Toni Morrisons Sula - The Provinciality of Sulas Characters :: Sula Essays

The Provinciality of genus Sulas Characters            In her review of Toni Morrisons novel, Sula, Sara Blackburn complains that the setting and calibres seem someway frozen, stylized(1). While Blackburn talks favorably most Morrisons past novels (The Bluest midpoint in particular), she is of the opinion that Sula is less successful because the characters ar moderate to one location and one mode of thought.   Morrison hasnt endowed her people with living beyond their place and wreak in the novel, and we cant imagine their surviving out of doors the tiny community where they carry on their separate lives (1).   While I agree with Blackburn that the characters remain inside the confines of the Bottom and the way of look there, I disagree with her that the characters are nothing more than their place and function in the novel. After reading this review, I began to think about other famous authors and novels and I realized that most stay within a certain setting and way of life. Morrison is not writing her characters as smooth by making them a product of their environment and upbringing she is only when mirroring the reality of life and human nature. I too disagree with Blackburn that the character of Sula is the exception in the novel. She too is simply a interlock of her surroundings and the people who raised(a) her and whom she came into contact with. Had Sula not been raised by a mother prone to taking other womens husbands into fund closets, she would not have slept with her best friends husband and then act as if she had done nothing wrong. Morrison says the following in the novel about how Sula became the woman she was Evas arrogance and Hannahs self-indulgence merged in her and, with a thingmabob that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them respectable reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleas edher (118).   I also disagree when Blackburn says that Sula is a novel whose long-range impact doesnt stick the intensity of its first reading(2). How can that be true when the characters actions are never those that the reader expects. The reader is forced to wonder why about so many different situation in the novel, that it sticks with them way later on theyve put down the book. How could Eva justify burning alive her own son?