Sula Study Guide

Sula

Sula by Toni Morrison

Sula is a novel by Toni Morrison about two women, Nel and Sula, who grow up in the Bottom, a black neighborhood in Ohio. Though their personalities diverge from an early age, Nel being far more reserved than free-sprited Sula, they become friends. After inadvertently drowning a young boy, they begin to grow apart, Nel settling down with a husband and Sula leaving Oklahoma to have numerous affairs. Upon returning to Oklahoma, Sula has an affair with Nel's husband, the two become estranged and only reconcile shortly before Sula's death.

Sula Characters

Table of Contents
  • Sula Peace : the main antagonist, whose return to the Bottom disrupts the whole community. The main reason for Sula's strangeness is her defiance of gender norms and traditional morality, symbolized by the birthmark "that spread from the middle of the lid toward the eyebrow, shaped something like a stemmed rose," which, according to some psychoanalytic readings, is a dual symbol with both phallic and vaginal resonance.
  • Eva Peace : Sula's grandmother, who is missing one leg. Though the circumstances are never fully explained, it is suggested that she purposely put it under a train in order to collect insurance money to support her three young children.
  • BoyBoy : Sula's grandfather, who leaves Eva for another woman.
  • Hannah Peace : Sula's mother; Eva's eldest daughter. Hannah is a promiscuous and care-free woman who burned to death early on. Her daughter Sula witnessed the fire but did nothing.
  • Eva (Pearl) Peace : Sula's aunt; Eva Sr.'s youngest daughter and middle child.
  • Ralph (Plum) Peace : Sula's uncle; Eva's son and youngest child. Plum was a WWI veteran and a heroin addict. Eva burns him alive with kerosene because of his mental instability.
  • Helene Wright : Nel's strait-laced and clean mother.
  • Nel Wright : Sula's best friend (can also be considered a main protagonist) who doesn't want to be like her mother because she will never be reduced to "custard" and she will not be humiliated by other people as her mother is.
  • Shadrack : A paranoid shell-shocked WWI veteran, who returns to Sula and Nel's hometown, Medallion. He invents National Suicide Day.
  • Jude Greene : Nel's husband, who leaves Nel due to a love affair with Sula.
  • Ajax (Albert Jacks) : Sula's confidant and lover.
  • Tar Baby (Pretty Johnnie) : A quiet, cowardly, and reserved partially or possibly fully white man who rents out one of the rooms in the Peace household. It is believed that Tar Baby has come up to the bottom to drink himself to death.
  • The Deweys : three boys, each about one year apart from one another in age, who were each nicknamed "Dewey" by Eva. Their real names are never written in the novel, and after the introduction of these characters, the three were referred as one being, thus Morrison's use of a lowercase "d" in "dewey" for the rest of the novel.
  • Chicken Little : The little boy whom Sula accidentally drowns by throwing into the river.

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