Sula: Failure And Hope

As one of the most prominent novelists in contemporary literary world, Toni Morrison is also the first Afro-American black woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. With her unique angle of view and sharp insight into the black history and reality, she vividly depicts and deeply explores the humiliated and depressed mood of the double-oppressed black women, the awakening of their self-consciousness and the exploration of the value about individual independent existence.This thesis focuses on one of her most popular works, Sula. It is committed to an analysis of the double-oppressed protagonist of this novel, Sula, her failed quest for self-identity and the causes for her defeat.Based on former studies of the novel Sula since it has been published, the thesis mainly explores the pain and trauma, which the blacks are subjected to. Simultaneously, it also shows the dual oppressions of and discriminations against black women through the analysis of the dilemma the black people in Sula experience. The body parts of the thesis stress Sula's hard and failed quest for her self-identity, expounding the social and historical reasons as well as the familial effects for her defeat. And through analyzing the relationship between Sula and Ajax, the thesis indicates that only black women's own independence can win the understanding and support from black men. Furthermore, to strive for building an atmosphere of equality and harmony between two sexes on the basis of such independence and understanding to promote the blacks' subsistence and progress and to resist the main cause—racism—for their predicament, is what Morrison implies through Sula's story. The thesis concludes that the harmony between two sexes is the core of blacks' happiness, and it is conducive to get over the racial and gender prejudices and discrimination in American society, which is also the aspiration Morrison wants to express to the blacks through her novel Sula.