Questions and Proposals about Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula (1973)
Please note: The page numbers given below are from the First Vintage International Edition of Sula, June 2004. The novel was originally published in 1973.
These questions were composed by Emilie T. White, for use by participants in the Kay Falk Literary Project in Asheville, NC.
“Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.”
— Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture in Literature, Stockholm, 7 December 1993 (taken from Toni Morrison’s What Moves at the Margin, Selected Nonfiction, University Press of Mississippi, 2008)
- Going back to the first chapter to see how deliberate were Morrison’s choices, how articulate her vision
One thing you might do after you’ve finished the novel is to go back and look at the first chapter. Certain fine works of literature will, in their opening sections—their first chapters, sentences, stanzas, what have you—demonstrate, in condensed form, the nature of the world about to unfold. This is certainly true of Sula. Looking closely at its first chapter will show you just how articulate is the vision of the novel, just how coherent and succinct. Let me point to a few features in that first chapter that seem to me especially “telling.”
- The first sentence of Sula shows us a place, only then to show us that it is gone. It could be said that the novel as a whole will do this as well, and in several different ways. Do you agree?
- The subject of the first sentence of the novel, indeed really of the entirety of this first chapter, is a place, rather than a single character, or a set of characters, from that place. Could it be said that this novel most deeply is about a place or community? Thoughts?
- In the first paragraph of the novel, we will learn much about the life of that “place” and the nature of the concerns that “will” “raze” it and “knock [it] to the ground.” We will also learn much about the narrator’s attitude toward the dispensers of the “generous” funds that have been “allotted to level the stripped and fade buildings that clutter the road from Medallion up to the golf course.” (3) How would you describe the narrator’s attitude? Out of what kind of wisdom does s/he appear to be responding to the gone life of the Bottom?
- What if I said that there is much life in the first paragraphs of the novel, much idiosyncratic and inspired life. Do you agree? If so, where do you see it? And: Why is it so important that it’s here?
- On the next page of the novel, p. 4, for the first time we will see someone “watch” a black woman dance. Several more times in the chapters to come we will encounter characters “watching” other characters go through experiences that cannot be shared, that can only be passed through alone. And we will be watching the watching characters watch. This is an address—reader to read-about—to, well, watch for.
- And then in the next paragraphs, you have the first of several of the novel’s many reversals: in this instance, the “top” become “Bottom.” As you re-read the novel, you might, as I say, stay on the lookout for the novel’s many reversals: terms ordinarily standing as opposites having the terms of their opposition reversed. You might also look for recurrences of the words “bottom” and “top.”
- And then in the very last two paragraphs of the novel, we are given a kind of instruction as to how we might orient ourselves as we enter the story to come. Here are the paragraphs to which I’m referring.
“Still, it was lovely up in the Bottom. After the town grew and the farm land turned into a village and the village into a town and the streets of Medallion were hot and dusty with progress, those heavy trees that sheltered the shacks up in the Bottom were wonderful to see. And the hunters who went there sometimes wondered in private if maybe the white farmer was right after all. Maybe it was the bottom of heaven.
The black people would have disagreed, but they had no time to think about it. They were mightily preoccupied with earthly things—and with each other, wondering even as early as 1920 what Shadrack was all about, what the 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.”
Could it be said that this is what we will do as readers: wonder at what these characters are “all about,” but not just from our own, individual perspectives, rather from the perspective of the town? Perhaps that will be part of our activity as readers: deciding what Shadrack, what Sula, what Eva, mean, and on terms largely informed by the meanings given them by their fellow citizens in the Bottom. What are your thoughts, here?
- The novel’s narrator
Have a look at the first two paragraphs of the novel and describe for yourself the novel’s narrator. Here are a few questions about him or her to help focus your thinking.
- How much does the narrator know about the world he or she is showing us? It would seem s/he knows everything, maybe even more than everything—that s/he has drawn her wisdom from exposure to many more histories than are included in this story. At one and the same time s/he sounds to me of the Bottom and beyond it, bearing perspectives both vernacular and mythological. Though maybe they are the same thing, the vernacular and the mythological, in this world. (?) That this narrator should speak of magical and/or supernatural occurrences without designating them as such perhaps speaks to his or her estimation of the power of the imagination–a very great estimation indeed. Do you agree? Disagree? Or am I viewing the presence of magic and/or the supernatural in this novel in the wrong way?
- If this narrator has wisdom to impart to us, what is the substance of that wisdom? It may not be possible to answer this question definitively. (Indeed, this may not be a very good question.)
- At many points in the novel the narrator will speak on behalf of everyone in the community. This perspective is an important one to keep in mind.
3. Shadrack/ The Shadrack chapter, “1919”
One thing your book group might do before meeting to discuss Sula is to look closely at the chapter about Shadrack, which is the second in the novel (it begins p. 7). The group might look in particular at the way Morrison manages the development of Shadrack’s life, from a young, “permanently astonished” war veteran, to a larger-than-life, self-ostracized, Cultural Collective Unconscious. It’s a remarkable development, one worth wondering at; and one worth studying, given that its shape, its “circle of sorrow,” will be repeated across the novel as a whole.
4.. What happens to Helene on that train, in the third chapter, “1920”?
And what happens to Helene’s daughter, Nel? How will their time on that train ride influence them later on? How will it influence the lives of those around them?
5. Reflections/ Mirrors
Two characters will look at their reflections early in the novel: Shadrack in his prison cell, looking into the water in the cell’s toilet bowl (see page 13), and Nel looking at her face in the mirror after her train ride, a “shiver” running through her, as she whispers, “I’m me. Me.” (28) It seems telling that so early in the novel, two major characters will regard their reflections and wonder at their respective…identities? (I’m not sure “identity” is the right word.) What do you think?
6. Skin/ clothing and what’s underneath it
At two points in the novel a character will wonder at what’s underneath the skin or clothing of another character. The first of these moments is when Nel, in the COLORED ONLY section of the train to New Orleans, is trying not to let her eyes travel up her mother’s body, “for fear of seeing that the hooks and eyes in the placket of the dress had come undone and exposed the custard-colored skin underneath.” (22) And the second of these moments is when Sula, astride Ajax during lovemaking, envisions taking a chamois cloth and rubbing “the black” of his face until it disappears. Beneath the black, she imagines, will be gold leaf; under the gold leaf, alabaster; under the alabaster, loam. (See p. 130) And the gradual, envisioned disappearance of Ajax, into loam, coincides with Sula’s mounting sexual climax. I genuinely do not know if these two moments in the novel are part of a larger theme; and I don’t know if they are connected to the images, indicated in question 5, about mirrors and reflections. But for the sake of discussion, it seemed a good idea to highlight this (possible) correspondence.
It should also be said that all of these images, these ways of re-imagining the relationship of the “outside” of the body to the inside of the body—to what is beneath the skin—seem of a piece with a description of Sula that comes fairly late in the novel, in which it is said that she had no “center,” “no speck around which to grow.” (119)
“In the midst of a pleasant conversation with someone she might say, ‘Why do you chew with your mouth open?’ not because the answer interested her but because she wanted to see the person’s face change rapidly. 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. For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself—be consistent with herself.” (119)
Do you agree that this description of Sula—that she has no “speck” around which to grow—seems part of a larger meditation within the novel on what is inside the body as contrasted with what is outside of it? On surface and identity? Or am I distorting the material to make it say something that it actually does not?
7. Eva’s December night in the outhouse with Plum
I also want to mark that night for Eva in the outhouse with Plum. To me, this is one of the most important—-and by important I guess I mean decisive—-events in the novel, not just for Eva, but for Hannah, and, therefore, for Sula. (And by the way, I could be wrong.) The moment I’m talking about is on p. 34, when Eva takes the last bit of food staple she has in her house, a bit of lard, and puts it up her baby, Plum’s, anus, then pulls from his body “pebbles,” which are “hard stools.” This is a remarkable moment in lots of ways: for the life of the woman it’s happening to—it is this experience that will decide Eva’s disappearing for eighteen months, during which, somehow, she gives up (?) her leg for money (?); for the lives of her children and grandchild; and for us as well: for the lives of our imaginations as readers. I doubt I will ever forget reading this scene. It seemed to me unprecedented, unprepared for, in all the fiction I’d read before. How did the scene register for you? And how would you respond if I said that for me this scene functions as the novel’s deepest recess, indeed like a womb, or perhaps an anus, or a “bottom”?
8. Sex
There’s a lot of it in this novel. And it’s very important to the people who have it. It’s sought after, made space for, cultivated, protected. How does it figure in Nel’s life? In Hannah’s? In Sula’s? In the life of the town? For the men on the street? For Ajax and Sula? For Sula and Nel? For what-it-means, or is-going-to-mean, to be a woman in the Bottom? For what-it-means, or is-going-to-mean, to be a man in the Bottom? How does it figure in the way black men are figured, or are believed to be figured, by white men?
It will also be important, however, to resist fixing what sex means in this novel. To decide, say, that Sula “portrays female sexuality as no other work of fiction has,” etc, would imperil, really would shut down, the particular people described here, and the ways in which they respond to and are changed by what happens to them, and changed also by what happens to them in their relationships with each other. (I heard just such an estimation of the novel—“a truer portrait of female sexuality than anywhere else”—a couple of weeks ago at a party.) Also mistaken would be to say that the book portrays something essentially “African American” about sex. To think in an essentializing or generalizing way about anything in this novel would be to read it exactly against its grain.
Sub-question: Recognizing the complexity of what sex means to Nel and Sula as recognizing their complexity as people
One way to think about the relationship between Nel and Sula, and also about what they are believed to “stand for” in the society of the Bottom, is to look again at their “contrasting” notions of sex and sexuality. At first, the contrast would seem a pretty simple (and simplistic) one: for Sula, sex is just….sex, the way a dog might have it (105), whereas for Nel sex is bound up with possession, matrimony, and the orderly functioning of society. But there is more going on inside of each of these women than this dualism will allow. For example, Sula, too, will experience the desire to possess someone through her coupling with Ajax (because she has fallen in love with him); and when we finally get around to learning what sex means for Nel, we see that Nel’s pleasure in sex does not begin and end with Jude—and here I’m thinking of her despair at the prospect, once Jude has left, of never being able to “open her legs” to “some cowboy lean hips” again (111). It seems that every time we oppose Nel and Sula, thereby requiring them to fulfill only those “points of a cross” Morrison speaks of in her Foreword (xiii); every time, moreover, we ask them to stand for values determined by their society, which was never really theirs to imagine in the first place, something will happen in the development of the story to stretch the limits of our conceptualization. Yet neither we nor they seem able to hold their ever-complexity, their ever-promise, in view. What are your thoughts, here?
9. Nel’s and Sula’s friendship
I don’t really have a question here, except to invite you to watch for the many repercussions of that friendship outward from its inception. While there is definitely a diachronic, linear “shape” to this novel—and we have only to look at the chapter titles to see it—there is another shape too, which maybe could be described as concentric, such as ripples in water. And Sula’s and Nel’s friendship seems best described by that concentric or “ripple” shape. What happens between Sula and Nel? The novel never says outright. Certainly what happens has something to do with Chicken Little’s death, but it seems to this reader that the source of the mystery lies even deeper than that. Indeed if I had to point to one image in the novel that embodies the understandings Sula and Nel share, it would be the “grave” the two of them dig near the river as girls. This happens on p. 59. The grave begins as two holes, which then become one hole, which then is filled with debris, which then is covered up to become a “grave.” Nel and Sula dig this “grave” just moments before they encounter Chicken Little. For me, the image of this “grave” bears a kind of authority you rarely see in modern fiction. Which images in the novel for you seem to speak to the particular intelligence of Nel’s and Sula’s friendship?
10. The aftermath of the death of Chicken Little/ The novel’s materialism
In mentioning Chicken Little’s death in the previous question, it occurred to me how important it is to underscore the novel’s faithfulness to matter—to its laws, its limits, its inevitable life and death. Chicken Little, for instance, matters more to this novel than just as a lost child, a loss, of itself, devastating enough. There is also his dead body to account for, a body we’ll encounter from several perspectives: the (presumably) white bargeman whose first response is “disgust at the kind of parents who would drown their own children”; then the sheriff; then the embalmer; then Chicken Little’s mother; then the women of the town, their hands flying up in the air at his funeral. This is a materialist novel through and through, which is to say that Morrison never lets us forget that the world she’s describing must and can only be occupied according to the laws and limits of matter. What the great matriarch Eva understands, she understands from a constant and inescapable reckoning with the limits of the earthly and the bodily. (“Play?” she exclaims to Hannah when Hannah asks her if she “played’ with her children when they were young. “Wasn’t nobody playin’ in 1895.” (68) Further examples of the novel’s materialism: the intricately considered description of the pains taken by Shadrack to come to terms with his shaking hands (pp. 8-9); Eva’s night in the outhouse with Plum (the “pebbles” in his anus, the three beets she doesn’t use to loosen them) (34); the seemingly endlessly impeding course Eva must take to get out of the window to try and save her daughter, Hannah, from being engulfed by fire (75-76); the cared-for and episodically imagined course of Sula’s coming to sexual climax (130-131); the depth at which Sula imagines Ajax’s incarnate soul (130-131); and countless other examples.
11. Burning/ Fire
Two people burn away in this novel, Plum and Hannah. The reach here, the reach of the image, I mean, seems to extend beyond the earthly or the plausible, certainly beyond the “realistic,” into another realm entirely: the realm of legend? of myth? What do you think is going on, here? And why burning? Why fire?
Connected to this question: There are many supernatural elements to Sula that end up placing the story well beyond the realm of the “real.” We have talked many times in the book group about a kind of fiction that can habituate the imagination to expect—well, I can only generalize here, and that’s hanging me up—to expect the unexpected: and Sula certainly qualifies as that sort of fiction. Sula doesn’t seem to me the kind of fiction that readies the imagination for Christian grace–the way, say, O’Connor’s fiction does, or Marilynne Robinson’s; but it definitely has oriented this reader’s mind, if you will, toward “what moves at the margin.”
In what cultural logic, for instance, does the “deweys never growing above forty-eight inches”, belong? What is this world that three boys entwine together to become effectively one boy, and then never grow up? Where flocks of robins augur doom, or where the death of a female “pariah” precipitates the dissolution—not just the dissolution, the disappearance–of a whole community? Where a certain dream—marriage in a red dress—only means one thing, and actually does predict the future? What is the magic here about? And: Whose magic is it? Who believes in it? And: What does that magic make possible that might not have been possible otherwise? What, for instance, do Shadrack’s beliefs make possible for him, and for those around him? And how are magical truths mobilized to make certain developments impossible? And: Why does this narrator treat these magical elements as though they were “real”?
And it’s true! The proposals of this question contradict those of question number 10, which stated that the novel is a materialist one “through and through.” But the two proposals interestingly do not contradict one another entirely.
12. Why Peace?
Why give this family the last name of Peace? The name, or word, will ring a new set of notes in the novel’s last pages, when, in 1965, Nel will visit the Medallion graveyard and will see all the “flat slabs” with “one word” carved on them.
“Together they read like a chant: PEACE 1895-1921, PEACE 1890-1923, PEACE 1910-1940, PEACE 1892-1959.” (p. 171)
13. Why “Always?”
What is meant by this word? It’s what Shadrack says to Sula when she’s come to his door after Chicken Little flies out of her hands into the river. Both Shadrack and Sula will supply a meaning for the word later on in the novel; but somehow there will be another meaning, another ripple or “circle of sorrow” around the word, the significance of which is perhaps not available to us, or even to Sula or Shadrack.
14. Sula’s autonomy
This is a question I imagine you have been asking too: why Sula’s autonomy, when even she knows it’s going to result in a life lived alone. Connected to this question is why Sula doesn’t appear to feel for those around her, even for her mother and her best friend. (Emphasis here on “appear”!) It’s an immense question, one that concerns not just this particular character, “Sula”, and not even just the particular reality of being a black woman in the south in the early part of the 20th century, but also—and now the question expands to include all of us–a question that concerns the imagination, and its vulnerability to lived experience: to social, racial, communal, material experience. Sula is a kind of riddle, one we study from several perspectives but are never able finally to penetrate. We know what sort of family she’s come from; we have a sense, but maybe only a sense, of the secret understanding encircling Sula and Nel as they grow up and through their friendship into women. We have a sense of the social and really mythological pressures at work on Sula and Nel as they articulate their life-choices as African American women in the early part of 20th century—though it should be emphasized that it is rare in this novel that Morrison ever states the contents of those pressures outright. We know that Sula goes to college (Nel, by contrast, does not.) But accounting for why Sula is able to stand in “interest” (!) and watch her mother burn, to me the most troubling event in the novel; accounting for why she’s able to sleep with Jude, and thereby risk losing her dearest friend; why she’s able in full cognizance of what she’s doing to alienate her society and thereby to isolate herself irrevocably for the rest of her life: accounting for Sula’s radical autonomy, is, for me, the great and vexing and even frightening question that is Sula. It’s an existential question, and it’s not just Sula’s question, it’s all of our question. What do you think? Please review the novel as you contemplate this question.
And now I’m going to contradict these last proposals and say that if we forget that Sula is an African American woman in the early part of the 20th century, and in the southeastern part of the United States, we won’t be able to answer this question about her autonomy. More consequential still, we’ll lose the novel—all of it. Yet Morrison has managed to tell a story here of universal relevance. How can that be possible? Do you agree? Disagree? Why?
15. Another way to view Sula’s autonomy: Considering Sula as an artist and in the possession of the moral subtlety of an artist
With this question I invite you to view Sula’s intelligence as an artist’s intelligence. What set me thinking in this direction was sheer coincidence, but I’m going to share the observation even so.
In the last couple of weeks, three reader friends of mine, and from different parts of my life, have, in trying to articulate the source of Sula’s “autonomy,” compared her to certain of the great artistic geniuses of Western literature—and here I’m not talking about writers, but about characters. One friend compared her “social discernment” to that of Hamlet, another her “coldness” to that of Stephen Dedalus at the end James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist of a Young Man, and another her “moral subtlety” to that of Professor St. Peter in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House. Again, this correspondence, this fellowship, really—Sula among the Artistic Geniuses Too Subtle in their Thinking to Take Up their Designated Place in Society–are in actuality the result of sheer coincidence. Yet I do want to invite the possibility that there’s something instructive going on here. Quite possibly a comparison between Sula and, say, Hamlet, or—and now I’m brainstorming—Lily Briscoe—might show each character more sharply than before the comparison. What if we thought of this early novel of Toni Morrison’s as another “portrait of an artist” as a young person; only this artist has no opportunity to develop her craft, no opportunity to articulate her vision? What are your thoughts, here?
And this way of figuring Sula—as an artist—does happen in the novel proper. Here’s the relevant passage.
“In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of the equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.” (121)
16. It’s after Sula dies that the Bottom begins to disintegrate. Even the land falls to ruin. Why? One of the members of the All Souls Book Group suggested that Sula had been for the Bottom a source of “enchantment,” and another said that Sula was the “speck” around which the “community” “grew” (to remember the description of Sula-the-individual on p. 119). Do these descriptions resonate with your reading of the book?
17. Question for personal reflection:
What did you take personally from the novel? Where, or how, do you find yourself in it?
18. An especially expressive image: the dandelion spores
One of (for me) the most expressive images in the novel is that of the dandelion spores to which Sula’s “drifting” thoughts are compared as she is dying (147), and which reappear on the very last page of the novel, as Nel is leaving the graveyard, in 1965 (174). You might have a look at these two incidences of dandelion spores and contemplate the relationship between them. The second time they appear, when Nel is leaving the graveyard on the last page of the book, they begin as a “soft ball of fur,” which makes me think of the “gray ball” hovering “just to the right” of Nel after Jude leaves (108). What do you think is going on here? What do these dandelion spores, shared by Sula and Nel, drifting across their story, and across time, “say” that words–meaning, exposition–could not?
19. The way the novel ends
Lastly, I’d like to point to the way the novel ends, which is that it ends and ends and ends (in a good way.) For me, the ending really begins on the first page of the third-to-last chapter, “1940”—so in the Vintage edition, that’s page 138—and lasts until the last page of the novel, which is page 174 (and even beyond the last page, as the final image of the novel has “no bottom and no top”.) This is to say that the ending roughly begins with Nel’s coming to visit Sula when she’s sick, and ends with Nel walking away from the Medallion graveyard twenty-five years later, in 1965. What I invite you to do in your meetings about the book is to look at the shape of that ending, its effective, if you will, endlessness, each implication resulting in its next, and its next, a story, in a sense, with “no bottom and no top,” “just circles and circles of sorrow.”