Death and Destruction in Toni Morrisons Sula - Essay Example

Death and Destruction in Toni Morrison's Sula Toni Morrison in Sula celebrated the lives of ordinary people who daily must work and provide. Sula celebrates many lives: It is the story of the friendship of two African American women; it is the story of growing up Black and female; but most of all, it is the story of a community. Events that befall the denizens of the Bottom, a segregated community of mythical Medallion, Ohio, can be seen as those that might befall residents of any Black community in any town during the years of this narrative, 1919 to 1965 (Claudia Tate, 1983, 128). Historically, great literature has concerned itself with nature, death, and love. In Sula, Morrison takes on an apparently simple theme, the friendship of two black girls. One, Nel Wright, follows the pattern of life society has laid out for her, and the other, Sula Peace, tries to create her own pattern, to achieve her own self. In Sula, the patterns of both cultures are distinct, yet share common factors (Deborah E. McDowell, 1988, 80). Sula's destiny is charted by the mythology of Evil and Nature her hometown ascribes to and by the view the Bottom as well as the larger society holds of woman, her span and space. In exploring this community's system of beliefs, Morrison weaves a fable about the relationship between conformity and experiment, survival and creativity. This mythological system is continually discerned in the novel's fabric through death, so ordinary in its eternal presence that it might otherwise be missed, through the drama of time as a significant event, and through the pervasive use of nature as both a creative and destructive force. In Sula, Death occurs in each chapter and is the beginning of, or climax of, the experience in that particular section of the novel. Death becomes a way of focusing experience. As each year gives way to another, so each death gives way to a new view of life, a new discovery, a new feeling for truth. Morrison created Nel and Sula to be a whole: "Each has part of the other. . . . But each one lacked something that the other one had" (Robert B. Stepto, 1977: 474) This lack, like Sula's absences, serves to define her and is first dramatized in the novel when Sula hears her mother saying, "I love Sula. I just don't like her" (Toni Morrison, Sula 57). Hannah's statement unwittingly severs a significant bond with Sula. Sula is conscious only of "a sting in her eye," but the event essentially points out Sula's difference from her mother (Toni Morrison, Sula 57). Sula and Nel immediately strengthen their union in a wordless ritual, loaded with sexual implications. But the hole they dig, both womb and grave, signals both their union and dissolution. Sula is structured around catastrophes of various sorts, from individual deaths to the destruction of the Bottom, which is razed in order to make room for a golf course. With each of them there is a projected return to a mythic past--much like Marcus Garvey's idealized Africa--where there is community, harmony, and freedom. Drawing upon an African cosmological system, Morrison maintains that although life in modern America is chaotic, it is possible to escape life in the West and recover the time of the black community's non-Western beginnings (Barbara Christian, 1980: 53). The destruction of the Bottom, a black community located in the hills above the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, is a central event in Toni Morrison Sula. With the collapse of a tunnel linking Medallion to a neighboring town and the leveling of the Bottom in order to make room for a golf course, the community appears to have reached its inevitable end. Those in the Bottom are attuned to natural phenomena and the socioeconomic influences circumscribing their lives. Natural disasters, unexpected deaths, and continued racist oppression serve as bitter reminders of the near-tragic dimensions of life, for to be black in America is to experience calamity as an ever-present reality, to live on the brink of apocalypse. The shell-shocked war veteran serves as priest and prophet to the Bottom, exorcising the townsfolk of their misery while heralding their inevitable day of doom. He is identified with John the Baptist: "His eyes were so wild, his hair so long and matted, his voice was so full of authority and thunder that he caused panic on the first, or Charter, National Suicide Day in 1920" (Terry Otten, 1989, 42). Community lore also associates him with Christ: "Then Reverend Deal took it up, saying the same folks who had sense enough to avoid Shadrack's call were the ones who insisted on drinking themselves to death or womanizing themselves to death. 'May's well go on with Shad and save the Lamb the trouble of redemption'" (Toni Morrison, Sula 13 - 14). Ostensibly, Shadrack's presence represents the community's imminent attainment of order and progress, but the reality of his life belies that expectation. Madness has rendered Shadrack incapable of redeeming anyone, including himself. Instead, the tunnel, the cherished symbol of progress, collapses while Shadrack, the maddened priest-prophet, stands at a distance ringing his death bell (Valerie Smith, 1987 135). Shadrack's tragicomic holiday fails to end the community's constant disorder. Deaths steeped in imagery of fire and water interrupt the rhythm of life in the Bottom, and each one of these deaths, except Sula's, is both bizarre and unexpected. Catastrophic events such as these not only reveal the absurdity of the community's endeavors to attain an Edenic existence within the context of Western history, but also serve as a commentary on the futility of Morrison's efforts to create an orderly fictional world whose setting is in modern America. A gesture equally as unavailing is the attempt to curtail the plague of robins, one of many omens accompanying Sula's disruptive return to the Bottom. The presence of evil in all of its subtle manifestations is an altogether inescapable part of African-American life. Perhaps more important to an understanding of Morrison's fictive apocalypse, however, are the similarities between Shadrack's annual ritual and the celebration of the end of the world among many non-Western cultures whose conception of time is circular, not linear. The end of the world is believed to have already occurred. Subsequent annual celebrations of this past even provide a link between what Mircea Eliade refers to as the sacred, primordial time of a community's "beginnings" and its present sociopolitical conditions (Toni Morrison, Sula, 54 - 55). Considered in this larger, mythic context, the recurrence of Shadrack's National Suicide Day, with its accompanying ritualistic emotional display, is reminiscent of the community's vibrant cultural past. The event offers a necessary buffer against the onslaught of history and, therefore, reveals a continuity between the Bottom's past, present, and future that is both redemptive and psychologically gratifying. In the Bottom, then, the negative effects of time can be overcome. Eva's troublesome dreams in which Plum tries to reenter her womb also have mythic implications: They reveal the latent impulse to recover the psychological wholeness characteristic of black life prior to slavery. As living proof of the damage that slavery and its aftermath have wrought upon the male psyche, the male characters in the novel are, like Plum, very much in need of the heroic stature that might well have been theirs in the community's mythic past. Eva's wandering husband Boy, for example, can never settle down long enough to accept the responsibilities associated with manhood; Tar Baby, a half-white hillbilly, is the town drunk; the Deweys are destined to remain homogenous children; Ajax is unable to fulfill his desires for flight and must watch airplanes from ground level; and Jude, Nel's unfaithful husband, considers marriage to be the only means by which he can validate his questionable manhood. These men are all scarcely shadows of their true selves, figuratively emasculated by a society whose tokens of manhood--wealth, prestige, and political power--are reserved for whites only. Appropriately enough, it is Eva, the larger-than-life matriarch of the Peace family, who offers a vital historical connection with the past. Her indomitable strength, the resourcefulness that prompts her to sacrifice her leg in an effort to provide for her family, and the survival capabilities which allow her to overcome numerous tragedies all make her a timeless character whose influence in the community is boundless. Sula rejects the community's vibrant past when she places her grandmother Eva in a rest home-an abominable act which precipitates the later cosmic disharmony in the Bottom. ) Munro, C. Lynn. 1984:150-54). Eva is a stabilizing force, and one of the distinctive features of African American writing is the presence of ancestors like Eve who, as Morrison puts it, are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom. Eva's is an ancient wisdom extending far beyond the mother wit that allows her to support three young children without either the financial or emotional support of her elusive husband. Hers is spiritual knowledge, omniscience. Before Hannah's startling death, Eva dreams of a red wedding dress. And although she is not present at Chicken Little's drowning, she recounts the circumstances surrounding this tragic event with amazing accuracy. She is an Eve figure in an upside-down Eden, the mother, creator of life, who, paradoxically, chooses to sacrifice Plum's life in order to preserve his damaged manhood. Plum's death is quite a victory. Armed with her mythic consciousness, Eva no doubt realizes that death is tantamount to a return to the womb, so she willingly ignites the flames releasing Plum from his tortured existence and allowing him to return to an eternal past. In the community's collective unconscious, then, the apocalypse, an event prefigured by the many deaths and disasters, endings and beginnings, is indeed a hopeful affair signaling the recovery of a lost past--much like Marcus Garvey's idealized Africa--characterized by freedom, vitality, and psychological wholeness. The novel emphasizes with forceful clarity that, although the white world may become extinct, the black world will not. It cannot. Those in the Bottom are fully aware of their marginal status in a racially divided country and that their dignity as a people depends on the destruction of a society hostile to the black sense of self. Thus, Morrison presents a parallel catharsis to emphasize the importance of communal responsibility. Blaming Sula and the tunnel will not improve conditions any more than personal evil can be exorcised by death because the human community's problems remains more fundamental. Seeing the painful, disfiguring effects of love, Sula creates herself in her own image, becoming totally "free." But she does not become "free" in a positive way. About personal freedom Morrison herself has said that "ideally" it means "being able to choose your responsibilities. Not having any responsibility, but being able to choose which things you want to be responsible for" (Richard O. Moore, 1978). In shunning responsibility for the creation of a healthy community, white Medallion and the Bottom become culpable, not Sula. After all, she has little choice of her growing environment. Indeed, the extended neglect of children throughout the novel is a recurring reminder of communal dereliction. Chicken, the deweys, Ajax, Teapot, and Sula herself are allowed to grow with little supervision or care. No wonder that the children who survive become as self-centered as their adult examples. Sula's solipsistic approach may seem to be more extreme than that of others. But when we see the widening rings of denial moving out from her to the Bottom to Medallion and the rest of the United States, we begin to fathom the political depth of this novel. Sula at least wholly claims her life, including its failures, while others deny their human connections in favor of simpler, safer ways. The community of the Bottom never recognizes its moral insolvency, never sees the role it plays in its destruction. But Nel is given a belated chance for self-recognition. Her glimpse of truth is brought about first when Eva, to whom Nel has paid a duty call, confuses Nel with Sula and soon thereafter asks how Nel managed to kill Chicken. Nel's assured moral rectitude melts as she begins to see that everyone might have been wrong about Sula, that what Sula stood for was not necessarily bad. In an exchange just prior to her death, Sula has pointed out her position to Nel: "How you know" Sula asked. "Know what" "About who was good. How you know it was you" "What you mean" "I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me" (Toni Morrison, Sula 146). Years later, Nel sees that Sula might have been right. Moreover, Nel acknowledges that there was spite behind communal actions, not love or moral conviction. And when she understands this, Nel also recognizes that Eva was right to confuse her with Sula. She sees that despite their difference, they were identical in their disclaimer of responsibility. The story ends with the beginning of Nel's painful comprehension that much of what she has believed in has led her away from herself instead of leading her to truth. Morrison's dramatization of tradition's unperceived barriers to self-discovery reflects her belief in the need for experimenting with life, of breaking rules, not simply out of boredom or curiosity but because there is no other way to explore possibilities. Sula discovers the terror and thrill of the free fall into life through her own creative capacity for invention. Nel, on the other hand, values duty and tradition more than self. Taught to believe in the virtue of self-sacrifice, she denies her own possibilities and becomes dependent on others for her life's meaning, and even, as Sula points out, for her own loneliness. Trying to read Sula as an either/or proposition, that either Nel or Sula must be right, is unnecessarily simplifying and distorting of this novel, for Morrison all along intends both characters to command our attention. Like the characters, labels of "good" and "evil" become confused because "one can never really define good and evil. It depends on what uses you put it to. Evil is as useful as good is." (Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison1985, 567-93) And though what remains of the Bottom will never know that Sula was not what they thought her to be, at least Nel breaks through the barriers of traditional moral certainty to recognize a Sula she hasn't seen for a long time: "'We was girls together,' she said as though explaining something" (174). Her reference to girlhood recalls a time of their greatest possibility, a possibility Nel rejected in favor of conventional ideas about womanhood which in turn blinded her to the truth of Sula (Tate, Claudia 1983.117-31). Nel's grief brings the novel to a close, but like most elements of the novel, it paradoxically opens up her own possibilities. Thus in a way, the novel is open-ended. Finishing Sula, we have to consider carefully what we in fact do know. Our conventional expectations, after all, have been challenged through omission, contradiction, paradox, irony, and speculation, through a fusion of supernatural and realistic, and through a lean prose conjuring gothic events. By the end, we are prone to have given up any dualistic thinking in favor of the fluid, multiple processes Morrison's novel gives us. The novel and the title character require imaginative exploration into the nature of life and art. Ultimately this means that, artistic structure notwithstanding, we are asked to respond to the free fall into individual consideration instead of relying upon literary conventions. References: Claudia Tate, "Toni Morrison," Black Women Writers at Work, ed. by Claudia Tate (New York: Continuum, 1983) 128. Deborah E. McDowell, "'The Self and the Other': Reading Toni Morrison's Sula and the Black Female Text," Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. by Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988) 80. Robert B. Stepto, "'Intimate Things in Place': A Conversation with Toni Morrison," Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 474. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974) 4. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses. Barbara Christian, "'Community and Nature: The Novels of Toni Morrison," Journal of Ethnic Studies 7 (1980): 53. Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987) 135. Terry Otten, The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989) 42. Richard O. Moore, dir., "The Writer in America," Perspective Films, 1978. Munro, C. Lynn. "The Tattooed Heart and the Serpentine Eye: Morrison's Choice of an Epigraph for Sula." Black American Literature Forum 18 (1984):150-54. Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. "A Conversation." Southern Review 21.3 (1985): 567-93. Michael S. Harper and Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 213-29. Tate, Claudia. "Toni Morrison." Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum 1983.117-31. Benjamin, Jessica. "The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination." The Future of Difference. Ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine. Boston: Hall, 1980. 41-70. Erickson, Peter. "Images of Nurturance in Tar Baby." Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives, Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad, 1993. 293-307. Hedgepeth, Chester, Jr. Theories of Social Action in Black Literature. New York: Lang, 1986. Johnson, Barbara. "The Quicksands of the Self: Nella Larsen and Heinz Kohut." Telling Facts: History and Narration in Psychoanalysis. Ed. Joseph Smith and Humphrey Morris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. 184-99. Read More