Nicole McLaughlin
12/18/2010
AP English
Accidental Progress
In her 1974 novel, Sula, Toni Morrison develops the story of two girls’ lives: Sula Peace and Nel Write. Morrison places accidental events throughout the novel in order to help develop the characters, and to also further the plot of the story. These accidents not only define specific points in the girls’ lives, but also allow the girls to grow and develop from that one defining moment. Because each accident helps to shape the girls into who they become, every event after that accident has a domino effect. Morrison shapes the story by colliding the events, developments, and accidents together.
The first truly defining accident of Sula happens when both Nel and Sula are around twelve years old. The two girls are playing in the fields with this little boy named Chicken Little. First, everything is going fine, and then, “Sula pick[s] [Chicken Little] up by his hands and sw[i]ngs him out…and around” (Morrison 60).
This children’s game turns sour quickly, though, when Chicken Little “slip[s] from [Sula’s] hands and sail[s] away out over the water” (Morrison 60-61).
It’s unclear to either girl what they had just done until the “water darkens and close[s]… over the place where Chicken Little sank” (Morrison 61).
At that point, both Nel and Sula realize that Chicken Little is dead, and that they had killed him. Their first thought wasn’t of Chicken Little’s well-being, but instead asking whether the “figure [that had] appeared briefly on the opposite shore” (Morrison 61) had seen their crime. Here is where Morrison first defines both of the girls for the reader. Sula “collapse[s] into tears” (Morrison 62), but Nel keeps her composure. She reassures Sula that “[she] didn’t mean it [, and that] it [wasn’t] her fault” (Morrison 62-63).
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Because of this scene, the reader learns that Nel appears to be the stronger more motherly of the two girls, and Sula the weaker, more child-like half.
Later on, we see another side of the young girls. During the funeral that was held for Chicken Little, the girls “did not touch hands or look at each other” (Morrison 64).
Morrison uses the aftermath of the Chicken Little accident to further explain the two different roles that the girls take on. With Nel, the funeral causes her to “turn to granite” (Morrison 64), and she “expect[s] the sheriff … [to] point [his] finger at [her at] any moment… [because] she felt convicted” (Morrison 65).
On the other hand, “Sula simply cried… [and] let the tears roll into her mouth and slide down her chin to dot the front of her dress” (Morrison 65).
Their complete opposite reactions to the funeral help to show their maturity of the situation. Nel, as with the actual act of the murder, is the sensible one. She is looking around, waiting to be blamed for the death, while Sula is dealing with the pain in a complete child-like manner with her “soundless…and heaving” (Morrison 65) cries. By using these two complete contrasting views of grief, one being mature and adult-like, the other childish and excessive, Morrison accomplishes characterizing Nel as the adult and Sula as the child.
The next accident that Morrison uses to show the development within the characters happens with just Sula. Her mother, Hannah, is “bending to light the yard fire” (Morrison 75), when “the flames from the yard fire [began to] lick…the dress” (Morrison 75) that Hannah was wearing. While other people ran to try and help Hannah, “Sula st[ood] on the back porch just looking” (Morrison 78) at the scene before her. It could be said that Sula only watched her mother burn to death because she was “struck dumb” (Morrison 78), but based on Sula’s reaction to the death of Chicken Little, it’s more probable that “Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested” (Morrison 78) in only a way that a young, immature child could be interested in flames. With this accident, though, Morrison does show an increase in Sula’s maturity level. Sula doesn’t weep silently for her mother, as she had for Chicken Little. However, she doesn’t close off her emotions and turn her face to stone as Nel had done at Chicken Little’s funeral. Sula is in-between those two emotions, which is a maturity progression from her emotions at the funeral.
The Essay on Toni Morrisons Novel Sula
In the novel Sula, by Toni Morrison we follow the life of Sula Peace through out her childhood in the twenties until her death in 1941. The novel surrounds the black community in Medallion, specifically "the bottom". By reading the story of Sula’s life, and the life of the community in the bottom, Morrison shows us the important ways in which families and communities can shape a ...
In order to show that progression of the characters throughout the entire cast of the novel, Morrison had to include every person in the book. The towns people march in a parade of “strut[ing], skip[ing]…and shuffle[ing] down the road[s]” (Morrison 160).
They, including Nel, were “aggressive…and paraded down the Main Street” (Morrison 160-161).
The people were full of “excitement and joy” (Morrison 161), and they marched onward to the newly constructed tunnel, and, in their “enraged [need to] smash” (Morrison 161), they “went too deep [and] too far” (Morrison 162) into the tunnel. “A lot of them died in [the tunnel]” (Morrison 162), and in that, Nel watched the death with a slightly softer stone face. She had shifted to being able to slightly grieve over death, but she didn’t shed a tear for the dead. She simply watched, and stood back away from the death.
The final accident that defined Nel’s life was the death of her long-time, childhood friend Sula. They knew that she was dead right away “not because her eyes were open, but because her mouth was” (Morrison 172).
This death, unlike the deaths that she had previously experienced, was tragic to Nel not because it was her friend, but because “none of the women left their quilt patches in disarray [, and]…nobody left the clothes halfway through the ringer to run to the house” (Morrison 172).
It was, to Nel, “very strange, th[e] stubbornness [from the town] about Sula” (Morrison 172).
Perhaps, the strangeness is what brought on the change in Nel’s take on death. “It was Nel who finally called the hospital” (Morrison 172), and, once she went to the mortuary, “she was so shocked” (Morrison 173) by the death that “she stayed only a few minutes” (Morrison 173).
At the funeral, Nel “found herself to be the only black person there” (Morrison 173), and she “sadly, heavily,” (Morrison 173) left the funeral. It was after the funeral, was she was walking home, that Nel showed her biggest change in the book. She “gaz[ed] at the tops of the trees” (Morrison 174), and finally allowed “the soft ball [inside of her to] br[ea]k and scatter like dandelion spores” (Morrison 174).
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Nel finally allowed the “lost [to] press down on her chest and c[o]me up into her throat[, and]…she cried. …It was a fine cry…but it had no bottom, and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow” (Morrison 174).
This release of tears by Nel was the un-doing of years and years of pent up sadness, of stony-faced funeral attending. The loss of her dear friend Sula finally allowed Nel to stop being the mother for the two. It gave her the chance to be the child, and to mourn in only the way children know how to morn. This finally allowed Nel to develop into a complete person, because she was no longer being drawn to being a half of a whole.
In order for the characters of the novel Sula, by Toni Morrison, to develop, there had to be conflict. Morrison found these conflicts in the form of accidents throughout the novel. With each conflict, the characters developed more and more into a whole person. Despite the fact that each of the main characters, Nel and Sula, were each half of a whole throughout most of the book, they each found their own whole before the book finished. It was through these accidents that the characters made the changes to not necessarily better themselves, but to complete themselves. The accidents were necessary for the characters of Sula to accomplish progress.