Sula: A Literary Deconstruction of Biopolitics
By Rachel Carbonell

 

Toni Morrison's novel Sula, in its exploration of gender roles, creates a political narrative framework that exemplifies and problematizes the interactions between kinship and law and their reliance upon female subjugation. The text of Sula examines the constructions of Black womanhood and manhood, particularly through the character of Sula, who rejects the conventional Black female role. Sula, determined to define herself outside of the traditional role of domesticity, must find an identity deeper than the standard identities of wife and mother. She seeks to find an internally defined identity rather than one informed by the paradigm of family. Yet, by refusing these expected, so-called natural roles, she is rejected by the community and actually strengthens their own enactment of traditional gender roles in the face of her unconventional attitudes. The interaction of the normative behavior of the community of Bottom and Sula's own outlandish, de-centered behavior inform each other to create a dialogue on gender roles and expectations. Specifically, Sula's feminist gestures will be analyzed in this essay in relation to law and gender norms, to explore Foucault's notion of biopolitics and the possibilities offered by Sula to overcome these established, normative structures. Sula acts as a political literary work that problematizes conventional biopolitics and calls for a re-configuration of gender and societal dynamics in terms of female autonomy.

The first pivotal moment in the text occurs when Sula comes into confrontation with Eva, her grandmother and the matriarch of the family, as their opposing ideologies serve to clarify the two primary opposing perspectives within the novel. Eva criticizes Sula's way of life and formulation of identity by asking her, "When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It'll settle you" (79). To this, Sula counters, "I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself" (79). Eva's emphasis on female power through matriarchy and family contrasts with Sula's own radical insistence on a complete departure from domestically centered definitions of feminine identity. Eva, who has built her life and meaning around her maternal role, cannot comprehend or accept Sula's notion that she can have an identity apart from a reliance on husband and children. Sula, the only character in the novel to refute the traditional female role, deconstructs the naturalization of such traditional views of femininity as inherently subjugating. Regarding the effect of these mythic structures that inform kinship laws, Pierre Bourdieu writes:

"The men (and the women themselves) remain unaware that it is the logic of the relationship of domination which imposes on and inculcates in women not only the virtues that morality requires of them but also all the negative properties that the dominant view imputes in their nature… (31)

Sula, who alone in the novel has realized that such assumptions of femininity are falsely deterministic constructions that impose a certain normalized way of being, seeks thus to re-create an autonomous identity not confined to traditional gender expectations.

While Eva and Hannah, in the aftermath of being left, have male admirers and/or flings, their deviation from the traditional female role is viewed as supplementary rather than subversive to the community's way of life and gender relations. When Sula points this out to Eva, she dismisses her objection by pointing out that they, the women, had been left by the men, rather than vice versa, as in Sula's case. Sula acts outside of her conventional role by disrupting the marriages of others; she challenges the very idea that women must naturally nurture men, and as such, she is seen as threatening and even evil. Sula offers an alternative paradigm here of self-definition and sexual liberation for women; yet, within the text, her behavior is not productive in regards to her aims but rather further enforces the community's belief in their norms. The reliance of the community's cohesiveness on Sula's transgressions highlights the hegemonic forces of law and the community that must rely on the "pathological" instance to create the norm. 1

Sula’s behavior emphasizes the socially constructed nature of gender and the difficulty of finding alternative, productive ways of re-definition within such strict conventional paradigms. Foucault has given the term biopolitics to this social enforcement of gender roles, which he describes as follows:

… a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of the population, and so on. It is these processes … together with a whole series of related economic and political problems … which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, became biopolitics' first objects of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control. (243)

Foucault's emphasis of the law as a normalizing, controlling force dependent on reproduction and family structure shows the way in which women's roles and bodies are normalized and mechanized by such biopolitics. Judith Butler, in Antigone's Claim, further examines how kinship, seen as an extension of structural linguistics, has been naturalized as an inherent system. She writes: "Thus the status given to the law is precisely the status given to the phallus, the symbolic place of the father, the indisputable and incontestable" (21). Sula recognizes these constructions of law and authority as doubly problematic for Black women, who rest at the bottom of this chain of reliance and signification. Sula, in her contestation of the law and kinship structures of Bottom, is precisely seen within her community as a witch, an aberration of the "natural" social order; for her departure from norms is so radical that it cannot possibly be integrated into the paradigm of the Bottom. While in the text, Sula's behavior only enforces her community's adherence to norms, for the reader her actions offer a deconstruction of naturalized norms and an alternative, feminist outlook to gender relations and definitions.

When Nel criticizes Sula for her independent behavior, saying, "You can't do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man," Sula simply tells her she’s repeating herself: "You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain't that the same as being a man?" (123). In Sula's conception, the two terms, "woman" and "colored," serve to cancel each other out, to make her, in effect, a man. Yet while she is barred from white definitions of womanhood and femininity, she is simultaneously expected within the Black community to take on the roles of mother and wife, and to then define herself accordingly. Sula's passionate rejection of feminine roles is perhaps strengthened by white society’s de-feminization of the Black woman; yet in her own culture, Sula is viewed with suspicion and even outcast for "acting like a man." Much like Antigone, Joan of Arc, and other historical controversial feminist figures, Sula's fierce independence and transgressions of the law and biopolitics make her community view her as masculine.

By blurring the lines of femininity and masculinity and problematizing the law's reliance on gender norms, the character and novel Sula exemplify the politics inherent in all communication and discourse. As Bourdieu asserts, the dominance of the masculine is taken for granted as "natural" in human culture; women thus are symbolically assigned the status of "maleficent beings whose purely negative identity is made up essentially of taboos each of which presents a possibility of transgression" (32). Sula pursues these taboos and transgressions to refute the myth of female inferiority and re-inscribe the female into both figurative and literal spaces traditionally confined to the male. Sula therefore refutes even the traditional paradigm of the novel by emphasizing the political nature of a text and overtly pursuing its own radical politics.

Sula's stark rejection of social norms provokes a communal fear within the novel that anything is possible in her behavior, as Morrison writes:

But it was the men who gave her the final label, who fingerprinted her for all time. They were the ones who said she was guilty of the unforgivable thing…. They said that Sula slept with white men. (97)

Whether this is true or not the reader never knows, but the conviction in the suspicion alone emphasizes the community’s belief that Sula finds nothing taboo in her emphatic failure to conform and their view that such trespassing of gender norms is inherently "evil." The passage also highlights the Black men’s resentment of Sula's sexual freedom, a freedom whose very existence is denied in both the Black and white communities. The passage continues,

Nor was the willingness of Black men to lie in the beds of white women a consideration that might lead them to toward tolerance. They insisted that all unions between white men and black women be rape; for a black woman to be willing was literally unthinkable. (98)

Sula’s (perceived) defiance of the traditional power structure accepted by both the Black and white communities forces the community of Bottom and the reader to examine the power dynamics implicated in sexual relations. Whereas Black men may use sexual relations with white women as a source of power, Black women are seen as necessarily subjugated and unwilling in any sexual relations with white men. To assume that Sula would willingly engage in such an activity implies recognition on the part of the Black men in the community regarding Sula’s sexual potency as a woman. Yet such potency is necessarily perverted in the minds of these men, who cannot bring themselves to believe that a Black woman can use sex as a source of power the same way in which men can. Sula, in both her actual and perceived sexual behavior, serves to assert that Black women can empower themselves through sex and use it for their own pleasure, as men do. In re-defining such a basic act as sex, Sula seeks to reclaim the potential for female autonomy and agency in all spheres.

Sula's continual questioning and refutation of Black female roles, both sexual and societal, offers a stark contrast to the ways in which the other Black women in the novel, namely Eva and Nel, focus their lives on the domestic sphere. When Sula realizes, " … that a lover was not a comrade and could never be for a woman," she seeks to depart from the conventional mold and to find a self-oriented identity rather than one male- or family-oriented (104). Through the character of Sula, Morrisson explores the possibility and consequences of breaking social norms to achieve a Black female identity that protests the gender-based and racial-based oppression enacted upon Black women through their expected roles and stereotypes. The price of Sula’s independence and rejection of her expected roles in the novel was reciprocal rejection by the community; yet Sula as a literary work explodes the biopolitics inherent in traditional gender roles and offers the possibility of female autonomy in its place.

1 This idea of the norm being defined by the pathological is derived from Freud, The Ego and The Id.

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Butler, Judith. Antigone's Claim. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Dubey, Madhu. "'No Bottom and No Top': Oppositions in Sula." Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. Ed. Linden Peach. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 70-88.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. New York: W.W. Norton 1962.

Foucalt, Michel. "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collége de France, 1975-1976. New York: Picador, 1997.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.

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