Sula by Toni Morrison Analyze

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Sula by Toni Morris
Introduction
Events take place at specific places. Such places are known as settings. The narration of each event in its setting makes it different and brings more meaning to the story. If the same story is told in another context, it might have a varying effect on the audience. Setting in most cases has a significant impact on the storyline, the characters, the mood of the story, and time. The Setting enables the author or the creator of work to introduce characters and portrays their characters to suit their assigned roles. It also helps in revealing hidden emotions in the story and also compares them to the immediate societies. In Morrison’s Sula, the setting has been used as the primary reason behind all events that occur in the story.
The story begins with the explanation of how a neighborhood that was inhabited predominantly by black people in Ohio is destroyed. The author refers to the area as “Bottom.” The story is a narration and gives uses the past tense to show that Bottom’s destruction has already happened. The narrator tries to make the reader see how many local enterprises in the area were destroyed to pave the way for the Medallion City Golf Course construction. The destruction transforms the Neighborhoods near Bottom from average settlements to suburbs. According to the author, a slave who had achieved a lot of feats after an agreement with his master was given the land and subsequently, his freedom.

However, it got its name Bottom since the master did not want to lose good land since it was intemperate and infertile.
There are clear discrimination and segregation between whites and black in this part of Ohio in all dimensions. It brings about discrimination due to race, a vice which existed earlier and still exists in some places in America (Bouson 154). The whites remain in control of the black people in the story because the latter’s land was destroyed for the construction of a luxurious golf course that no black person was permitted to access or become a member. The turn of events also shows the inferiority of the white and the blacks especially in the instance where the master lied to the slave that the land is a Bottom Land because it is Godly, while it was less fertile and not arable (Lynch 4). Such form of deceit can be interpreted to show how the white exercised their control of black people even mentally.
Morrison’s description of Sula and Nel brings about two different world settings. The two girls grow up in totally different environments even though they live in the same area. For instance, in Sula’s house, many people come to visit, which prompts her parents to give her some form of freedom to make decisions some things. She lives with her mother, Hannah, grandmother, Eva, two informally adopted boys and several boarders. The author describes both Eva and Hannah as loose and eccentric in the eyes of the townspeople. Nel, on the other hand, grows up in a home where all her moves are monitored and is kept busy to keep track of all the things she does. The interesting bit of this is that both ladies get attracted to each other’s homes, and in the process they become friends. Nel is portrayed as one who does not understand what her mother wants for her in life until she finally knows her better after meeting her grandmother.
Morrison brings in the concept of love and death and how Sula is a victim of the same. They are portrayed through the setting of conflicts between the town and Sula, her relationship with Nel, and also her interaction with other people. The community of Bottom is a character of its own; it gives a setting of a society that arbitrates the social and moral behaviors of its members. Sula’s relationship with the community is one of love and hate. She believed that the community hates and despises her mainly because of how easily she sleeps with men in the town (Morrison 122). She, however, feels that the community will love her when the right time comes. Morrison tries to portray the town’s character as one that marks the social and mental boundaries between a black person who tries to discover herself and the black community that has been discriminated by the rest of the country.
The relationship between Nel and Sula is one of love, hate, and death. They love each other as shown in the story. Both ladies are committed to love and life due to their creativeness and imaginative qualities that enable them to embrace all things. The story portrays them as adventurous and determined to do anything that interests them as girls of their age would do. As the story proceeds, the author narrates how Sula returns to Bottom after ten years whereby she commits one of the greatest acts that destroys her relationship with Nel (Morrison 85). She sleeps with Nel’s husband, Jude, leading to its destruction. Sula is portrayed as a sexually liberated person who engages in sexual activities for her pleasure whereas Nel is not. Nel is described as a person whose sexuality is for her husband’s pleasure due to her upbringing that is based on obedience and observation of ethical and moral virtues. It conforms to how girls brought up like her view sex in the modern days. The setting tries to reach out to the present days by inferring what happened in those earlier days. It is clearly expressed when Nel finds Jude and Sula getting intimate. The author shows her as a person who becomes dead in the sexuality life that she has endured all along in her marriage. She claims that Sula had taken away their life with Jude and that the latter had broken her heart.
Sula’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood was significantly influenced by her mother and grandmother. Both women were independent, self-reliant and had a different perception of how they viewed motherhood. Her grandmother even with her old age and one leg was able to attract many men. Hannah, on the other hand, was much active sexually. Morrison writes that this way of living made Sula achieve the feats she made in her sexual life and endeavors. She is described as having an unbroken line of women who are desirable sexual subjects for men. By growing in an environment of morally loose women, she inherits the characters.
It is hard to judge Sula as good or evil (Rodríguez 15). She loves herself but also self-destructs easily. The setting of a promiscuous environment that she grows and lives spells evil in the eyes of people like Nel but does not necessarily cast any self-criticism by her family. After high school, Sula lives a life that involves many sexual affairs even with white men while Nel chooses to get married and become a wife and mother. Sula comes back to Bottom and finds the same dull setting she left.
The town regards her as an embodiment of evil due to her disregard of social morals. Their hatred for her intensifies due to her affair with Nel’s husband, an affair that is termed as an evil act by the community around her. Sula eventually dies due to an unknown illness, but before she does, she comes back to her senses and opens up to Nel explaining why she slept with her husband even though Nel does not get convinced. The part of the story is equated to what happens in the real world when people with desperate pasts are on their death beds. They try to recollect their pasts and amend them hoping to have a peaceful death.
Conclusion
Toni Morrison in her book Sula narrated a story that is based on several characters and themes which make use of several settings for his story. The story has been set in a community and individuals who are connected towards each other by love, hatred, and subsequently death due to their sentiments. The characters provide a good perspective of what Morrison is communicating to the audience. It is set in a black neighborhood whereby the people are discriminated due to their color; the story gives an insight of what transpires in such societies. Although Morrison does not seem to condemn the act of segregation, she brings out the fundamental problems that the black community goes through amongst themselves in matters of love and family.
Works Cited
Bouson, J. Brooks. “Race, Trauma, and Home in the Novels of Toni Morrison (review).” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (2012): 155-158.
Lynch, Matthew. “On the Contrary: The Shared Sensory Experience of Toni Morrison’s Sula.” (2014).
Morrison, Toni. Sula. DC Books, 1973.
Rodríguez, Adriana Jiménez. “Toni Morrison’s Sula: Formation of the Self in Terms of Love-Death Relationships with Others and with Oneself.” Revista de Lenguas Modernas 11.