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Sula is a 1974 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison.
[edit] Plot introduction
The story is about two friends, Nel and Sula, whose relationship examines the confusing mysteries of human emotions. The novel addresses ideas of goodness and value in theory, good and evil, and how the two coexist, taking on each others characteristics/interweaving and changing constantly.
[edit] Characters
- Sula Peace: the main nobody protagonist, who affects the whole town of Medallion with her return
- Eva Peace: Sula's grandmother, who is missing one leg. Though the circumstances are never fully explained, it is assumed that she purposely put it under a train in order to collect insurance money to support her three young children.
- BoyBoy: Sula's grandfather, who leaves Eva for another woman.
- Hannah Peace: Sula's mother; Eva's eldest daughter. Hannah is a promiscuous and care-free woman who was unwantingly "burdened down" by Sula at an early age.
- Eva (Pearl) Peace: Sula's aunt; Eva Sr.'s youngest daughter and middle child
- Plum (Ralph) Peace: Sula's uncle; Eva's son and youngest child. Plum was a WWI veteran and a heroin addict. Eva burns him alive with kerosene because of his mental instability.
- Helene Wright: Nel's strait-laced and clean mother
- Nel Wright: Sula's best friend (can also be considered a main protagonist) who doesn't want to be like her mother because she will never be reduced to jelly and she will not be humiliated by other people as her mother is.
- Shadrack: A paranoid shell-shocked WWI veteran, who returns to Sula and Nel's hometown, Medallion. He invents National Suicide Day
- Jude: Nel's husband, who leaves Nel due to a love affair with Sula.
- Ajax (Albert Jacks): Sula's confidant and lover
- Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie): A quiet, cowardly, and reserved man who rents out one of the rooms in the Peace household.
- The deweys: three boys, each about one year apart from one another in age, who were each nicknamed "Dewey" by Eva. Their real names are never written in the novel, and after the introduction of these characters, the three were referred as one being, thus Morrison's use of a lowercase "d" in "dewey" for the rest of the novel.
- Chicken Little: The little boy that Sula and Nel accidentally drown by throwing into the river.
[edit] Literary significance and criticism
Barbara Smith has argued that Sula is a lesbian novel[1] 'not because Nel and Sula are lesbians - they decidedly are not - but because the novel provides a critique of heterosexual institutions.'[2].
[edit] References
- ^ Barbara Smith, 'Toward a Black Feminist Criticism', Women's Studies International Quarterly 2, no. 2, 1979, page 189
- ^ Marilyn R. Farwell, 'Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Subtexts: Toward a Theory of Lesbian Narrative Space', Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow, Onlywomen Press Ltd, 1992, page 93
[edit] External links
