English: What is the relationship between love and duty in Sula, and which one is ultimately privileged?
Sula is a novel by Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison. Morrison wrote the novel in 1973. The novel, set in Ohio, features two girls named Nel and Sula who live contrasting lives. Whereas Nel comes from a stable family that believes in social institutions, Sula comes from a dysfunctional family (Morrison). The social divide between the two girls as well as that of the white farmer and his former slave shows the intricate relationship that exists between love and duty. This novel prompts the question, “do people choose to love each other voluntarily, or does duty compel people to love or coexist with each other?” The author chose to portray failed relationships in order to emphasize the power of love in relationships and to show the essence of love triumphing over duty in the existence of a community and among individuals.
There was deep love that overrode duty in the relationship between parents and their children. When a bigoted white conductor humiliated Nel’s mother, Helen Sabat, during a journey by train to New Orleans, Nel vows never to let anyone abuse her so cruelly (Morrison). Nel felt deep love and bitterness seeing her mother being insulted. Although, there was the moral duty of defending her mother against any form of aggression, any violent reaction to the white man would have resulted in more insults. In yet another instance, when Eva’s son, Plum returns from World War 1, he is emotionally disturbed and he sinks into alcoholism and drug addiction (Morrison). Eva, who had become senile because of age, chose to set her son alight using kerosene in order to avoid seeing him decay! (Morrison) In as much as Eva had a duty as a mother to take care of her son, the loving manner in which she tends to her son shows that her love for Plum overrode duty. In the case of Nel and Eva, family members act contrary to the dictates of duty and more out of love since love had an overbearing effect on them as compared to duty.
Sula and her family accommodated extended family and other people because they loved them and not necessarily because they were obligated or had a duty to accommodate those people. Eva peace, her daughter Hannah and grandchild, Sula, although not well up and capable agreed to take in several other people. When her husband Boyboy died, Eva was left without social identity, or access to economic resources since marriage, and a husband to provide for a woman’s a needs were women’s only means of self-realization (De Angelis, 172). Eva’s efforts to love an embrace all people nears her was her way of achieving the self-satisfaction.
The book plays out a love-hate relationship between Sula and the people. Sula and Nel formed love bonds between them when they were young which helped them to overcome the many challenges of race inferiority and domestic problems. At one point, some Irish Catholic White boys harassed the two girls (Morrison, 53). Sula sliced the tip of her finger to warn off the boys against attacking her and her friend Nel an incident that scares off the boys. In yet another instance, while playing on the banks of a river, Sula swings a little boy named Chicken Little. The boy slipped and fell from Sula’s hands, landed in the river and drowned (Morrison). Sula and Nel opted to keep the issue a secret. These incidences point to a love between the two girls that had grown beyond the mere stage of each serving another as a call of duty. The two girls had genuine and deep love for each other.
Love dominates the relationships in the story as compared to duty. In a sad incident, Hannah caught fire while she was lighting a cooking fire. Eva, Hannah’s mother saw her daughter on fire from her bedroom on second floor. Without caring the danger she was putting herself into, Eva jumped from her bedroom to reach Hannah and put out the flames. Hannah passes away on the way to the hospital while Eva sustains severe injuries. While Eva recovers in hospital, she remembers seeing Sula standing on the outside of the house as she watched her mother burn. Arguably, Sula was shocked in such a manner that she was unable to react and save her mother. This incident points to the deep love between the women in the novel.
In some instances, duty as well as the forces of class and race poses a threat to female friendship. The combined forces of class and race pushed Jude, Nel’s husband to get into the patriarchal institution of marriage as an attempt to redeem his damaged image of manhood. However, Jude becomes an agent of patriarchy and she ends the relationship between Nel and Sula (Sy, 10). In this case, the calls of duty override the need for love affection and consideration for one’s family member and spouse.
The patriarchal structures of the society on which Sula and Nel lived compelled the women to love each other. The women loved and served each other beyond the boundaries of family and duty because they wanted to overcome patriarchal structures such as class, race, and marriage. Being a black woman was a challenge. The novel “Sula” in itself is a “meditation of black female bonding and maternal bonding” (Venkatesan and Gurumurthy 113). In addition, the novel concerns the divisions between good and evil that is characteristic of human beings. Inherently, duty and obligations cannot help an individual to overcome wrongs but the application of love stands the test of time and challenges to help individuals to unite and triumph over evil.
The African Americans were able to stand oppression from the Irish settlers because they were united in love. There was a shaky relationship between the Irish settlers in Sula’s community and the local people. The racism that existed then was so severe that it threatened the love that is supposed to exist between human beings. In this case, duty and the adherence to one’s race, beliefs, and systems overrode the quest to reach out to other races lovingly. As Venkatesan and Gurumurthy observes, “disaffection was purposefully sown” between the arriving white immigrants (most of them Irish) and the African Americans.
Love overrides duty and causes people to achieve extra ordinary things. When Sula is dying, Nel visits her. Upon her death, Sula mystically becomes conscious and gets outside her body. She realizes that there is no pain in death and that is something she must tell Nel. This incident shows the great extent of bonding between Nel and Sula. The kind of relationship that the two women had can only be described as genuinely loving. Sula’s love for Nel burdened her to shoulder the responsibility and duty to try to inform her friend about death.
The novel “Sula” by Morrison, centers on two girls Nel and Sula at a time when there was massive racism in the US. The women in the novel show extraordinary solidarity and love to stick together, and serve each other lovingly beyond the call of duty. The black community also stuck together to resist oppression by the Irish settlers (Reddy, 631). The incidences such as Eva burning her son and Sula watching her mother burn to death are bizarre and worthy of condemnation but the motives behind the actions of those people seems to be helplessness or lack of ability. In addition, the loving gesture by Eva and her family to taka in people from different backgrounds points to a high level of solidarity. It is apparent that almost all the characters in the novel love genuinely since they are able to come into terms with each other after disagreements. As such, the issue of love overrides the call of duty in the novel Sula.
Works Cited
Reddy, P. Sreenivasulu. "A critical analysis of Sula by Toni Morrison." Language in India 2012: 631. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, and Gurumurthy Neelakantan. "Morrison's Sula." The Explicator 2 (2008): 113. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
Sy, Kadidia, "Women's Relationships: Female Friendship in Toni Morrison's Sula and Love, Mariama Ba's So Long a Letter and Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come" (2008). English Dissertations. Paper 30.
De Angelis, Rose. "Morrison's Sula." The Explicator 3 (2002): 172. Literature Resource Center. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
Morrison, Toni. Sula. [1st ed. New York: Knopf; [distributed by Random House], 1973. Print.
