Essay Instructions: 4 page essay on the book SULA by Toni Morrison
2 day turn around
Essay Topic
1)? Sula?s role and the effect on Society OR
2)How Society?s views shape the individual.
Morrison's characters are both empowered and restricted by the heavy sense of community that operates in her novels. In all of her novels the characters are pulled along by and enmeshed in the communities in which they live. The struggles of the community and the characters with in the framework of community are the driving force behind much of the novel.
Thesis below is just an dea and you can rework it to sound better.
THESIS: Both the characters and the larger communities are irrevocably changed throughout the course of the novel the as tension to define both individual and community surfaces.
Ideas to be incorporated into essay:
"The community of the Bottom, in a northern Ohio town called Medallion, is not only a place but a presence--a kind of collective conscience that arbitrates the social and moral norms of its members" (148).
Sula is a story about community.
, "Sula celebrates many lives: It is the story of the friendship of two African-American women; it is the story of growing up black and female; but most of all, it is the story of a community" ( Nigro, Marie)
This uniting against evil, the determination to survive evil, "without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it," (90) is another defining factor of me community. Sula works, as other evils have done such as, "floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance," (90) to unite me community together and give them common definition.
But Sula does more than just give them a common unified identity. She changes me community. Rubenstein says, "While people see themselves more clearly through her(Sula) she cannot see herself"(131). In this way she becomes an essential member of the community, allowing others a clearer picture of themselves while at me same time remaining outside of the accepted community. They recognize Sula as evil and "the presence of evil was something to be first recognized, then dealt with, survived, outwitted, triumphed over" (118). In recognizing Sula as evil Morrison says, "Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not. Sula was distinctly different" (118). In recognizing her as different, as evil, as something to be survived, they are recognizing themselves.
Sula makes a statement about wholeness achieved through the unity of parts. The community in Sula is whole only when she is part of it . In Sula, the character of Sula must sacrifice her ?self? completely in order to define the community., Morrison suggests that the whole, whether self or community, is made up of individual parts. There is no recapturing of sacrifices made in Sula and the novel ends with Nel?s cry for the friendship that was sacrificed for the good of the community, ?It was a fine cry- loud and long- but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow(174 )
Not only does Sula's presence allow the community to define itself, her presence begins to change them, "The conviction of Sula's evil changed them in accountable yet mysterious ways. Once me source of their personal misfortune was identified, they had leave to protect and love one another" (117)
Feel free to incorporate any of this into essay using the above essay topics and possible thesis I have provided. Thanks
