Sula: part I

"Hannah exasperated the women in the town – the “good” women, who said, “One thing I can’t stand is a nasty woman”; the whores, who were hard put to find trade among black men anyway and who resented Hannah’s generosity; the middling women who had both husbands and affairs, because Hannah seemed too unlike them, having no passion attached to her relationships and being wholly incapable of jealousy. Hannah’s friendships with women were, of course, seldom and short-lived, and the newly married couples whom her mother took in soon learned what a hazard she was. She could break up a marriage before it had even become one – she would make love to the new groom and wash his wife’s dishes all in an afternoon. What she wanted, after Rekus died, and what she succeeded in having more often than not, was some touching every day."

This passage seemed very compelling, because it accurately describes the plight of a woman who doesn’t fit into the narrow conception of what being a woman means, and is resented for it. It’s strange that even though Hannah and these women shared several of the same womanly desires and experiences, they still chose to despise her. Perhaps she physically manifested the evil parts of themselves they wished to pretend didn’t exist. I had a similar experience with a female who I became close to. Some of her personality traits I despised in other people, and they eventually ended our friendship. However, after she moved away and I reflected on the situation, I realized that I shared some of the same characteristics I had despised in her. Perhaps I, like the women in Sula, wanted to ignore the characteristics of myself I found to be negative, rather than trying to change them myself. There was a clash between the rational and the emotional halves of myself. The rational part wanted to change my behavior, but the emotional half was unwilling to admit it was even there.

"It was not really Edna Finch’s ice cream that made them brave the stretch of those panther eyes. Years later their own eyes would glaze as they cupped their chins in remembrance of the inchworm smiles, the squatting haunches, the track-rail legs straddling broken chairs. The cream-colored trousers marking with a mere seam the place where the mystery curled. Those smooth vanilla crotches invited them; those lemon-yellow gabardines beckoned to them. They moved toward the ice-cream parlor like tightrope walkers, as thrilled by the possibility of a slip as by the maintenance of tension and balance. The least sideways glance, the merest toe stub, could pitch them into those creamy haunches spread wide with welcome. Somewhere beneath all of that daintiness, chambered in all that neatness, lay the thing that clotted their dreams."

I found the last sentence of this passage to be particularly interesting. “Clotted their dreams” could simply mean occupied their innermost thoughts, but it could also mean destroyed their ambition. Thus far, neither Nel nor Sula has a particularly ambitious attitude toward life. If the female figures in your life need a man to validate their existence, what message does that send to you? Hannah, Sula’s mother, was constantly searching for a man to validate her existence, to recapture some of the feelings she experienced with her deceased husband. Undoubtedly the messages Sula and Nel received from the maternal figures in their lives informed their perceptions of men. My own experiences with maternal figures contrasts that of Sula. Several of my relatives consider themselves feminists, and the message "you don't need a man, so don't rely on one" was consistently reinforced. Thankfully I've turned out differently than Nel or Sula, in part because the messages I was given as a child didn't reinforce the cultural narrative that a woman needs a man to validate her existence.