Black Women's Search For The Self

Sula is American black woman writer Toni Morison's second novel and it was published in 1973. Owing to the heroine Sula's controversial image in the story, many critics in the American literary circle hold rather different attitudes to this novel. Sula is set in America from the end of World War I to the mid 1960s when the black civil rights movement and women's liberation movement were rising. It describes the heroine Sula's growing experiences and the vicissitudes of her hometown "Bottom", a black community. This thesis intends to present the process of black women's search for the self through an analysis of the three female characters' status, personality and behavior.In this thesis, Eva is defined as a representative female figure submitting to male authority. As a black woman of the old generation, she has got used to the oppressed life in the patriarchal society. However, under economic pressure, she starts her pursuit of the self to strive for independence. Nevertheless, Eva is still a conservative woman as she judges herself from man's point of view. Eve's self-awareness comes into being passively from the very beginning. Because she can not cast off the traditional ethics that men are superior to women, she is assimilated by the male-centered consciousness eventually.Sula, who belongs to the new generation with rebellious spirit, is presented as a force of resistance to male authority here. Her family, the social environment and her unique growing experiences result in her independent personality. This thesis analyses the image of Sula in some aspects, such as her challenging against conventions in her pursuit of the self, her status as an outcast in the alienating and hostile community, her influence upon the community and so on. In a way, Sula's search for the self ends with failure in the black community of the time. It verifies Morrison's opinion that the black's self-fulfillment needs to be completed within the black community. Black women should be loyal to their cultural tradition, otherwise their search for the self will be in vain without its support.Nel, Sula's good friend in childhood, can be regarded as a successor to Sula in pursuit of the self. The thesis also makes detailed analysis of Nel, such as her self-awareness and her search for the self in childhood, her conformity to the conventions and the loss of the self later, her retrospection and awakening in the end. Here Morrisoncreates such a character who will not succumb to the conventions any more but begin to strive for individual rights and therefore transcend black women's traditional fate. Morrison indicates at the same time that, with the awakening of black ethos, black women will no longer fight alone by themselves but unite with their community and exert themselves to realize the self.With the development of women's movement and black feminist literary criticism, Morrison as a representative of black women writers begins to think about how to emancipate black women from the double oppression of both white and black men. As a bildungsroman, Sula's theme is black women's quest for the self. Around this theme, the novel reflects the contradiction between the traditional and the modern, as well as the conflicts between black culture and white culture in American society. Through her depiction of the three black women Eva, Sula and Nel, Morrison shows her profound recognition of black women's hard course of seeking the self. Although Sula is not the most engrossing one among Morrison's novels, it is the only one related to African-American culture in a comprehensive way. As an American black woman writer with abundant experiences, Morrison points out indirectly in Sula that the awakening of women's self-awareness is just the first step of women's emancipation. What's most important for black women is to realize the self, affect black men, gain mutual regard and harmony between men and women so as to achieve women's liberation to the core.