It seems pretty relevant here as Sula, with the rose-shaped birthmark on her face, claims her independence and total lack of interest in doing what's "right. We learn much about Sula through her relationship with Nel.
As children, both girls experience "loneliness [ Sula quickly emerges as the tougher, braver, and more adventurous of the two—or at least it seems that way; we later learn that the truth is more complex. When she returns from her ten-year absence, not much seems to have changed. Nel has stayed in the Bottom and gotten married and had kids, just as she's expected to do, and Sula quickly sets out on a life unconcerned with all of these expectations.
She starts sleeping with married men, just as Hannah did, and feels no remorse or concern when she starts sleeping with Nel's husband, Jude. This is where things get really complicated for us as readers.
We probably feel that Sula should know better, that she should understand that her best friend's husband is off-limits. And when she doesn't seem at all sorry, we probably don't like her. But we also have to remember that Sula grew up in a household where this type of behavior was considered normal. She saw her mother having sex with married men, and she is so secure in her friendship with Nel and the fact that they have always shared everything, including boyfriends, that she doesn't think Nel will be angry.
Her deepest affection is for her friend, and she assumes that that trumps everything else. When it doesn't, Nel's reaction leaves her confused and saddened.
Although the two spend years apart after the affair, when Sula dies, her last thought is of her friend. She can't wait to tell Nel about death, and we realize that despite what we might consider her great faults, and despite all evidence to the contrary, Sula is loyal and devoted to Nel until the day she dies.
Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Toni Morrison. Previous Next. As Sula's friend, Nel becomes more like her and even approaches individuality.
In order to gain respectability and acceptance in the community, she decides to marry and settle down; the decision obviously delights her mother, for she wants Nel to be just like her. For Nel, her husband, Jude, becomes a poor substitute for Sula, who feels abandoned by the marriage and leaves town. Nel throws herself into trying to please Jude and making him feel like a man; in the process, she loses her sense of self.
When Sula returns to Medallion after a ten-year absence, Nel, who has suffered from a lack of friendship, is eager to befriend Sula, in spite of the opinion of the town about her.
Then when she finds Sula in bed with her husband, she is infuriated; when Jude leaves her out of shame, Nel is truly devastated. She goes through the next years of her life believing that she mourns the loss of her husband, when in truth it is Sula that she misses. Yet she is too proud and proper to approach Sula. After her own children are adults and abandon her, Nel decides to pay Eva a visit. Nel is finally forced to come to grips with the truth. Nel suddenly knows that her friendship with Sula was the best thing she has ever had, stronger than motherhood or marriage.
She accepts that Sula was really the other side of her coin. The unique combination of the two women, who completely complement each other, forms a friendship that supercedes everything else in their lives. Shadrack is a strange resident of The Bottom. He returns shell-shocked from the war and turns to alcohol for company.
Although a relatively minor character, he takes on more importance because the actual story starts and ends with him. Shadrack only interacts with Sula one time in the novel.
He often observes her in town, and always recognizes her by the mysterious birthmark on her face. Sadly, Sula, who is so in need of love, is totally unaware that Shadrack cares for her; but her life, which she judges as meaningless, has given meaning to Shadrack. Throughout the novel, he faithfully celebrates his holiday, eagerly leading a parade through town that few people join.
The excitement swells, and the Blacks find themselves heading toward the tunnel being built by the whites. Filled with hatred for the tunnel, they begin to destroy it from the outside. Then they go inside to do more damage, but the tunnel caves in and most of them are killed - on National Suicide Day; it is as if their own small-mindedness has destroyed them.
Shadrack appropriately stands above on a hill observing the death scene and ringing a bell. Eva, Sula's grandmother, is alive during the entire span of the novel. She is significant in the shaping of Sula and in the movement of the novel's plot. Morrison tells us that Sula "had no center, no speck around which to grow"; her life is like an open rainbow for experimental freedom that often touches the edges of danger.
Sula must experience events in order to reflect on them: She watches her mother burn, she commits her grandmother to a nursing home, and she has a sexual affair with her best friend's husband. As flawed as Sula is, however, she never surrenders to falseness or falls into the trap of conventionality in order to keep up appearances or to be accepted by the community.
As Morrison notes of her, "She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments — no ego. Faced with a racist world and a sexist community, Sula defends herself by creating a life, however bizarre, that is rich and experimental. She refuses to settle for a woman's traditional lot of marriage, child raising, labor, and pain. The women of the Bottom hate Sula because she is living criticism of their own dreadful lives of resignation.
Their resentment of her is foreshadowed in the novel's epigraph, from Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, which hints at the independent nature of Morrison's title character. In Williams' play, Serafina delle Rose, an Italian-American woman, mourns for the recent death of her husband, Rosario, who, Serafina's gossipy and cruel neighbors claim, was having an extramarital affair before his death.
None of the play's characters understands Serafina's fierce commitment to her dead husband's memory; her questioning his love for her would effectively negate the pride — the glory — she has for herself.
Her shallow neighbors think that Serafina has "too much glory," just like the Bottom's black community despises Sula because she has an independence that contrasts to the community's own small-mindedness.
Described by one critic as a "cracked mirror, fragments and pieces that we have to see independently and put together for ourselves," even Sula's birthmark over one eye is perceived differently by different characters.
0コメント