The women of the Bottom dislike the way Sula treats their men. She sleeps with them once time and then discards them. In an attempt to soothe the men after Sula abandons them, the wives become more attentive and compassionate than usual towards their husbands. Sula experiences her first long-term affair when she becomes involved with Ajax, a man nine years her senior who she knew in her girlhood.
In her relationship with Ajax, Sula shows signs of domesticity. She begins to sleep only with him and eventually treats him the way a wife might treat a husband, showing concern for his well-being and seeking to bring him solace.
Ajax is frightened by this and runs off to Dayton, becoming yet another absent male. When Ajax leaves, Sula again suffers with impermanence. She thinks that he may never have existed to begin with and searches for signs of his existence. When she finds his license and discovers that it says A. Jacks, not Ajax, Sula decides that she never even really knew the man because she did not know his name.
At the end of the chapter, Sula falls asleep and in the next chapter, she contracts a serious illness. The Question and Answer section for Sula is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel. Explain the kind of relationship Nel and Helene have. Explain how their train trip down south affected this relationship and affected Nel overall. How are they similar or different to how Sula and Hannah get along? This is only a short answer space. Helene passes along the same sense of goodness and superiority to her daughter Nel.
Nel becomes the vessel through Sula study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Sula essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison.
Remember me. Forgot your password? Buy Study Guide. I don't know what you mean by Villa Rai. Within The Bluest Eye and Sula , Morrison favors strong female characters who are self-reliant and through her development of those characters comments on how society punishes those who depend on others for a sense of fulfillment.
While love is a recurring theme Morrison's expression of that theme varies from couple to couple. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses love as a destructive force that both harms and sustains Pauline and Cholly's relationship. Similarly, Morrison's second novel, Sula , continues to illustrate the ramifications of codependent relationships. In both The Bluest Eye and Sula , Morrison uses deficient love to comment on how society punishes dependent women.
In order to understand Morrison's derision of female dependency, the reader must first examine what causes the characters to be dependent. American psychologist, Abraham Maslow is noted for his contributions to the study of human behavior and for his conceptualization of the hierarchy of human needs. Consequently, according to Malsow's psychological theory there are two types of love:.
One type which he referred to as D-love [deficiency love], is an essentially selfish need to give and receive affection from others. People experience this need strongly when they are lonely. In contrast, he also described B-love being love , which is a more unselfish desire for what is best for the loved one.
People manifest B-love when they love and accept a person's failings and foibles rather than trying to change them. In Maslow's deficiency love paradigm, individuals who seek others in order to experience fulfillment are in essence seeking to satisfy baser needs such as a sense of belonging or a feeling of being wanted.
On the other hand, individuals whose baser needs have already been fulfilled and have experienced self-actualization are more inclined to love their partners for who they are regardless of what they can provide. Essentially, these individuals are already complete within themselves and consequently are not seeking others to complete them.
Following Maslow's description, the insatiable craving to be needed experienced by Morrison's protagonist Nel corresponds to the deficiency love paradigm. Nel, as a victim of deficiency love, has an intense desire to be needed by an individual and as a result, seeks individuals who can satisfy this desire.
Nel's longing is fulfilled at first by her mother, Helene, who needs someone to care for while her husband is away: 'Her daughter was more comfort and purpose than she had ever hoped to find in this life' Sula Helene needs someone on whom she can expend her energy and vast amounts of free time lavishing with attention.
By allowing Helene to dote on her, Nel in turn fulfills her own desire to be needed. While it may have been possible for Nel to achieve self-actualization and develop autonomy once her baser needs were met, Helene prevents Nel from attaining this goal and stunts her personal growth.
By determining how Nel behaves and whom she befriends, Helene effectively squelches any sign of independence in Nel and sets her daughter on a dangerous path of self-denial and subordination. Consequently, when Nel meets Jude and recognizes a deep, burning need within him, she immediately accepts the burden of fulfilling that need.
Nel's desire to appease the man she loves is born out of her own primal desire to be needed. Spurred by his inability to gain employment from the white contractors, Jude's obsession to prove himself manifests in his relationship with Nel.
As Morrison indicates, '[Jude's] determination to take on a man's role [by any means makes] him press Nel about settling down' Sula Jude's feelings of inadequacy permeate his consciousness and demand subsequent satisfaction. At the same time, Nel is driven by an intense desire to be needed by someone.
Nel's acquiescence to Jude's marriage proposal appeases both his need to establish his masculinity and adulthood as well as her longing to be needed by an individual. According to the narrator, '[Jude] wanted someone to care about his hurt, to care very deeply' Sula By comforting and caring for Jude, Nel is also able to fulfill her own desire to be needed.
Morrison further portrays Nel's dependence on Jude by making her entirely subservient to him. Instead of forming a relationship of equals, Jude's feelings, opinions, and decisions take precedence, while Nel comforts, upholds, and acquiesces to his every command.
Morrison consigns Nel through her own proclivity to the role of the passive individual and designates Jude to maintain the dominant position in the relationship.
Nel's willingness to place Jude's desires above her own sets the tone for their relationship and provides Jude with the power to become the superior individual. As a result, '[the] two of them together'make one Jude' Sula Through this distinctively descriptive statement, Morrison conveys that Nel no longer exists as a separate entity and that she has, in fact, been consumed by her desire to fulfill the parameters of her deficient love.
In addition, Morrison indicates society's derision for Nel's conditional state by subsequently removing the object of Nel's desire. Through Jude's infidelity, Morrison forces Nel to become self-reliant.
This is clear when the narrator states, 'Because Jude's leaving was so complete the full responsibility of the household was Nel's' Sula Without Jude to depend on and provide for her, Nel is obligated to rise to the occasion by becoming the breadwinner and coping with the strain of being a single parent. David Middleton in the edition of Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism states, 'When she discovers her husband Jude's infidelity with her best friend, Sula, Nel for the first time is forced to define a self apart from Sula [and Jude]' By removing Jude, Morrison comments on how society punishes Nel for her dependent nature and offers her a chance to develop into a person complete within herself and not reliant on others.
Nel, however, squanders the opportunity for self-actualization and turns to her community to fulfill her desire to be needed. As Terry Otten in The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison states, 'unwilling to run the risk of a fall, Nel knows 'how to behave as the wronged wife', wrapping the drapery of her innocence about her life the other women'' Consequently, Morrison continually denies Nel even the prospect of love: 'It didn't take long, after Jude left, for her to see what the future would be.
She had looked at her children and knew in her heart that that would be all. That they would be all the she would ever know of love' Sula Until Nel overcomes her pathology of deficient love and her dependent nature, Nel must live a life without love.
In The Bluest Eye , Morrison also weaves the theme of love through the narrative, but this time focuses on a more volatile kind of love experienced by the protagonist's mother, Pauline Breedlove. A childhood accident permanently damages Pauline's foot and makes her an outcast within her family and community. As a result, Pauline 'never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace' Bluest According to Maslow's deficiency love paradigm, Pauline lacks the baser need of inclusion.
Her infirmity prevents her from being granted the familiarity of a nickname and robs her of her fundamental sense of belonging. As a result, Pauline searches for someone who can make her feel complete and included. It is in this state that Pauline meets Cholly and is immediately captivated by his relaxed manner and careful acknowledgement of her injury: 'Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, [Cholly makes] it seem like something special and endearing' Bluest Until Cholly comes into her life, Pauline feels different from everyone else and separated by her injury.
With Cholly by her side and under the guise of her deficiency love, Pauline feels whole for the first time in her life. After moving to Lorain, Ohio, Pauline and Cholly's relationship takes a drastic turn. Pauline quickly becomes disenchanted with their life in the city as she struggles to fit in within the new community.
Although the community regards her as an evil person, her return to the Bottom is actually far more than it appears to be. It is actually a blessing in disguise. What seems like a chaotic disruption in the social fabric is actually an ordering and focusing influence. Sula's relationship with Ajax opens her to new feelings; she discovers the possessive nature of love. Earlier, she condemned Nel for conforming to the web of conventional social expectations, yet she herself is seduced by the promise of security that her love with Ajax seems to offer.
Her ultimately negative experience with Ajax seems to confirm her suspicion that she will never have the close security in a relationship with a man that she had in her friendship with Nel. In this comparison rests an implicit contrast between the love that exists between women and that which women can find with men. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook.
Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Toni Morrison and Sula Background. Summary Summary The community mulls over the plague of robins,which preceded Sula's return, and the story about her reaction to Hannah's fatal accident.
Commentary As the community's animosity and hatred toward Sula grow, they impose meaning on random occurrences. Their horror at Sula's consensual affairs with white men reflects the extent to which racial segregation defines their lives and psychology Ironically, the community's labeling of Sula as evil actually improves their own lives.
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