Sula

While Nel, Helene, and, to some degree, Eva and Hannah, allow race and gender to predetermine the outcome of their lives, Sula refuses. Having neither a mother nor a model, she sets about making herself. What she comes up with is as frightening and defiant to the residents of the Bottom as is her act of slicing off the tip of her finger.

Due to racism, Black women have not, by default, receive the courtesies that white women have enjoyed. With an identity borne out of the notion of having been property and the producers of a slave labor force, Black women fought for centuries to claim rights of motherhood and the right to love men of their choosing. On the other hand, sexism often forced upon Black women the mandates of becoming wives and mothers before they could be given time to make a choice.

Nel has done everything that her mother and the residents of the Bottom would have expected of her: she marries, has children, and, after menopause, settles into the habits of an old maid, denying her sexuality and pretending that it doesn’t matter. Having relented to others’ demands for most of her life, she ends up with little to show for her obedience. She spends her last years lonely and looking to others for purpose. Sula, on the other hand, lives contrary to everyone’s expectations and dies with no discernible regrets. She ignores her grandmother’s demand that she marry and have children—an ironic request coming from Eva, whose own husband had left her and her three children in poverty to pursue to a new life elsewhere. Eva’s demand, veiled in ideas about respectability, partly come from wanting Sula to suffer as she and so many other Black women had. Sula’s disinterest in men is something that Eva cannot understand, just as neither Nel nor her mother can understand the ease with which some women can have sex without love or the idea of it.

Sula’s behavior is a rejection of both the strictures of race and gender. Determined to move more freely in the world, as Ajax and her grandfather, BoyBoy, do, she must reject conventional domesticity and its requirement that women remain fixed in place. Similarly determined not to be undermined by white supremacy, as her uncle, Plum, had been, she also rejects the values of this system, which may explain why she doesn’t bother to carry money and eschews work instead of occupying the low-wage, servile positions usually available to Black people in the early twentieth century.  

Instead of finding something to learn in Sula’s indifference to the white world’s gaze, and the unfair rigidity of gender roles, those in the Bottom use her as something “to rub up against” (153). Betty, for example, Teapot’s neglectful, alcoholic mother, suddenly embraces sobriety and industry when she comes to believe that Sula pushed her child down some steps. After Sula dies, she no longer has a contrast, or a figure toward whom she can declare some superiority. So, Betty resumes her abuse and neglect of her son.

The politics of respectability are, thus, about the need to feel better—more moral, cleaner, or holier—than someone else. With Sula no longer around, the people at the Bottom, particularly Nel, have to reckon with themselves and the underwhelming lives they have accepted.