A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O'Hara and Her Literary Daughters

Chapter 4. Sula: “More sinned against than sinning”

Chapter 4 Sula “More sinned against than sinning” #43 “I have an ongoing interest in outlaw women.They can be wild or they can be ordinary women who learn something fresh. I like very much to see them under duress. I like to see who survives this awful mess, who makes the best decisions, who is left and under what circumstances. If your character knows something at the end of a book she didn’t know at the beginning, she is in a better position. Everybody wants a happy ending, but the real happy ending is when somebody really figures something out.” Toni Morrison, in Houston, “A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (2) “Womanist . . . Wanting to know more and in greater depth than is considered ‘good’ for one. . . . Responsible. In charge. . . . A woman who loves other women . . . Appreciates and prefers women’s culture . . . and women’s strength. . . . Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people . . .Traditionally capable . . . Loves . . . Regardless.” Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (xi–xii) Almost fifty years after Glasgow’s Barren Ground was published, Toni Morrison set her novel Sula in about the same period of time that Glasgow left “More sinned against than sinning” 91 Dorinda. Sula certainly takes place in a different region of the country, Ohio, and depicts a different culture, a community descended from slaves, but still Morrison’s novel begins with the community’s southern heritage: the “nigger joke” that explains how this community came to be called the Bottom after a man tricked his former slave into working in exchange for good bottom land and then gave him instead land in the hills, claiming it was the “bottom ”of heaven.* Barbara Christian calls to mind the previous echo of Barren Ground in Gone with the Wind when she explains the role of this anecdote in Sula: “In presenting the Bottom’s origins as a ‘nigger joke,’ and by juxtaposing its birth to its death, the author signals to the reader that her story will be concerned with the community’s philosophy of survival. This philosophy, in Morrison’s narrative, is very much related to the land—for the Bottom is actually topland where survival is precarious”(“Community”66–67; emphasis added). Christian remarks too on the consequences of such an insular place as the Bottom, particularly on the women, whose lives are limited. Hearkening back to the Civil War–era novels Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain, this Morrison novel’s two main characters, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, are brought together in friendship by their shared experience of the limited expectations for women—perhaps even more limited by their race than the expectations for Scarlett O’Hara and the other women of her earlier generation who have been considered thus far.Sula and Nel’s friendship reminds the reader again of what Dorinda Oakley is missing in her life—not so much a husband, which she is simply not interested in, but a friend—as Scarlett had Melanie and Ada has Ruby. Pamela R. Matthews examines Glasgow’s “lifelong concern with women ’s cooperative relationships [with each other] and with certain traditions of women’s lives, such as marriage, that often threaten them.” Matthews asks, “Does the traditional structure of a woman’s life isolate her . . . or can it encourage female cooperation and friendship” (18). Luise Eichenbaum and Susie Orbach begin their 1987 book on women’s friendships remarking on the changing attitude toward women’s relationships in the 1970s (the decade in which Sula was published, if not set), “a time when women’s roles have been changing and women are demanding of themselves that they get out and fulfill themselves. . . . It wasn’t until the seventies that the significance of * In her interview with the author, Carolyn C. Denard noted that “Medallion—a (northern) Ohio town—. . . was a lot like Black community life in the small southern town I grew up in,”to which Morrison’s response implies an inevitable intermingling in “what’s southern and what’s Black” (Denard 184). 92 Sula women’s relationships was recognized. Of course women’s friendships have always been important and essential, but until the seventies, friendship between women was rarely graced with the social recognition that befitted it. Friendships were fitted around family commitments and almost every woman understood that her time with a friend was limited”(9).Toni Morrison recognized this failure to appreciate the...