each other, wondering even as early as 1920 […], what that little girl Sula who grew into a woman in their town was all about, and what they themselves were all about, tucked up there in the Bottom” (6). The community preoccupies itself with Sula because the community needs to preoccupy itself with Sula. Focusing on Sula distracts them from worrying about whether or not the Bottom was actually the Bottom of heaven, as encroaching White capitalists begin to think it is upon Sula’s end. Cedric Gael Bryant explores the notion of communal needs for a focus, or even a common enemy, in Sula, saying “The community's survival literally depends upon the presence of evil that forces the community to reexamine its own ideals constantly. So long as the community does so, it avoids self-destruction” (733). In what appears to be the peak of the Bottom’s sense of community, the moment that residents most share common-feeling and population growth (when Eva’s children were young, she had only a few neighbors to help her care for them), they must direct their curiosity and their focus to Sula and her womanhood to avoid considering where they come from and where they are going. In doing so, Nel focuses on her own womanhood as she observes others’ preoccupation with Sula’s.

Nel’s domestic positioning at the beginning of Sula’s second half, in which she marries young has children, and participates in church, grounds her in a traditionally idealized framework of femininity. Her naturally keen observations of her world in the Bottom drive her development into womanhood and she becomes a traditional, family-oriented, domestic woman as she grows up in Helene Wright’s perfectly domestic household and watches others’ responses to her family and domesticity (or lack thereof). Nel learns what she witnesses and, despite her early realization of self-hood following her trip to New Orleans (most evident in her whisper of “I’m me […]. Me” (28)), she finds her early dreams of travel and individual freedom lose their prominence in her mind to the concerns of those around her, including her new friend, Sula. Despite the “new found me-ness” (29), Marie Nigro finds that Nel’s next-to-immediate connection with Sula allows them to “grow into womanhood clinging to each other, each providing what the other girl lacks in herself” (727). Nel’s self-hood requires external influence, despite her insistence that “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me” (29). Her keen awareness of others, and their actions, reactions, and feelings, does not render her less of an individual person, they simply shape the individual she becomes.

Who Nel becomes, in fact, when readers find her at the beginning of Part Two is perhaps the gold standard of traditional, domestic womanhood. Indeed, much of this comes from her upbringing. Amanda Putnam draws connections between “Helene Wright’s desire to remove herself and her daughter completely from the taint of [Helene’s childhood]” and subsequent “squashing [(of)] Nel’s curiosity” (31). Further, Nel’s observation-heavy development operates to her disadvantage, as emphasized in Putnam’s analysis: “The parental violence to her maturation process forces Nel to develop into a woman who does not understand the options available to her as an adult. […] Nel meekly follows along, having suffered the passive violence of her mother’s repression” (31). In fact, it seems that Nel’s talent for observation and social awareness stems from Helene’s “parental violence” and the need to adapt to her mother’s “oppressive” (Morrison 29) expectations of “neatness” (29), and therefore maintain attributes closely aligning with the virtues of traditionally domestic womanhood. Throughout Sula, Nel’s mother and husband, Jude, influence her self-hood through their appreciation of her development in the domestic sphere. Where her mother raises her to be “obedient and polite” (18), Jude capitalizes on this, proposing to her when he finds that she “actually wanted to help, to soothe” (83). As such, Nel’s self-hood is most consistently and potently maintained by domesticity and submissiveness. As others manipulate Nel’s sensitivity to them, she adopts traditionally domestic feminity, wedging herself into the role that the community finds best fit for her. By the end of the novel, she appears to be one of the few who remember the Bottom as it “had been,” in her youth, “a real place” (166). The story finds her alone and mourning after living a life where those who viewed her as a vessel through which they could fulfill their desires placed her on the path of restrictively domestic womanhood.

Sula never exhibits Nel’s same talent for observation or a desire to belong to the community—rather, from her introduction she is remarkably herself, even within her and Nel’s homogenizing friendship. Truly, even though “[Nel and Sula’s] meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on” (52) and “they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for” (52), Karen F. Stein remarks that their lives “represent the range of choices possible for black women in modern America” (146) and “opposite approaches to the epic tasks of self-discovery and integration into society” (146). Sula takes readers on her journey of relentless self-discovery throughout the novel, never seeming stagnant in her place in life and, in moments of brief stagnancy (like her affair with Ajax), she takes them as learning experiences contributing to her personal growth.

Sula’s self-discovery, her individualism, is abrasive, or even violent throughout the novel. The earliest example of violence for the betterment of herself occurs when she slices off her own fingertip to scare away a group of boys racially harassing her and Nel. Morrison writes:

[Sula’s] aim was determined but inaccurate. She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, circling in the cherry blood that ran into the corners of the slate. Sula raised her eyes to them. Her voice was quiet. “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” (55)

Above, Morrison encapsulates Sula’s approach to her self-hood and community, as well as the fear of her that the Bottom later possesses. Sula sets aside the materials of her life, “her lunchpail, her reader, her mittens, her slate” (55), putting on hold seemingly everything associated with her identity as a young girl. Methodically and calculated, “determined but inaccurate,” she slices off her fingertip, aiming for more. Sula’s continuous journey of self-improvement requires personal sacrifice, and Morrison reveals that sacrifice is the fruit of her personal labor: “like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous” (121). When she becomes an othered entity in the Bottom, Morrison echoes her 1922 question “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” Sula becomes something for the Bottom to project their fears onto as they watch her seemingly self-destructive individualism spiral out before them, only to undergo her same spiraling out in the “‘New River Road’ tunnel” (Bryant 742) collapse of 1941.

Sula’s final moments illustrate her continuous self-actualization as Morrison knots together curiosity as to whether she fails to achieve individualism, or successfully maps her way to individualistic self-actualization. Sula’s death scene features numerous moments in which she seems to realize the motivation behind her self-determining violence and make peace with her perpetual sacrifices for the sake of personal development. Specifically, she realizes that “I didn’t mean anything. I never meant anything. I stood there watching [her mother, Hannah] burn and was thrilled. I wanted her to keep on jerking like that, to keep on dancing” (147). Earlier in the novel, Morrison’s narrator informs readers that “[Sula] 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” (118). Sula’s internal exploration and its physical manifestations and ramifications, ultimately mean nothing and she takes peace in that knowledge. Sula’s continuous search for self and experience culminates in a moment of almost nihilistic meaninglessness, which allows her to wash herself of any regret or remorse and appreciate her life for what it was. For bell hooks, this realization followed by immediate death signifies Sula’s ultimate failure in her search for individualism, saying: “[e]ven though readers of Sula witness her self-assertion and celebration of autonomy, which Sula revels in even as she is dying, we also know that she is not self-actualized enough to stay alive” (48). Further, the ambiguity around her cause of death, as well as her narrative-long search for self-hood, implicates her “longing for self-hood” as being the cause of her destruction” (48). hooks’s argument that Sula’s death is perhaps too ambiguous, at least to verifiably determine actionable moral meaning from it, rings true to the nihilistic, meaningless verbiage woven within the passage. However, to quote Stein again, if Nel and Sula “represent the range of choices possible for black women in modern America” (146) and “opposite approaches to the epic tasks of self-discovery and integration into society” (146), then exclusively finding failure in Sula’s death makes the quest for traditional femininity one of Sula’s few solutions, despite its being more of a failure than the self-destructive individualism.

Sula’s death contains more than isolation but lacks any physical external presence of another and as such, illustrates her transcension of the limitations placed on Nel by traditional womanhood and those placed on herself by individualism. Morrison locks readers into Sula’s point of view in the moments leading to her death, and in those moments, she remarks that “[t]he sealed window,” which she could not bring herself to pull her eyes from as she lay dying, “soothed her with its sturdy termination, its unassailable finality. It was as though for the first time she was completely alone—where she had always wanted to be—free of the possibility of distraction” (148). Sula goes through the motions, before she further understands that “[s]he was dead” (149). With the same curiosity that struck her still watching her mother burn when she was twelve, Sula experiences her own death, marking every sensation and every thought that occurs to her. Sula’s last words (though she probably could not verbalize them) are “[w]ell, I’ll be damned, […] it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel” (149). The moment Sula realizes her own “sturdy termination” (148), she reaches for Nel, with whom she is no longer close with well before her death. Sula simultaneously rejects the community that othered her as she gazes at the window (finally feeling alone as she “had always wanted to be,”) and at the moment where she might actualize that isolation, she connects to community by remembering Nel. Even further, she excites at the ability to share information with Nel, and to give her something, even if that is simply a recount of her experience. Through Sula’s contradictory and curious death scene, Morrison disproves both notions that Sula’s individualism is unattainable for black women and that self-actualization comes at the sacrifice of community. Rather, at Sula’s peak moment of self-awareness (death is not a prerequisite), she posits that individualism is best and fully achieved through an appreciation for community and one’s ability to affect it (“Wait’ll I tell Nel”).

Ending though Sula may in “circles and circles of sorrow” (174), Morrison’s novel captures persistent connection, natural stagnation, and devastating loss—both at the individual level and the communal. Nel and Sula’s story and their varying life paths microcosmically reflect the Bottom as Morrison takes readers from the town’s creation, rooted in deception and racism, through its prime in Nel and Sula’s lifetime, and ultimately its decline, both sudden and jarring (in Sula’s time) and slow and steady (in Nel’s). Within Nel and Sula’s story, Morrison provides two approaches to womanhood, an experience which Morrison calls “naturally disruptive,” saying that “[woman’s] status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men” (xvi). In her quest to explore femininity and female friendship, she examines womanhood “under the rule of men” and otherwise. Nel leads a traditionally domestic and feminine life, enduring years of loneliness before “leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of over-ripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scattered like dandelion spores in the breeze” (174) and she realizes the loneliness she feels is the loss of herself and the loss of Sula, saying “[w]e was girls together” (174). Nel’s grief is palpable, but the “over-ripeness” of the moment and the “circles and circles” it manifests in insinuate a newness to her story, perhaps a reclamation of her individuality. Sula’s individuality, which so starkly separated her from the community– and most especially separated her from Nel– reaches a critical moment as she dies. She acknowledges the joy in her being alone and absolves herself of regret over the curiosity that she allowed to run free throughout her life. Once she does so, she can embrace the communal feelings that Nel knows all too well, and embrace her ability to give others something—specifically to give Nel her experience, saying: “[w]ell, I’ll be damned, […] it didn’t even hurt. Wait’ll I tell Nel” (149). Morrison’s Sula rejects the notion that womanhood must be achieved exclusively through either of the methods that Morrison herself seems to present. Instead, by offering readers Nel’s domesticity and Sula’s individualism, and then wrapping either girl’s ending in confusion, even loss and pain, she signals the dissatisfaction, even the nihilism that comes with looking to one methodology of womanhood exclusively. Rather, it seems that any womanhood, whether exercised by an “outlaw woman” (Morrison xvi), or a traditional woman, or any woman who identifies otherwise, can best achieve actualization by balancing experience and growth, even if they come with loss and hurt, and by celebrating friendship and community alongside the self.

Works Cited

Bryant, Cedric Gael. “The Orderliness of Disorder: Madness and Evil in Toni Morrison's Sula.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 24, no. 4, 1990, pp. 731-745. https://www.jstor. org/stable/3041799.

hooks, bell. “Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves the Subject.” Black Looks. Routledge, 2014, pp. 41-60. https://www-taylorfrancis-com.proxy.lib.utc.edu/ chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315743226-4/revolutionary-black-women-making-subject-bell-hooks?context=ubx.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. Vintage Books, 1973.

Nigro, Marie. “In Search of Self: Frustration and Denial in Toni Morrison's Sula.” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 28, no. 6, Jul. 1998, pp. 724-737. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 2784814.

Putnam, Amanda. “Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy.” Black women, Gender + Families, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, pp. 24-43. http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.5.2.0025.

Stein, Karen F. “Toni Morrison's Sula: A Black Woman's Epic.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 18, no. 4, 1984, pp. 146-150. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2904289.