{"id":170407,"date":"2015-11-24T12:24:01","date_gmt":"2015-11-24T17:24:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kanglaonline.com\/?p=80750"},"modified":"2015-11-24T12:24:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T17:24:01","slug":"anti-conventionalism-in-sula","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/2015\/11\/24\/anti-conventionalism-in-sula\/","title":{"rendered":"Anti-Conventionalism in \u201cSula\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Dr Omila Thounaojam<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Morrison experiments with anti-conventionalism and most profoundly comes up with the creation of Sula, a woman whose personality in the novel totally diverts away from the conventional expectations of \u201chow\u201d an ideal woman should be like. She is a woman who will not mother, nurture, or take her place in the usual heterosexual social order that characterizes women like Helene Wright and her daughter Nel. Sula could be considered as an imaginative creation of Morrison\u2019s experiment with feminist ideologies wherein, she tries to imagine a self-creation, rebelling from, and at odds with, all the preceding prescription. Morrison has asserted that she wanted to take a woman who is unlike Geraldine in The Bluest Eye or Helene Wright (Nel\u2019s mother) and Nel in Sula who just folds away many parts of herself by just preparing oneself for marriage and home-making (Asinof \u201cFresh Ink\u201d). Hortense Spillers notes that in Sula, the novelist imagines a woman, who, intends on opening up all parts of herself rather than folding them away, flouts convention and received morality (214).<\/p>\n

Morrison cuts Sula free from the conventional responsibilities and definers of an ideal womanhood and provides her a kind of detachment and distance by cutting her loose from feeling and as well to make her in many ways surprisingly evil. In a series of events that unfold in the course of the narrative, one finds Sula coldheartedly disposing her grandmother Eva by placing her in a degraded old home meant for old people. A string of signs is linked to Sula based on the community\u2019s mythology, thereby almost equating her with the devil figure. Morrison has noted in many of her interviews that she is fascinated with the way black communities tolerate evil, learning to live and survive in its presence rather than responding aggressively and anxiously to banish or exorcise it.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, the community in Sula, more than simply tolerating it, helps to add up in Sula the evil that it perceives and even needs. Sula\u2019s presence is a need for the community for it challenges its members to explore their best selves and this facet is markedly evident in the novel when, after her death, the sense of relief, hope and order that the people of her community felt is short-lived: A falling away, a dislocation was taking place. \u2026 Without her mockery, affection for others sank into flaccid disrepair. Daughters who had complained bitterly about the responsibilities of taking care of their aged mother-in-law had altered when Sula locked Eva away, and they began cleaning those old women\u2019s spittoons without a murmur. Now that Sula was dead and done with, they returned to a steeping resentment of the burdens of old people (153-54). Throughout the novel, there is a reiteration of \u201chow\u201d it is only Sula who can look upon pain and trauma with disinterest. Sula\u2019s strength to live life on her own terms is best
\nexpressed: \u201c\u2018Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else\u2019s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain\u2019t that something?\u00a0 A secondhand lonely\u2019\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

Many commentators have argued that Sula\u2019s conscious disinterestedness provokes unease and this illustrated when she admits that she is thrilled and \u201cinterested\u201d (78) to see her mother burn and also when Ajax has left her, she recognizes that she would have liked to tear \u201cthe flesh from his face\u201d (136) to get to the secret of his blackness and beauty.\u00a0 Barbara Johnson\u2019s brilliant reading of the novel draws our attention to Sula\u2019s puzzling disinterestedness particularly focusing on the moment when Nel discovers Jude and Sula together. All Nel does is looking at them in disbelief at the adulterous scene before her and waits for one of them to say something by way of explanation: \u201cI waited for Sula to look up at me any minute and say one of those lovely college words like aesthetic or rapport, which I never understood but which I loved because they sounded so comfortable and firm\u201d (105). Johnson argues that the novel functions as a test for the reader of readerly aesthetics or rapport, interest or disinterest in the succession of horrible images, painful truths and losses, that it articulates and interrogates the readerly response to the horrible images we see and hence, asks \u201cWhat is the nature of our pleasure in contemplating trauma?\u201d (171).<\/p>\n

Sula\u2019s determination to live one\u2019s life in one\u2019s own term certainly made her disregard the usual constraints that socialization involves, but such a disregard for convention made her pay a heavy price, especially in the last chapters, the novel is explicit about the pain and suffering that Sula, disinterested as she seems, has not managed to leave behind. The aspect of Sula that we see by the second part of the novel seems \u201cto have become a repository of pain \u2013 personal, local and cosmic\u201d (Matus). Such an assumption about her could be drawn on the basis of the fact that Sula perceives even the act of lovemaking surprisingly, as a way to find \u201cmisery and the ability to feel deep sorrow\u201d (122) and seeking out the \u201ceye of sorrow in the midst of all that hurricane rage of joy,\u201d she locates at the center of \u201cthat silence \u2026 the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning\u201d (123). It is then that she wept: For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the death of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drown by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows\u2019 the tidy bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice\u201d (123). Sula\u2019s sense of cosmic grief as evident from the references above draws our attention towards an incident or rather an accident, a case of specific trauma of her past that involves the death of Chicken Little. One could ascertain that Chicken Little\u2019s death is the central symbol of loss in the novel. As the narrator puts forth, with a \u201cbubbly laughter,\u201d he was there for one moment as Sula swings him, holding him by the wrists, but he is gone the next moment \u201cThe water darkened and closed quickly over the place where Chicken Little sank. The pressure of his hard and tight little fingers was still in Sula\u2019s palms as she stood looking at the closed place in the water. They expected him to come back up, laughing\u201d (61). The effect of Chicken Little\u2019s death is as if \u201csomething\u201d is \u201cnewly missing\u201d and at the funeral, the women mourners connect to the event by identifying with the child as \u201cinnocent victim\u201d and are also reminded of the \u201coldest and most devastating pain there is: not the pain of childhood but the remembrance of it\u201d (65). The funeral foregrounds the notion that the boy\u2019s death is a symbol of Sula\u2019s own childhood hurt.<\/p>\n

Chicken Little\u2019s accidental death is one of the key moments in the novel and is an incident that introduces us with the notion of the pain of losing innocence and also through Shadrack\u2019s promise to Sula, the permanence of childhood secured and captured by death. Realizing that Shadrack has seen the accident, Sula runs to his shack and all she gets to hear from him is the one consolidating word he utters, \u201calways.\u201d The notion of permanent peace in Chicken Little\u2019s long sleep of water returns to Sula shortly before her own death. She dies with the dominating feeling of \u201cbeing completely alone \u2013 where she had always wanted to be \u2013 free of the possibility of distraction\u201d (149).<\/p>\n

When Shadrack remembers of the exchange that he had with Sula, he promises her not ostensibly the sleep of water, but a stay against change and the \u201cfalling away of skin, the drip and slide of blood. He had said \u2018always\u2019 to convince her, assure her, of permanency\u201d (157). When he sees Sula\u2019s corpse, he realizes that yet another whose face, he knew has died and finally the hope preserved in his sense of \u201calways\u201d disappears. A heavy sense of despair propels him so much so to the point that he starts doubting whether his suicide day has helped to keep order in the universe. One could undoubtedly infer that Sula\u2019s death sets off the chain of circumstances that leads to the deaths of many of the Bottom\u2019s community members.<\/p>\n

In her final conversations with Nel, she says \u201cBeing good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don\u2019t get nothing for it\u201d (144-45). What becomes clear about Sula, having lived life on her own terms, is that she has not avoided pain, but simply objected to order or school her feelings to go with conventional practices. She finds the cult of womanhood that conditions, proscribes and prescribes emotions to be not worth following. In a most shocking declaration, Sula asserts that there will be a time when the world will actually love her: \u2018Oh, they\u2019ll love me all right. It will take time, but they\u2019ll love me. \u2026 After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the younger girls have slept with their drunken old uncles; after all the black men fuck all the white ones; when all the white woman kiss all the black ones \u2026 then there\u2019ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like\u2019 (145).<\/p>\n

Sula\u2019s thought in the stated speech is distinctively about taboo breaking, iconoclasm and moreover, the shattering of social and sexual conventions. We find that Sula is comprised of voices echoing with delayed reactions, dissociations, repressed memories and above all, the \u201cpsychic discontinuity\u201d of event and affect (Johnson). There are a series of moments in the text that contain incidents witnessing that discontinuity \u2013 Shadrack\u2019s reaction to the experience of the battlefield, Nel\u2019s response to discovering her husband Jude committing adultery with her best friend Sula, and Sula\u2019s response to the drowning of Chicken Little \u2013 to mention a few examples. It could also be highlighted here that indeed many characters in the novel experience the disjunction between the immediate event and the registration of its psychic effects. Eva is the best example to point out, for the narrator describes how Eva feels when Boyboy leaves her and she doesn\u2019t know what she feels and then suddenly it strikes her that she hates him: \u201cIt hit her like a sledge hammer and it was then that she knew what to feel. A liquid trail of hate flooded her chest\u201d (36). There is a fascinating structural pattern that is formed by the accumulation of such delayed effects and Eva\u2019s just one to be pointed out here. Barbara Johnson remarks: \u201cWhile the chapter headings promise chronological linearity, the text demonstrates that lived time is anything but continuous, that things don\u2019t happen when they happen, that neither intentionality nor reaction can naturalize trauma into consecutive narrative\u201d (169). Robert Grant offers further input to such an observation by stating that the wrought, \u201cquasipalindromic\u201d structure of the novel is testimony to its concern with delayed effects: \u201cSula divides precisely into two equal parts and characters introduced and developed in \u2018I\u2019 are brought back in \u2018II\u2019 in inverse sequence. The novel begins in memory and concludes with Nel\u2019s crucial remembrance of Sula\u201d (95).<\/p>\n\n

Read more \/ Original news source: http:\/\/kanglaonline.com\/2015\/11\/anti-conventionalism-in-sula\/<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Omila Thounaojam   Morrison experiments with anti-conventionalism and most profoundly comes up with the creation of Sula, a woman whose personality in the novel totally diverts away from the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[2666,330],"class_list":["post-170407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kanglaonline","category-news","tag-articles-opinions","tag-kanglaonline-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170407"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170408,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170407\/revisions\/170408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.manipur.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}