Sula
Quiz
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1. Why does Shadrack start National Suicide Day?
(X-tra credit – When is the first National Suicide Day
celebrated?)
2. What occasion prompts Nel’s one and only trip
outside of Medallion?
3. Who is it who only “wanted a place to die
privately but not quite alone?
4. What’s the difference in the way Hannah and Eva
“handle” men?
5. So, what’s Plum’s problem? Why does Eva burn
him up?
6. How does Sula defend Nel from the Irish boys?
7. what does Shadrack say to Sula? What do you
think it means?
Shocking Events
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This is a novel full of shocking events.
List some . . .
How do you respond to them?
What do you think Morrison is trying to
do by piling up all of these horrible
stories?
Sula and The Bluest Eye
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Morrison has observed that Sula is the
story of Claudia and Frieda grown up.
What connections do you see between
the two stories?
Opposites/Pairs
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What are some of the oppositions / pairs /
dualities that Morrison plays with in this first
part of the text?
Intro.
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Bottom/Top
Nightshade/Blackberry
“Nigger Joke” – who is fooled? (p. 2, Binary . .)
What about people/situations that aren’t just
opposites, but are oppositional to what we
normally think or perceive about something?
Motherhood
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Like Motherhood, for example
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Eva and Plum
Helene and Rochelle
Hannah and Sula
Nel and Helene
The Deweys . . .
Bodies – Dismemberment,
Dependencies, Sexuality
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Eva’s dismemberment = power, not
helplessness. It gives her control of her life,
offers her a chance for self-definition,
independence, control of her own narrative
Shadrack and Plum, in contrast, lose power
over their bodies through the trauma’s they
encounter in the war
Hannah and Helene’s sexuality – How does
Morrison represent each of them in terms of
sexuality? How does the opposition work on
you?
Whites/Blacks
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What does the white bargeman think of blacks? (p.
63)
What do blacks think of black women who sleep with
whites? (p. 112)
Why do black women (Nel, in particular,) want to look
like white women?
What kind of work do the black men what to do?
How does Tar Baby fit in here?
How is Morrison messing with binary thinking in
these comparisons?
Morality/Judgement
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Eva – How do you respond to her?
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To her abandonment of her children
To her loss of a limb
To her torching of Plum
Do you admire her stoutheartedness, her ability to survive?
Or, are you horrified?
The Deweys
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Do you praise her for taking them in
Or, do you condemn her for her absent-minded treatment of
them?
Is Eva following the folk wisdom that encourages a mother
to treat all of her children the same? Or are the deweys
“bludgeoned into insipid sameness by this folk love and
indifference?
Wednesday Quiz
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1. Why does Eva burn Plum?
2. What’s the second strange thing?
3. Why does Eva think Sula just
watched Hannah burn?
4. Why does Jude ask Nel to marry
him?
5. Why don’t the Dewey’s grow?
Quiz cont.
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6. Outsiders think that tenants of the bottom
are slack and slovenly, but the real reason
people there just accept bad karma or the
presence of evil is that they recognize . . .
What?
7. What happens to Eva?
8. Jude doesn’t “read” Sula’s birthmark as a
stemmed rose, but rather as a
_____________.
A summary of
“’Aesthetic’ and ‘Rapport’ in Toni
Morrison’s Sula” by Barbara Johnson
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She begins with a catalogue of figures Freud
associates with the uncanny:
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Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the
wrists, . . . feet which dance by themselves . . . – all these
have something particularly uncanny about them, especially
when, as in the last instance, they prove able to move of
themselves in addition. As we already know, this kind of
uncanniness springs from its association with the castration
complex. To many people, the idea of being buried alive
while appearing to be dead is the most uncanny thing of all.
And yet psychoanalysis has taught us that this terrifying
phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which
had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was
qualified by a certain lasciviousness – the phantasy, I mean,
of intra-uterine existence. (244 of “The Uncanny)
Echoes of the uncanny in Sula
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The one-legged grandmother
Plum, who Eva fears will crawl back into
her womb
Sula’s cutting off of her own finger
Shad’s experience on the battlefield
“Toni Morrison both displaces and
deconstsructs Freud’s notion of the
castration complex.”
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Loss of bodily intactness is integral to survival
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At least for Eva . . .
The novel is written under the sign of the newly missing –
Chicken Little
Castration is recognized as a mechanism of social
control
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P. 103-104 of Sula
How does the castration complex work differently for black
and white men? For white men it’s an unconscious fantasy,
for black men, a political reality.
Who suffers from penis envy, according to this passage? -Not just women, but white men, for the black penis
How does Sula challenge the idea of the phallus as law,
patriarchy? Home, in the novel, is not where the phallus is.
“The dissociation of affect and event is one of
Morrison’s most striking literary techniques in
this novel. . .”
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Best example is Nel’s reaction to her
discovery of Sula and Jude on the floor
– it takes her seventy pages to howl
with pain. But also,
Shadrack’s permanent astonishment
and his “use” of suicide day to contain
his shock and terror.
Then, p. 105
Aesthetic and Rapport?????
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Aesthetic = domain of contemplation of
forms, implying detachment and
distance
Rapport = dynamics of connectedness
The two words, according to Johnson,
“name an opposition, or at least a set of
issues, that are central in Sula.”
For example . . .
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Why do Sula and Nel just watch the
space close up after Chicken Little drops
into the water? P. 168, 170
Hannah’s death scene and Sula’s (dis)
interested watching p. 78
“What Eva is accusing both Nel and Sula
of here is a privileging of aesthetics over
rapport.”
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They watch; they are interested . . .
Interest is the name of a lack of involvement.
Kant defines the domain of the aesthetic as
the domain of disinterestedness.
What’s the difference between interest and
disinterest? It’s almost impossible to tell.
Freud discusses the aesthetic principle in his
essay on the uncanny . . .
The kind of interest Nel and Sula exhibit, is
uncanny, terrifying, terrorizing.
Johnson’s questions:
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The novel raises the question about our own gap
between affect and event. How do we respond to
the horrible images, painful truths and excruciating
losses the novel describes?
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Do we just sit back and watch?
What is the nature of our pleasure in contemplating these
traumas?
What would be a response that would embody rapport
rather than aesthetics?
Is this what Morrison is challenging us to consider?
Or, is she merely trying to make us less innocent in our
contemplation, or analysis, our “interest”?
Her answer:
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By choosing to aestheticize
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A father’s rape of his daughter
A mother’s murder of her son
A daughter watching her mother burn
Morrison makes the aesthetic inextricable
from trauma, taboo, and violation. . . She
represents – in all its moral ambiguity – the
problematic fascination of transforming horror
into pleasure, violence into beauty, mourning
into nostalgia.
How does are we, culturally,
trained to be watchers?
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Anybody remember the movie “Being
There” with Peter Sellers?
How often do we act as spectators?
Sports? TV? (which makes us spectators
of war, starvation, torture, . . .)
Internet? Class?
What do you think of interpreting the
novel in this way?
Friday – Themes
See handout in Word.
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Death, Time and History, Sexuality,
Language and Meaning,
Absence/Presence,