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One and One Make One: A Metacritical and Psychoanalytic Reading of Friendship in Toni Morrison’s Sula Author: Alisha R. Coleman Date: 1993 From: CLA Journal(Vol. 37, Issue 2) Reprint In: Contemporary Literary Criticism(Vol. 366) Document Type: Critical essay Length: 3,658 words
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[(essay date 1993) In the following essay, Coleman approaches Nel and Sula’s relationship as the pairing of a single personality with many different facets. According to Coleman, examining the two characters from this psychological perspective allows the reader to understand complex issues in the novel—including Sula’s affair with Jude and the women’s ultimate reconciliation—in a manner that is not easily accomplished through other critical approaches.]
In Sula, Sula Peace and Nel Wright’s relationship is a complex friendship that merits exploration through many avenues in order to be understood fully. In the critical debate surrounding this novel, three critical approaches to Sula—the black feminist lesbian theory, an African aesthetic analysis, and a psychoanalytic analysis—have provided useful interpretations of the novel from a non-Western, nonmale perspective. Barbara Smith uses the black feminist lesbian theory to define the nature of Sula and Nel’s friendship. She suggests that this friendship can be defined as lesbian because it exists between two females. However, even though Smith refutes the traditional Western androcentric interpretation, she neglects to analyze fully the novel in a cultural context.1 Vashti Lewis explores the “culture question” through her African aesthetic analysis. The African cultural context reveals the influences of traditional African religion in the novel. Still, Lewis focuses on Sula and Shadrack and does not examine why Sula and Nel are constantly paired together in the novel.2
For me, the clearest way to understanding the pairing of Sula and Nel is to see the two characters as halves of a single personality through a psychoanalytic interpretation. Judith Gardiner criticizes Elizabeth Able (both psychoanalysts) for treating Sula and Nel as “case histories”;3 however, one advantage of using psychoanalytic criticism is that it is more appropriate for analyzing the multifaceted characters and relationships presented in Sula. Indeed, this approach helps answer questions not addressed by other critics. In fact, it addresses the most troublesome questions about Sula herself: “Why does she have an affair with Jude?” and “Why do Sula and Nel fail to reconcile their friendship before Sula dies?”
The black feminist lesbian, African aesthetic, and psychoanalytic approaches to Sula do warrant examination since each theory contains crucial and important assertions about Sula and Nel’s friendship. Still, each theory is only partial. An extended psychoanalytic discussion that incorporates Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” of personality development and Elizabeth Abel’s criticism will answer questions left by the other interpretations and create a more complete understanding of this complex friendship.
In “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith provides what she considers a black feminist lesbian interpretation of Sula. I prefer to call Smith’s interpretation just lesbian. While Smith lists some
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good principles of a black feminist theory and gives her definition of lesbian literature, she does not show the linear, or circular, connection between black feminist criticism and lesbian criticism.4 If Smith believes that black women’s literature and criticism must be distinguished from that of white men, white women, and black men, then it should follow that lesbian criticism must also be separated from black feminist criticism and thus be recognized in its own right.
After her discussion of black feminist criticism, Smith discusses lesbian literature and prescribes its meaning by referring to Bertha Harris:
If in a woman writer’s work a sentence refuses to do what it is supposed to do, if there are strong images of women and if there is a refusal to be linear, the result is innately lesbian literature.(175)
According to Smith, Sula is a lesbian novel because of Sula and Nel’s close, “passionate” friendship and because of Morrison’s consistent criticism of male-female relationships. Furthermore, Smith believes that novels like Sula are lesbian novels “not because women are ‘lovers,’ but because they are the central figures, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships with one another” (175).
I believe that this novel’s refusal to “be linear” may simply reflect a refusal to conform. Smith implies that Sula’s difference or nonconformity is lesbian, but she does not examine her examples in the context of the novel. Furthermore, a work that contains women as “central figures” in “passionate,” “pivotal” relationships is a feminist work in that it focuses on women. But this focus on women does not necessarily make it a lesbian work. Perhaps the confusion arises because Smith does not define the term “lesbian.” I think that the ultimate basis of a lesbian relationship or mode of thought is one woman’s sexual attraction for another. Although lesbian relationships need not be sexual, it is that initial sexual attraction that makes the relationship lesbian (not feminist or womanist) in the first place.
Although Smith is sensitive toward the intimacy of Sula and Nel, she misinterprets this emotional intimacy. The “bonding” that takes place is not necessarily sexual (which Smith continually denies and implies at the same time), but may simply show a commonality between the two women. Nel and Sula bond because they are drawn to each other. Both feel alienated from their families, especially their mothers, and thus bond as a way of supplying the emotional needs they do not receive at home.
In “African Tradition in Toni Morrison’s Sula,” Vashti Crutcher Lewis uses a different theory to analyze Sula. In this essay the novel is interpreted from an African aesthetic point of view. Like Deborah E. McDowell, Lewis argues that black critics look more favorably on novels that portray black people, especially black men, positively.5 Sula does not conform to the desired standard, however, because it is a novel that incorporates African names, the presence of the African ancestor, and traditional African religion into the plot. This approach identifies another complexity of the novel, the presence of the African (African-American) community.6
According to Lewis, an African interpretation of Sula would “clarif[y] much of the mystery of the novel for the reader” (91). While contemplating her relationship with Sula, Nel senses Sula’s spirit in the air and realizes that she truly misses her childhood friend. Lewis also notes that “[a]ccording to traditional African cosmology, spirits linger in the most remote and desolate places” (94), and thus Nel’s awakening to Sula’s presence may be attributed to an aspect of traditional African religion:
Feeling Sula’s spiritual presence in nature, her physical remembrance presses-down hard on Nel’s [sic] chest and she recognizes the spiritual love that she had had for Sula transcends the sexual and romantic love that she had felt for her husband, Jude.(95)
Lewis’ African aesthetic interpretation acknowledges the importance of the African (African-American) community, culture, and tradition in Sula. This interpretation also acknowledges the spiritual dimension of Sula and Nel’s friendship. This spiritual dimension is distinguished from the sexual
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relationship that Smith implies in her interpretation. Yet even though Lewis briefly discusses Sula and Nel’s friendship, her focus remains on Sula and Shadrack (African water priestess and African water god, respectively) and their relation to each other. The spiritual and African aesthetic interpretation explains Sula and Shadrack’s presence in the novel, but it only partially explains and examines Sula and Nel’s friendship.
I believe that a psychoanalytic analysis more thoroughly explains the meaning and significance of Nel and Sula’s friendship. Elizabeth Abel uses the feminist psychoanalytic theory to show “the importance of same-sex friendship in female identity formation.”7 One major assumption of Abel’s is that the movie media’s and fiction’s complementary portrayal of female friendships is misleading. Instead, female friendships are based on a commonality, a common psychological need that brings two women together (Abel 415). This psychological need is the need to develop an identity which results from female bonding. This bonding, according to Abel, “exemplifies a mode of relational self-definition” (414). As young girls Sula and Nel bond with each other:
They were solitary little girls whose loneliness was so profound it intoxicated them and sent them stumbling into Technicolored visions that always included a presence, a someone, who, quite like the dreamer, shared the delight of the dream.8
Thus, as Abel writes, “Through the intimacy which is knowledge, friendship becomes a vehicle of self- definition for women, clarifying identity through relation to an other who embodies and reflects an essential aspect of the self” (416).
Abel begins her discussion of female bonding by examining Nancy Chodorow’s approach to mother- daughter relationships. Then she discusses how the process of mother-daughter bonding is carried over into female friendships. According to Chodorow’s “object-relations theory,” in mother-child relationships the mother identifies more closely with the child of the same sex. Thus, because of this stronger identification, the daughter has difficulty establishing her own ego boundaries. The girl’s pre- Oedipal attachment to her mother is crucial in establishing her own sense of identity. In the Oedipal stage of development, the girl does not give up her attachment to her mother (Able 417). Later conflicts arise in the daughter between wanting to identify with the mother and being autonomous.
Abel asserts that Morrison establishes the basis for Sula and Nel’s friendship by writing of the alienating mother-daughter relationships which both girls have. In these relationships, the daughter struggles “to achieve independence from one’s [her] mother, frequently by devaluing her, without thereby devaluing one’s [her own] feminine identity.” Thus the need to separate from their mothers (who already alienate them) but still identify with someone in order to form one’s own identity draws Nel and Sula together and creates the basis of their friendship. Sula and Nel provide the “real alternative female identification” that each needs (Abel 427).
Again, this friendship plays a crucial role in the formation of Sula and Nel’s selves. This is a key assertion that addresses the complexity of the human psyche that Morrison portrays in Sula.9 While Sula and Nel are friends because of the common need to form an ego, they are still able to maintain their individuality in the sense that neither personality is restricted; neither self is disregarded. Abel sums up these ideas when she writes:
Friendship in Sula is both the vehicle and product of self-knowledge, the uniquely valuable and rigorous relationship. By combining the adolescent need for identification with the adult need for independence, Morrison presents an ideal of female friendship dependent not on love, obligation, or compassion, but on an almost impossible conjunction of sameness and autonomy, attainable only with another version of oneself.(429)
At this point I would like to add some of my own theoretical assumptions and expand on Abel’s analysis by including an interpretation of Sula and Nel’s relationship based on Lacan’s “mirror stage”
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of personality development. I acknowledge the commonality of Sula and Nel that Abel discusses; however I do not fully agree with Abel’s general argument against the complementarity of Sula and Nel’s friendship.10 I believe that Sula and Nel complement or rather complete each other. I prefer to view them as two halves of a personality that combine to form a whole psyche. In other words, Sula and Nel represent two parts of a psychological self: individually or apart, Nel is the superego or the conscience, and Sula is the id or the pleasure and unconscious desire of the psyche; together they form the ego, the balance between the superego and the id, and what is usually considered to be a single identity.
Jacques Lacan developed a theory of the “mirror-stage” of personality development, the stage in which a child first begins to develop an ego:
The child, who is still physically uncoordinated, finds reflected back to itself in the mirror a gratifying and unified image of itself; and although its relation to this image is still of an “imaginary” kind—the image in the mirror both is and is not itself. … [I]t [the child] has begun the process of constructing a center of self. This self, as the mirror situation suggests, is essentially narcissistic: we arrive at a sense of an “I” by finding that “I” reflected back to ourselves by some object or person in the world. This object is at once somehow a part of ourselves—we identify with it—and yet not ourselves, something alien.11
Lacan believed that one would “have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image. …”12 The reflection in the mirror causes the child to “misrecognize” itself and creates a “pleasing unity” that it does not feel within itself. According to Jeannette King and Pam Morris, “[i]t is misrecognition because the image is not the child; it offers an ideal perception of self with a completeness and autonomy the child lacks.”13 Jacques Lacan offers a similar view of the nature of selfhood: “For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify” (Eagleton 165).
Sula’s childhood relationship with Nel represents this “mirror-stage” of development. When Sula interacts with Nel, she sees a gratifying image that she can identify with, and Nel finds the same thing when she is with Sula. Sula’s “reflection” helps to “create” Nel’s identity and vice-versa:
Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers, … they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.(52)
Although I mentioned each woman’s identity, in actuality they do not have complete identities or egos unless they are together interacting with each other:
Except for an occasional leadership role with Sula, she [Nel] had no aggression. … Only with Sula did that quality have free reign, but their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s.(83)
This difficulty in distinguishing separate thoughts is a prime example of Sula and Nel’s interconnectedness. When they are together, Sula and Nel are one complete identity. Furthermore, each woman has partial feelings which combine to form complex human emotions. For example, when Nel decides to marry Jude, she is generally indifferent toward the idea. Sula is elated, however. Together, these emotions combine to form the happiness and anxiety that a bride-to-be experiences. Further, Sula is not jealous of Jude’s proposal to Nel because “she [Sula] seemed always to want Nel to shine” (84). Because Nel is Sula’s reflection, the attention she receives from Jude is reflected onto Sula: “In those days a compliment to one was a compliment to the other” (84).
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Nel and Sula seem to fall apart, however, when they become adults. The “mirror-stage” is pre-Oedipal. In the Oedipal stage, the father enters, signifying sexual difference. At this time the child also discovers language (Eagleton 165, 166). The child who emerges from the Oedipal stage—having “learned the lessons” of sexuality and language—“is a ‘split’ one, radically divided between the conscious life of the ego and the unconscious, or repressed desire” (Eagleton 167). Sula and Nel’s concern about whether or not Shadrack saw Sula throw Chicken Little into the river signifies their emerging consciousness of a father. The Oedipal stage and discovery of language for Sula and Nel occur when Shadrack says “Always” (62). The “split” between the two begins to emerge when Nel cannot supply Sula with an explanation for this word. Chicken Little’s funeral is the first time they are distant from each other: “Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each other during the funeral. There was a space, a separateness, between them” (64). Once this separateness is created, the division between the consciousness has been created. The development of this separateness allows Nel to consider marriage and life without the other part of herself—Sula. When Nel does marry Jude, she walks away from Sula’s reflection in the mirror and turns to see another reflection of herself in Jude: “And greater than her friendship was this new feeling of being needed by someone who saw her singly. She didn’t even know she had a neck until Jude remarked on it” (84).
Nel leaves Sula standing at the mirror staring into emptiness. As a result, Sula is forced to make her own reflection, her own identity, without the help of Nel. When Sula sleeps with Jude, she is attempting to connect with the other part of herself, Nel, by possessing something which Nel also possessed. Sula attempts to relive the days when the two girls were one, when they were “two throats and one eye” (147). When Nel finally confronts Sula about the affair and brings up the friendship that they once shared, Sula replies, “If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it” (145). Eventually, Nel realizes that she can not get Sula to understand her pain because Sula herself does not know why she had the affair: “Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys” (145). In other words, since Sula is the one left standing at the mirror, she remains in this “mirror-stage” as the id, or unconscious desire, with no ego, or self-control: “She had no center, no speck around which to grow” (119) because her center, Nel, had walked away from her: “She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing” (119). Nel and Sula can not reconcile their friendship because once they separate they come to exist on two different levels of consciousness. As a superego Nel can only comprehend the world in terms of right and wrong, and as an id Sula only sees the world in terms of her wants and desires.
Sula is not the only one who suffers from this separation of consciousness. Nel leaves Sula at the mirror and thus leaves the “mirror-stage” uncompleted. Without Sula, without the id, pleasure and unconscious desire, Nel loses her emotion and passion. In fact, during Sula’s absence from Medallion, Nel’s love for Jude “had spun a steady gray web around her heart” (95). When Sula returns, however, Nel’s emotions are rekindled. Her love for Jude “became a bright and easy affection, a playfulness that was reflected in their lovemaking” (95). Furthermore, Sula’s return to Medallion fostered both women’s return to their positions at the mirror and the reunion of the two parts of the psyche. For Nel, Sula’s return “was like getting the use of an eye back, having a cataract removed” (95). Thus, the conflict and dissatisfaction in each woman after their friendship ends can be attributed to the tension and psychological stress of not having a superego and ego for Sula, and an id and ego for Nel. Finally, years after Sula’s death, Nel realizes that it was not Jude that she missed but Sula, her friend, her id, and the other part of herself.
In conclusion, many novels, especially those of Toni Morrison, are complicated and intricate texts which require more than one literary interpretation. I believe my own interpretation of Sula and Nel’s relationship can be used as the basis for other interpretations. For example, many critics view Sula as a novel about the individual versus the community and its values. I would agree that many conflicts in the novel arise out of this theme. We should remember that the start of Sula’s status as pariah begins once she separates from Nel and their friendship begins to deteriorate. Sula’s status in the community as the pariah can be attributed to her existence as an id without her superego and companion Nel to
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help her understand the necessity of acknowledging the needs and feelings of others in the community.
Notes
1. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985): 168-85. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text and notes.
2. Vashti Crutcher Lewis, “African Tradition in Toni Morrison’s Sula,” Phylon 48.1 (1987): 91-97. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
3. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “The (US)es of (I)dentity: A Response to Abel on ‘(E)Merging Identities,’” Signs 6.3 (1981): 437.
4. When I use the term “lesbian feminism,” I am referring to the principles and theories of lesbian interpretations (or critiques) of literature.
5. See Deborah E. McDowell, “‘The Self and the Other’: Reading Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Black Female Text,” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, ed. Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: Hall, 1988) 77-90.
6. Barbara Smith does discuss the common experience of African-American women, briefly (175), but she does not reinforce this concept in her analysis of Sula.
7. Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs 6.3 (1981): 416. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
8. Toni Morrison, Sula (New York: New American Library, 1973) 51. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page reference only.
9. We should note that Abel’s psychoanalytic interpretation counteracts Smith’s assertions that Sula is a lesbian novel: “Because it is a freely chosen expression of self, friendship is a privileged relationship in Sula, implicitly contrasted to both parental and sexual bonds” (428).
10. Abel does acknowledge the complementarity of Sula and Nel in her reply to Judith Gardiner: “There are elements of complementarity as well as commonality in female friendship, as in all relationships, and the decision to emphasize one or the other is a function of one’s larger critical project” (“Reply to Gardner,” Signs 6.3 [1981]: 443).
11. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 164-65. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
12. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Ecrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977) 2.
13. Jeannette King and Pam Morris, “On Not Reading between the Lines: Models of Reading in The Yellow Wallpaper,” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 26.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2015 Gale, Cengage Learning Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition) Coleman, Alisha R. "One and One Make One: A Metacritical and Psychoanalytic Reading of
Friendship in Toni Morrison’s Sula." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 366, Gale, 2015. Gale Literature Resource Center,
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link.gale.com/apps/doc/H1100118454/GLS?u=lincclin_mdcc&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=6bd9dd0d. Accessed 25 May 2022. Originally published in CLA Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, 1993, pp. 145-155.
Gale Document Number: GALE|H1100118454