Toni Morrison And Sula Essay, Research Paper

Toni Morrison is one of the most prolific authors of African American women novelist. She mostly focuses on issue of gender and community as in the story of Sula. Her contributions to African American literature are awarded many times in twentieth century.

SULA

Sula is the story about the girls Nel Wrigth and Sula Peace. They are close friends in the black community of the Bottom in the town of Madellion. The town people see Sula as the evil and treat as an outcast. Because Sula wants to be self and free so it is not available for the historical figure of womanhood or girlhood through the contemporary period.

How Sula represents the issue of gender is, the invisibility of the women or girls even to be girl children and to be female as uncomfortable as to be a black. As she stated on some points in Sula, Morrison generally implies that women’s strength is born out of divisive social structures. They are the victim in a chain of oppression. Also relationship between the sisters female friends, mothers and daughters are the central in Morrison’s works as in Sula. Sula Peace and Nel Wright are each the only doughtier of mothers whose distance leaves the young girls alone with dreams of someone to destroy the solitude. When they first met they felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Moreover, their meeting was fortune and it led them use each other to grown on. Sula’s spontaneous intense is relieved by Nel’s passive reverse. Sula loves the ordered neatness of Nel’s home and her life and Nel like Sula’s household of throbbing disorder awry with things, people, voices and over the years they found relief in each others personality. Sula and Nel together face life, death and marriage and they also must face separation. Morrison affirms the necessity of their collaboration. In the story, being two close friends is focused on mostly the dimension of their own existence without the permission of their families or the community. Because each discovered that they were neither white nor male and all freedom was forbidden to them, they had sad about creating something else to be. So they are not accepted by community and community represents the traditions and the historical figure of women which had not cared. By the way, Sula had afford to abandonee the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things. Sula represents the rebel against conventionality. But nothing even her closest and only friend’s censures will force Sula to abridge herself. And Sula believes that she got her mind and she got her. Sula’s self confident for freedom remains intact, she has not betrayed herself as Nel has and any loneliness she feels is a price she is willing to pay for freedom.

As for Nel, Nel takes her place besides the other women in the community, she and other women identified with spiders who limited them, they terrified of the free fall. Nel envisions herself as victim of someone else’s evil. In contrast Sula is the metaphor for freedom and she is unafraid of the free fall. Because Nel will marry and have children just like others and not like Sula.

Beside the gender issue in Sula there are other different lives as being in community or out of community. It’s represents are Ajax and Jude even they are men they also confuses by community and traditions. Ajax is a man who has self-esteem that is not diminished away and leave behind a wife and children. So Ajax and Sula comes together not as individuals in need of the other to be complied but as whole people not like Nel and Jude. Because Nel and Jude are the community themselves, accept traditions and life’s in justice. As a result of these combinations story becomes either gender or community (Black Community) issues.

To sum up, Morrison’s characteristic treatment of bigotry is not the defining episodes of white hatred but instead to direct attention to the black community’s ingenious methods of coping, using humor, garnering strength from folk traditions and she captures the rhythms of the black community like and women cooking dinner, men on the street.