You know, I like this. It was written to please a teacher, so it is by nature bullshit, but I like Toni Morrison and I like the points I made in this essay. Plus I think the writing in it is good. I reached a really liberating (some say, "fatalistic") attitude during the year I went back to college. I decided I was going to write the way I wanted to, not the way they wanted me to. You can really see the difference in confidence, of style and thought-structure, between this piece and the earlier ones, like "Yeast" and "Zojirushi."
The virgin-whore dichotomy is one of the most common devices for portraying women in the history of literature, going back even to the Christian Bible, with its two principle Marys, and probably beyond that. As a result, Western culture and literature are saturated with the erroneous belief that women may be classified, strictly and rigidly, into two categories: either virginal, or promiscuous.
Of course, no real woman fits neatly into either of these categories. Even whores were innocent once upon a time, and young girls who have no real knowledge of sex may feel its heat, and the yearning, though they don’t understand it until years later.
In Sula, Toni Morrison uses her two main female characters, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, to exemplify both this stereotype and its inaccuracy. Morrison spends the first half of the book emphasizing how different the two women are from each other, then turns around and spends the second half demonstrating how they are really just alike.
The first example of the differences in the two women comes in Morrison’s careful descriptions of both their backgrounds. She begins with Nel’s mother, Helene Wright. Helene is the daughter of a whore, but raised by her grandmother to become a righteous, upstanding member of the Medallion community. Ironically, Helene is at first opposed to Nel’s friendship with Sula because of Sula’s family lines. Nobody in Medallion, of course, knows that Nel’s grandmother was a prostitute, but the reader is allowed to infer that “blood will out,” as the saying goes.
But Morrison ignores this for the time being. Instead, she describes Helene’s impressive bearing, her impeccable behavior, the “oppressive neatness” of her house. (Morrison 29) She has her husband, her daughter, and the church in her firm control. Her house is in the ‘nice’ part of town, it is perfectly clean and straight. Only Helene and her daughter live there; the house is barely polluted by a man’s presence, since Helene’s husband is so seldom home from work. In fact, the Wright house could be compared to a nunnery: inhabited only by devout women, dominated by the Mother Superior, and only one lonely Novice scurrying to carry out the Abbesses wishes.
In stark contrast, the Peace household is chaotic. In some ways, Eva Peace’s house can be compared to the Biblical Garden of Eden. While all three women were living there, it was a kind of Paradise. People drifted in and out and were provided for, although no one ever seemed to do any work. Their livelihood was support by mysterious checks that came from some unknown source, as mysterious as God’s providing for Adam and Eve. Like the Wright household, there are no father figures living with the Peace women. Unlike Helene, Eva and Hannah have a whole parade of men passing through their home, but the men who actually live there are sexless and stripped even of identity by Eva’s renaming of them.
Of course, the settings of the Peace and Wright households are only stage dressing. Far more important are the dynamics of the women living there.
Drawing on the psychological theories of Jean Shinoda Bolen, in her book, Goddesses in Every Woman, Helene and Nel match the Demeter/Persephone archetypes so brilliantly it’s blinding. Helene is the enabling, controlling goddess, and Nel is completely dependent upon her. (Bolen 190) However, another aspect of the Demeter/Persephone relationship which Bolen did not mention is the occasional mention of myths in which Kore (Persephone’s “maiden” name) was actually birthed and raised by her mother to take Demeter’s place as the Goddess of Grain. This would preclude any need for Kore–or Nel–to develop a personality of her own. This aspect of the Demeter/Kore relationship should be considered, since once Nel is married, her mother virtually disappears from the novel.
The Peace women don’t fit so neatly into Bolen’s psychological theories. Hannah could probably be compared to Aphrodite because of her uninhibited sexual relationships, attractiveness to men, and resentment by women (238, 251). But Hannah lacks the “Alchemical” power that Bolen attributes to Aphrodite, the ability to turn “the ‘baser’ material of everyday life […] into ‘gold’” (232). Hannah never transforms her relationship with her mother or daughter, a lack which is one of the key elements shaping Sula’s life and eventual destruction.
If the Peace women resemble anything in Greek mythology, they suggest the pre-Christian “Goddess Trinity” of the maiden, the matron and the crone. Bulfinch’s Mythology calls this trinity the Fates, whose job was “to spin the thread of human destiny, and they were armed with shears, with which they cut it off when they pleased” (9). Usually, the Furies, who went by the names of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, were portrayed as three women in various stages of life. These three stages are also exemplified by the Peace women in the first half of the novel: Sula is the innocent, the youthful girl who holds only the promise of sensuality; Hannah is the mother or matron, who is at once nurturing and sexually knowledgeable; Eva is the crone, the older woman, full of wisdom. Even more telling, Eva, in her role as Atropos, cuts the thread of Plum’s life short.
Each in their dysfunctional households, with their dynamic but not very nurturing examples of femininity, Nel and Sula learn very different lessons about men that will shape their characters as adults, and provide the groundwork for the stereotypes Morrison means them to represent. Nel learns that men are for financial support, but are otherwise unnecessary and to be kept at arm’s length. Sula, on the other hand, learns that men are for personal gratification and not good for much else. These lessons, and the behavior of the girls as a result of these attitudes, would have been trite if Morrison had simply let them lay. But she won’t.
As is fitting the womens’ status as symbols, Morrison almost never lets the reader see Nel or Sula as people. There are very few action scenes in this book; the only way the reader learns anything about the girls is by the narrator’s description. Nel “has no aggression” (Morrison 83). She is “obedient and polite,” her imagination “driven underground” (18). Sula, on the other hand, is “incapable of making any but the most trivial decisions. When it came to matters of grave importance, she behaved emotionally and irresponsibly and left it to others to straighten it out” (101).
Of course, the most obvious difference between Sula and Nel would be their symbolizing the two traditional aspects of feminine character: either a virgin or a whore.
The virgin category, as portrayed in the history of Judeo-Christian ethics and Western literature, can include young girls, old maids, nuns, and even married women, provided they are faithful and not overly amorous toward their husbands. Generally, however, the married woman has to have children in order to qualify, a throwback to the Virgin Mary. Married virgin figures are not allowed to be sexual; it clashes with the nurturing image. In the book, Morrison mostly glosses over Nel’s courtship and engagement except in terms of what it means to Jude; already, Nel’s identity is being redefined in terms of her husband-to-be. Like Persephone, Nel goes right from being a daughter to being a wife.
Likewise, the whore persona need not literally be a woman who accepts payment for sexual activity; she can be any woman who has sex with anyone except her husband, and even if she behaves in an overtly sexual manner toward him she can be suspect.
The idealization of virginity as a desirable trait in women is partially based on Virgin Mary worship, but it is rooted more deeply in the old male insecurity, the fear that his offspring might not be his own and another man’s might inherit. Eventually the women came to value virginity as well, since in many epochs their bodies were the only wealth they possessed, and their willingness to barter their bodies for either money or marriage was the only means they had of securing their financial futures.
Given these factors, it is not surprising that men, who for the most part and until quite recently have been the leaders of society, family and culture, would be threatened by a promiscuous woman. It is also reasonable that women, dependent upon men for their livelihoods, would be threatened by such a woman.
So why, after Sula has alienated Nel and the reader as well by seducing Nel’s husband, does Morrison then begin casting Sula in a sympathetic light? The answer is simple: to demonstrate that Nel and Sula are not so different after all; neither is a stereotype, they are both simply women.
Morrison states, more than once, how the two girls complete each other. Nel feels funny, alive, braver when Sula is around; Sula feels responsible, settled, loved. When they are grown-up and Sula has just returned to Medallion, Nel describes how it feels like she’s regained the sight of an eye that had a cataract (Morrison 95). Even after Jude abandoned Nel and she blamed Sula for it, she still instinctively yearned for Sula to talk to, knowing only Sula would understand how she felt, or at least help her to forget it. Even near the end of the book, when Sula lay dying, her last thought was that she couldn’t wait to tell Nel how it didn’t hurt (149).
It is somewhat disappointing that Sula dies at the end of the novel, and possibly, although not explicitly, commits suicide, as all fallen women decently do in fiction. But near the end of her life, Sula asks Nel, “How do you know I wasn’t the good one?”
This is an important question, possibly the crux of the whole book. In effect, Sula is asking, “What makes you better than me?” Although Nel has the responsibility, the respectability, Sula is autonomous, honest, and educated. As a child, Nel looked in the glass and assured herself that she would be “Me,” not what her mother wanted her to be. Sula echoes this sentiment after she is grown, telling Eva she “wants to make herself” (92). Both women watch someone die without interfering, both feel the pain of losing a lover.
Naomi Wolf, in her excellent book Fire With Fire, describes how male culture and traditional feminism “Both declared that women could not be at once good and evil, selfish and selfless, mother and lover, nurturer and aggressor” (229). In a chapter called “Integrating the Bad Girl,” Wolf describes how contemporary culture is beginning to use images of empowered women, rather than victims, who can be sexual and nurturing at the same time. However, in the seventies, when Sula was written, these two ideals were still far apart, and in the thirties, when Sula is set, they weren’t even conceived of.
Morrison does, however, allow her community to be aware of the dual nature of fate. It is quite subtle, and in fact Morrison may not herself have intended it in regard the to dual nature of women. The townspeople of Medallion believe
“…aberrations were a much a part of nature as grace. It was not for them to expel or annihilate it. They would no more run Sula out of town than they would kill the robins that brought her back, for in their secret awareness of Him, He was not the God of three faces they sang about. They knew quite well that He had four, and that the fourth explained Sula. [...] The presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over.”
In other words, Morrison seems to be saying, if nature and God can be evil as well as good, then why not women? Sula is clearly a scapegoat for the community, but the irony in this is that although the community fears and despises her, they become happier because of their unity against her. Sula herself understands this; in her Beatitude-like speech to Nel, she observes in the end, when everyone has resolved their differences and there are no longer any artificial delineations between people, she will be beloved. Being Sula, of course, she couches her speech in coarse sexual terms, but the meaning in the same, and Nel is shamed by the truth in it.
If, by casting her characters as archetypes and then underlining the similarities between them, Morrison was trying to portray the resolution of the virgin/whore complex, then she was a writer ahead of her time. And if Sula, with her vital question, “Who said you were the good one?” understands that being female is far more profound and meaningful than the labels society imposes on her, then she was a woman ahead of her time. Which makes her, if not a savior, at least a martyr.
Bolen, Jean Shinoda. Goddesses in Everywoman. 1984. New York: Harper & Row. 1985.
Bulfinch, Thomas. The Age of Fable. 1968. Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. 1973. New York: Plume-Penguin Putnam, 1982.
New American Standard Bible. La Habra, CA: Collins World. 1973.
Wolf, Naomi. Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and How it Will Change the 21st Century. New York: Random House. 1993.