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Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula

Diane Gillespie and

Missy Dehn Kubitschek

In the 1970s and 1980s, an explosion of creativity in Afro- American fiction has made famous Ernest Gaines, David Bradley, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, to name only a few. As the last three names suggest, this "second renaissance" of fiction has a strong female component. In these same decades, a new psychology of women has emerged, in part, through the research oif Nancy Chodorow, Carol Gilligan, and the Stone Center psychologists at Wellesley College. In that it fo- cuses on women's rather than men's experiences and derives its interpretative categories from women's own descriptions of their experiences, this body of research may be described as women-centered. These researchers have listened to and ana- lyzed women's voices; as part of this exploration, they have turned to literature by and about women, where emerging psy- chological conceptualizations of female development are, as Carol Gilligan notes, well represented ("Moral Orientation" 29). Women-centered psychologists have found caretaking and its associated values of empathy, affiliation, nurturance, and a col- lective vision of social life to be central to female experience. This new psychology of women challenges the traditional male idea of the self-in-relationship. In order to explore this self-in- relationship, women-centered psychology has privileged the continuing mother-daughter relationship, an important expan- sion of the male model of the self. This new paradigm in turn requires expansion.

As yet, most of the literary models used in women-cen-

20 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

tered psychology have been of middle- or upper-class Euro- American origin (for example, see Jean Wyatt's analysis of Mrs. Dalloway). Minority literature offers women-centered psychol- ogy another expansion of the female self beyond the Euro-Amer- ican mother-daughter or friend-friend dyad; Afro-American lit- erature often explores a self-in-community. The mother-daugh- ter relationship is certainly crucial in the development of the female self, but powerful social and economic forces affect that central relationship and female development as a whole. In their depiction of female characters, minority women authors delineate experiences and psychological processes described in the new women-centered psychology; they also challenge its lim- ited assumptions about self-in-relation.

Toni Morrison's Sula, a contemporary novel about female friendship, offers a view of female psychological development that defies traditional male-centered interpretations of female development and calls out for an expansion of the women-cen- tered paradigm. Both the novel's subject (minority experience) and its treatment implicitly critique the psychology's usual focus on the experiences of middle-class white women, who are often bound by conventional social relationships. Nancy Chodorow's theory of the reproduction of mothering, Carol Gilligan's work on women's moral and psychological development, and the continuing work of the Stone Center offer a paradigm through which to perceive the novel, while Sula's exploration of wom- en's experiences fleshes out the still emerging psychological schema of these researchers.

Sula demonstrates the inadequacy of traditional male-cen- tered psychology's idea of the self by showing that men raised to be autonomous, contained selves become alienated and un- happy; though the women's lives do not run smoothly, they are raised to be selves-in-community and, except for Sula, have more fulfilling lives. In showing these two modes of self-defini- tion, the novel anticipated the findings of women-centered psy- chology. Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering provided the basis which women-centered psychologists have since used to discuss the origins of gender-identity differences be- tween men and women. Significantly, although Chodorow ex- plores individual psychological development, her theory explic- itly rests on the social fact of women's having been the primary caretakers of children. Like Toni Morrison, she sees the con- struction of an individual, gendered self as the result of in-

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 21

escapable social context. In her groundbreaking 1981 essay on female friendship in

five novels, including Sula, Elizabeth Abel disputes the suffi- ciency of Chodorow's theory of the reproduction of mothering. Chodorow argues that, because women, historically, have reared children, boys have had to differentiate themselves from their mothers in order to establish firm gender identities. In contrast, girls have identified with their mothers, and the resulting at- tachment has established the basis for empathie understanding of others' needs and experiences. Critical to the girl's preoedipal experience is her mother's double identification. In "Family Structure and Feminine Personality," Chodorow states, "A woman identifies with her own mother and, through identifica- tion with her child, she (re)experiences herself as a cared-for child" (47). In addition, a girl forms her gender identity by ob- serving female role activities that are "immediately apprehensi- ble in the world of her daily life" (51 ). She does not have to re- press or reject this preoedipal identification with her mother in developing. Instead, she continues to identify with her mother and other women in her social world after the preoedipal period: "Sex role training and social interaction build upon and rein- force the largely unconscious development" (54) so that girls be- come relationally oriented.

In her analysis Abel identifies and describes a common underlying psychological process or emotional pattern that, she argues, transcends "the diverse cultural situations" of the sev- eral novels. She criticizes Chodorow's theory for overestimating the degree of mother-daughter identification and undervaluing the role of women's friendships in "fulfilling the desire for iden- tification" (418). In this framework, several of the friendships exemplify women's tendency toward identification as a source of personal growth. Sula, in contrast, exemplifies "the tensions generated by the conflict between identification and autonomy" (426); the novel highlights this issue of "ambivalence and sepa- ration" in female friendships (443).

Abel presents a thoughtful case for the importance of identification in female friendships, largely unexplored terrain at the time of her essay. Her approach, however, has a funda- mental weakness which limits her interpretation: Her analysis decontextualizes female friendship. The scope necessary for a psychological theory of engenderment has been the occasional subject of feminist critical exchanges. Literary critic Judith Gar-

22 Diane Cillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

diner pointed out immediately that Abel's analysis isolated Nel and Sula's relationship. Psychologist Harriet Lerner criticizes feminist psychoanalytic theory from a family systems perspec- tive which attempts to restore social context.

Overlooking the context of female friendship particularly distorts Sula, the only Afro-American novel in Abel's analysis. In liniiting her discussion to Nel and Sula, she assumes a priori that Sula centers on self-in-relation rather than self-in-commu- nity. The Afro-American tradition has, however, always been steeped in context, assumed self-in-community (Levine, Cen- ovese). Hazel Carby, for example, distinguishes the nineteenth- century Afro-American women's tradition in fiction from the Euro-American women's tradition on just these grounds: "But [Iola Leroy's] future was perceived as social, a transformed indi- vidual committed to a definition of self in relation to commu- nity" (75). Iola Leroy was, of course, long thought to be the first novel by an American black woman; Sula's immersion in social context partakes of a long tradition. Morrison refuses to privi- lege the individual fen:iale in relation to any particular other. For female residents of the Bottom, the self exists in relation to the entire community; there is no alternative.

Abel's exclusive focus on the friendship makes invisible or uninteresting two major components of the novel: first, the interaction of male and female perspectives and, second, the so- cial and economic influence on female identity. Relocating the critical focus fron\ the dyad of a friendship to this social context reveals Sula's exploration of the interaction between traditional male and female visioris of sociality and hence of the self. It rec- ognizes Sula's challenges to current women-centered psychology limited by class and race: What happens when rigidly held social conventions, such as those characteristic of the middle class, de- termine the course of female psychological development? What happens to female psychological development when poverty and racism intervene in the process of mothering?

Nel and Sula's friendship forms part of an interchange be- tween male and female versions of the community. A return to Chodorow's theory offers a means of analyzing Sula's presenta- tion of the traditional male vision of sociality. In her postula- tion of two very different gender-determined visions of the self, Chodorow concludes that "masculine personality . . . comes to be defined more in terms of denial of relation and connection . . . whereas feminine personality comes to include a fundamental

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 23

definition of self in relationship" (169), a perception borne out in Gilligan's In a Different Voice and Jean Baker Miller's Toward a New Psychology of Women. Because boys must successfully separate from the mother, individuation becomes the overrid- ing issue in the development of masculine identity, while con- nection and involvement with others are denied. Not surpris- ingly, then, male-centered developmental theories, such as those of Freud and Erikson, designate the achievement of separation as a prerequisite for intimate relationships.

Sula's narrator clearly finds this separation inimical to personal fulfillment, but she depicts male sociality, as she does female sociality, in the total social context of the novel. An in- terpretation like Abel's decontextualizes the girls' friendship not only from the other women in the novel but from the men also. A holistic interpretation of gender must admit and analyze Sula's interactive, transformative interchanges between male and female visions.

L The Male Vision of Community

Women-centered psychologists cast doubt on the assertion "that separation leads to attachment and that individuation eventuates in mutuality" (Gilligan, Different Voice 155). The narrator's depiction of male characters in Sula shares their skep- ticism. In achieving identity through maintaining distance, the males experience a diminished capacity for intimacy and inter- dependence. Nel's father's occupation becomes a synecdoche for his position in the faniily—rarely at home, he's "a seaman." When their relationships become troubled, BoyBoy, Jude, and A. Jacks^ leave Medallion. Such a need to distance themselves fits with Chodorow's assumption that "for boys, identification pro- cesses and masculine role learning are not likely to be embedded in relationship with their fathers or men but rather to involve the denial of affective relationship to their mothers" (177). In Sula, with the single exception of A. Jacks, men who do not physically remove themselves from their mothers or mother surrogates cannot maintain their identities. The Deweys' indi- vidual identities dissipate completely to merge into one, and they not only stop growing physically but remain boys in mind.

24 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

"mischievous, cunning, private and completely unhousebro- ken" (73). Tar Baby and Plum "lose" themselves in alcohol and heroin, respectively. In this women-centered portrayal, nearly all men are impoverished in their ability to relate to others. Separation "dislocates" men, dissipating the community; close- ness suffocates them, dissipating the self. In contrast to other male characters, Shadrack does participate in the community, al- beit from a distance. Unlike his Biblical namesake, Shadrack emerges from his inferno, WWI, neither personally nor socially triunaphant. He is alienated, "with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book . . ." (10). The community rec- ognizes his distance by considering him crazy. A self, "a grave black face" unconnected to anyone else, he alone of the male characters "struggle[s] to order and focus experience" (12) and in so doing stakes out "a place for fear" so that he can control it. His ordering principle. National Suicide Day, becomes a recog- nized ritual in the community.

Though Shadrack's degree of alienation differentiates him from the other characters, his thinking nevertheless shows two traits which Gilligan considers central supports for the male model of a completely independent and detachable self: an ex- treme respect for others' autonomy and an overarching abstrac- tion as the basis for all moral action. Shadrack only once directly interacts with another member of the community (with Sula, af- ter Chicken Little's death). The annual National Suicide Day pa- rade welcomes any participant but requires none; its form is fixed whether it involves only Shadrack or half the town. Shadrack thus lives a vision which requires nothing of others, a position which links him to the men of GiUigan's study: "By limiting interference, [men tend to] make life in community safe, protecting autonomy through reciprocity, extending the same consideration to others and self" (Different Voice 37-38). In expressing fear through his ritual, Shadrack fulfills his responsi- bility to himself; by allowing others to participate, he extends it. By remaining physically isolated, he cordons off aggression in himself and limits any possible interference with his own or others' autonomy. Shadrack thus sustains somewhat tenuous connections rather than severing them, as BoyBoy and Jude do; in absorbing this man and his bizarre insight, the Bottom co- heres as a community.

This alienation perhaps of necessity makes Shadrack's moral vision abstract. When Sula stumbles into his shack after

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 25

Chicken Little has drowned, Shadrack sees "the skull beneath" Sula's face—a truth which abstracts from the context of Chicken Little's death (with which Sula is preoccupied) to the human condition. Shadrack understands that the presence of death makes human connections fragile, ever-changing, dangerous, especially if one attempts to live in proximity to others. In this same scene the narrator sets the background for contrasting the morality of abstraction with the morality of social connection. Shadrack attempts to comfort Sula with a single word, "al- ways"—without further context, a cryptic abstraction of madden- ingly contradictory meanings. Sula, on the other hand, discov- ers Shadrack as an individual through an empathie response to his situation; unlike the rest of the town, she sees a neat, orderly, unthreatening person whom she dubs "Shad." Because she rec- ognizes him as an individual, her visit leaves an impression on him. As women-centered psychologist Janet Surrey might ex- plain, through Sula's presence, Shadrack recognizes his "need to be seen . . . for who [hej is and [his] need to see and understand the other with ongoing authenticity" (9). Shadrack treasures his only post-war experience of self-in-relationship.

Shadrack's impersonal truth transcends his social context until Sula's death, when the certainty of "always" crumbles and the narrator exposes the depth of his loneliness. Complete au- tonomy and its guardian abstract morality have been made bear- able by the complementary experience of being "recognized and seen" by Sula. Deprived of the hope of continued relationship, Shadrack cannot maintain his role. In the canonical American novel, Shadrack's type of independence, with its concomitants of alienation and abstraction, has been privileged; its accompanying loneliness has in fact been valorized (Chase, Baym). In the usual pattern, Shadrack's moral vision and its development would dominate and Sula's would recede. The narrator of this women- centered novel, however, portrays Shadrack's world view in a reciprocal interchange with a female vision of moral connection.

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II. The Female Experience of Community

As Chodorow emphasized the source of different male and female conception of the self, Carol Gilligan has traced the processes of this gender development. Complemented by Stone Center research, Gilligan's paradigm offers an illuminating vo- cabulary for a beginning discussion of Sula's female characters. At the same time, Sula delineates moral problems and paradoxes for which women-centered psychology has as yet no language, limited as it has been by its focus on the white middle class.

Working from interviews with women about moral dilemmas in their lives, Gilligan traces a distinctive develop- ment in the moral thinking of her female subjects quite different from that identified in dominant developmental theories based on studies of boys and men. Whereas the male models value individuality and abstract principles, such as "justice," which apparently safeguard it, the female voice emergent from these interviews speaks of the primacy of emotional connection and its preservation. Women's concern for this continuity leads them to exercise care in their interactions with others to make decisions not on the basis of abstractions but with regard to a par- ticular context. Outside of psychology, discussions of "particular context" have frequently used different terminology, "commu- nity" being the most common. The centrality of this concern to Afro-American fiction is apparent from Susan Willis's remark on "the single most common feature in fiction by black women writers: that of return to the community" (116). In her discus- sion of selfhood in Paule Marshall's 1959 Brown Girl, Brown- stones, Mary Helen Washington accents the contextual model and its implications for individual identity: "Selfhood is not de- fined negatively as separateness from others, nor is it defined narrowly by the individual dyad—the child and its mother—but on the larger scale as the ability to recognize one's continuity with the larger community" (159).

Women developing this ethic of care progress through three stages, Gilligan suggests, which are characterized by unique definitions of moral responsibility to others: first, an unsocial- ized selfishness; second, submersion in others; third, an authen- ticity in relationship. Self-centered and isolated, a woman in the first stage conceives of morality as imposed from without; in this unsocialized state, her primary concern is survival. In the sec-

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 27

ond stage, she selflessly immerses herself in other people; defin- ing morality by social conventions and traditional feminine goodness, she concerns herself with service. Selfishness is equated with immorality, with not "being good." In the third stage, a woman includes responsibilities to herself as well as to others, an inclusion which forms the basis for authentic emo- tional connections.

After Chodorow, most women-centered psychologists rec- ognize the preeminent influence of the mother-daughter rela- tionship, its quality an important determinant of the young girl's successful passage through Cilligan's stages of moral de- velopment. This primary relationship is widely recognized in feminist (or womanist, to use Alice Walker's term) writing and criticism (Christian, Walker and Rich). Several prominent Black women novelists have attributed their artistic successes to their mothers' and grandmothers' empowering influences (Washing- ton). These real-life stories, of course, embody the extraordinary rather than the usual life. Cloria Wade-Cayles speaks movingly of black women's ambivalences in reading fiction about the mother-daughter relationship, indicating that they are

often disappointed by the recurring image of the cold, distant and domineering mother. We want to see moth- ers embracing their daughters—loving them openly and unashamedly. We want to see mothers and daughters sharing laughter and bearing [sic] their souls to each other in moments of intimacy. And yet, we want the truths of our mothers' lives, even if those truths are sometimes 'cruel enough to stop the blood.' We must see them first as persons with dreams and needs no less im- portant than ours, and then as mothers who sacrificed their dreams in order to put our hands on the pulse of freedom and self-hood. (12)

Wade-Cayles's comment reiterates Chodorow's social concern: The social context of the mother-daughter relationship struc- tures female personality and relational capabilities. Toni Morri- son has consistently delineated the results of mother-daughter relationships damaged by racism and poverty. In The Bluest Eye, Pauline Breedlove psychically abandons her daughter Pecóla, who goes mad; in Song of Solomon, First Corinthians becomes whole despite her mother; the heroine of Tar Baby is a deraci- nated orphan; in Beloved, Sethe's household is haunted by an unresolved mother daughter relationship. Sula explores the

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mother-daughter experience in the Bottom's equivalent of the middle class, the Wrights' milieu, and in its poorest sector, the household of the young Eva Peace. Further, the novel's por- trayal of the mother-daughter relationships is firmly contextual- ized in the larger society.

Women-centered psychological interpretations of female experience emphasize the web-like nature of women's social re- lationships. The connections represented in the web, interde- pendence and affiliation, are critical to the emergence of a secure sense of female self. As Gilligan notes, "The ideal of care is . . . an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, tak- ing care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone" {Different Voice 62). Partially because male psychology and literature have denigrated women's caretaking roles as impositions on male autonomy (consider Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson and James Thurber), women-centered psy- chology has tended to reclaim caretaking by focusing on its em- powering, generative aspects. The dangers of a self-image based upon a morality of care, however, have not been extensively ex- plored from within a women-centered framework. True, femi- nist literary critiques of caretaking have often focused on the de- generative aspects of this role for the women themselves, their stunted personal or artistic growth. This criticism, however, has generally been rounded on conceptions of the self more in line with the independent male model than the self-in-relationship.

The greatness of Sula lies partially in its commitment to the complexity of women's experience of caring. Exploring the degenerative and generative versions of female morality, Sula exposes the paradoxes of women's individual efforts to partici- pate in the collective life. Predating Gilligan's work by eight years, Morrison's depiction of the Wright women's progression is almost a textbook illustration of Gilligan's critique of the sec- ond stage of women's moral development, degenerative good- ness. Sula simultaneously shows the development of empathy possible within such financial security—a condition for eventual authentic selfhood—and the hibernation of the female self in the middle class.

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 29

Wrighteousness: The Middle Class and Degenerative Goodness

Sula traces through the Wright women the complexities of the second stage of women's moral development. Taking on responsibility for others to the exclusion of the self, a woman with this perspective venerates the feminine conventions of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. As Gilligan states, "The woman at this point validates her claim to social membership through the adoption of societal values. Consensual judgment about good- ness becomes the overriding concern as survival is now seen to depend on acceptance by others" (Different Voice 79). The ten- sion between responsibility to others and responsibility to self, however, creates a feeling of duplicity in relationships, an "un- derground world" (53) where opinion and judgment are re- served. In reserving the self, the woman fails to develop her own adult voice. Without a reconciliation between femininity and adulthood, the conflict between self and other "cannot be re- solved. The 'good woman' masks assertion in evasion, denying responsibility by claiming only to meet the needs of others, while the 'bad woman' forgoes or renounces the commitments that bind her in self-deception and betrayal" (71). Women gen- erally cannot articulate these degenerative aspects of caring be- cause caring constitutes the whole social definition of their being good; they are psychically unable to forego social approval and to imagine alternatives which are "not good."

For most of Sula, the adult Nel Wright personifies the de- generate aspects of conventional female morality; her mother largely shapes this lengthy phase of Nel's development. Helene Wright epitomizes the immorality of conventional feminine "goodness." Her many social concerns are not genuine; rather, her unconscious aim is to control by "manipulating her daugh- ter and her husband" (16). When Helene smiles at the white conductor who has just insulted her integrity, Nel sees the "cus- tard" which social propriety masks. Helene represents the melt- down of the self that occurs when women unconsciously adhere to social convention. She is the spider "blind[ed] to the cobalt on [her] own back" (104), unaware of her own nature and capabili- ties. Helene fears her repressed self—for example, her "rage at the folded leaves she had endured" (23) after relieving herself during her train trip home. Her fear of the social truths of her past—her "much handled" mother, "who never said a word of

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greeting or affection" (23)—prevents her from developing a moral perspective. Acting from this fear, she stifles the threaten- ing development of her daughter's self. Her insistence on clothespinning Nel's nose symbolizes her powerful need to channel her daughter's development in socially acceptable direc- tions. Her ostensible attention to others' needs is motivated by her own need for social approval. This option of conforming through service is, however, available only to a woman with sufficient income. Eva, trapped with three hungry children and no money, must make a genuine sacrifice as opposed to Helene's bogus productions. Eva gives of herself, literally, to secure food for her children, while Helene feeds on her child. Middle-class status thus allows the development of patterns of caring, which, carried to an extreme, blind one to the authentic needs of the self. Poverty and racism, on the other hand, often prevent pre- dictable social patterns from developing or recurring, as the Peace women's experiences demonstrate.

From her mother, Nel learns middle-class self-righteous immersion in others. From the time that she meets Jude Greene, Nel embodies the limitations and paradoxes of such immersion. As Gilligan makes clear, this goodness, ostensibly freely offered to others, is in fact a bargain: "Childlike in the vulnerability of their dependence and consequent fear of aban- donment, they claim to wish only to please, but in return for their goodness they expect to be loved and cared for" {Different Voice 67). Nel's husband shows an awareness of this social con- tract, and his image of wifely subordination indicates one of its usually unspecified costs: "Whatever his fortune, whatever the cut of his garment, there would always be the hem—the tuck and fold that hid his raveling edges; a someone sweet, industri- ous and loyal to shore him up. And in return he would shelter her, love her, grow old with her" {Sula 71). The obliteration of the serving woman's personality becomes explicit in his compla- cent forecast: "The two of them together would make one Jude" (71). The marriage bargain breaks down, of course, when Nel discovers Sula and Jude having sex. After several years Nel con- fronts Sula with what she defines as Sula's betrayal, protesting, '"I was good to you, Sula, why don't that matter?'" (124). Sula's reply exposes the diseased motivation in Nel's reasoning: '"It matters, Nel, but only to you. . . . Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don't get nothing for it" (124-125). But the traditionally good woman expects some-

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 31

thing for all that she has given up. Nel's concept of goodness damages her and those she

serves. To ensure that her husband remains dependent ori_her goodness, that he needs her, Nel encourages his worst traits. Morrison's diction indicates her disgust with the male childish- ness and female manipulation engendered by this process:

[Jude] told them a brief tale of some personal insult done him by a customer and his boss—a whiney tale that peaked somewhere between anger and a lapping desire for comfort. He ended it with the observation that a Negro man had a hard row to hoe in this world. He ex- pected his story to dovetail into milkwarm commisera- tion, but before Nel could excrete it, Sula said that she didn't know about that—it looked like a pretty good life to her. (88-89)

Sula's humorous rejoinder that the whole world is obsessed with his privates makes Jude aware of a viewpoint other than his own and moves him toward self-recognition as Nel's cod- dling can never do.

When Nel discovers Sula and Jude on the floor of the bedroom, she approaches the acceptance of her own needs which characterizes moral maturity and authenticity:

Hunched down in the small bright room Nel waited. Waited for the oldest cry. A scream not for others, not in sympathy for a burnt child, or a dead fa- ther, but a deeply personal cry for one's own pain. A loud, strident: 'Why me?' She waited. The mud shifted, the leaves stirred, the smell of overripe green things enveloped her and announced the beginnings of her own howl.

But it did not come. (93)

Nel's inability to admit her needs and feelings takes a terrible toll. Deprived of her husband, Nel focuses on her children, and here too the narrator's judgment of traditional goodness is un- sparing: "But it was a love that, like a pan of syrup kept too long on the stove, had cooked out, leaving only its odor and a hard, sweet sludge, impossible to scrape off" (142). Or, again, Nel's overwhelming intensity toward her children is "bear-love" (119). Destructive because of its dishonesty, this love enables Nel to evade her responsibilities toward understanding her own ex- perience; consequently she preserves an immature and incom-

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plete saintly self-image based on a denial of her real self. Nel's submerged needs are embodied in a gray ball of fur

floating just outside her field of vision, and "that was the terrible part, the effort it took not to look" (94). Repression devours Nel's energy, but Morrison's portrayal, while sympathetic, nei- ther excuses nor evades Nel's motivation, which is cowardice: "It was so nice to think about their [her children's] scary dreams and not about a ball of fur. . . . It just floated there for the seeing, if she wanted to. . . . But she didn't want to see it, ever, for if she saw it, who could tell but what she might actually touch it, or want to, and then what would happen . . ." (94). The hair ball represents an extreme of the repression which Nel has practiced all her life to preserve a self-image of goodness which has a nasty flavor of complacency. Sula challenges this assumption with her deathbed statement, '"About who was good. How you know it was you? . . . I mean maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was me'" (126). At this point, self-deluded by a "vision of an innocence attained by the denial of self" (Cilligan, Different Voice 145), Nel cannot admit that Sula's point has any validity; preoccupied with her own goodness in overcoming selfish resentment of the betrayal, Nel glories in being the only woman in town willing to visit the dying Sula.

Eva's much later reiteration of the same idea forces Nel to a self-recognition because Eva includes specific details which Nel cannot refute. Again enveloped in a glow of self-approval, Nel visits Eva in the nursing home as an act of charity. Instead of conforming to the social conventions of being grateful for Nel's sacrifice, Eva rudely demands, "'Tell me how you killed that lit- tle boy'" (144) and refuses to accept Nel's disclaimer with '"You. Sula. What's the difference? You was there. You watched, did- n't you? Me, I never would've watched'" (145). Eva identifies the same image of passivity characteristic of the second-stage women of Gilligan's studies, women "drawn unthinkingly . . . by the appeal of avoiding responsibility by sinking [like Nel] into an 'ice age of inactivity'" (143).

Eva jolts Nel into remembering that she did in fact watch as opposed to merely seeing; that is, she did in some way enjoy the excitement of the event: "All these years she had been se- cretly proud of her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was un- controllable. . . . Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquillity that follows a joyful stimulation" (146). Immediately after this

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 33

recognition, she becomes very angry with Eva, considering her a bad woman, mean and spiteful. Her self-image has been shaken, however, and revisiting Sula's grave provides the psychic impe- tus necessary to her self-recognition and acceptance:

Leaves stirred; mud shifted; there was the smell of overripe green things. A soft ball of fur broke and scat- tered like dandelion spores in the breeze. 'All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.' And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. 'We was girls together,' she said as though ex- plaining something. 'O Lord, Sula,' she cried, 'girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.' (149)

In this scene, the last of the novel, Nel abandons the conven- tional fiction of her supreme attachment to her husband to mourn her greater losses, Sula's friendship and Sula herself. No longer oversimplifying her experience and denying her feelings and her own needs. Nel has the potential to attain moral matu- rity and enjoy authentic relations with others.

Nel breaks out of the conventional vision of goodness, which, in its preoccupation with propriety, fails to nurture truth- fulness necessary to relationships that clarify the self. Nel's so- cialization, however, does teach her to empathize with others so that she can serve them. Her capacity for empathy extends to situations that fit conventional social dictates—an older woman in a nursing home, children, a sick friend. Her empathy reaches its limit when another's actions are unconventional—a friend sleeping with her husband. Nel's early friendship with Sula provided her with an alternative vision of the good which, in Sula's absence, she could not sustain on her own—until the end. The models of women-centered psychology can comfortably ac- commodate the Wright women; the Peace women, however, in their experiences of poverty, challenge the presumed universal- ity of the self-in-relation model, as Sula insists on an expansion to self-in-community.

34 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

The Peace Women: Necessary Experimentation

As with Nel, Sula's relationship with her mother psychi- cally structures her conception of morality and self. In the Peace household three generations of mother-daughter relationships work out their responsibilities to themselves and others in non- traditional terms. Because these women are largely indifferent to social convention, they can articulate an honest self-in-rela- tion which avows responsibility for action; such honesty pro- motes mutuality that eventuates in self-knowledge, knowledge necessary to achieve the authenticity of GiUigan's final stage. In taking responsibility for their actions, however, the Peace women struggle with developing emotional connections to other people and to each other. They tell social truths that cut through illusory, fragile, or superficial cormections; these truths force redefinition of the self-in-relationship, as with the mothers who suddenly parent their children in Sula's presence. But in this process the Peace women fail to develop empathy, a capa- bility necessary to harness truth with care.

Unlike the middle-class Helene Wright, Eva does not turn to custard in order to survive, but maintains an integrated self- in-relation with other people. In the poverty which constructs her reality, the survival of Eva's children is constantly threat- ened, and her emotional connections with them are thus fre- quently heightened (hence the fiery nature of her relationships). Paradoxically, in order to deal practically with this threat, Eva must distance herself (hence the ice imagery which also charac- terizes her). In order to feed her children after Boy Boy's deser- tion, for example, Eva leaves town for eighteen months. This physical separation is sign and symbol of an analogous emo- tional distance, for Hannah asks at one point, '"Mamma, did you ever love us?"' (58). In indignant reply, Eva demands to know if she '"was supposed to play rang-around-the-rosie'" while her daughter was "'shittin' worms'" (60). To Eva, the knowledge that she made herself live in order that they might live should suffice without softer manifestations of love. Eva bequeaths to Hannah, and Hannah in turn bequeaths to Sula, a capacity for emotional distance which allows for the creation of a female self. Through Eva, Morrison delineates the paradoxes of a morality of care when self and relations are threatened by social and eco- nomic annihilation.

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 35

For much of her life Eva embodies and evangelically promotes conventional service to others. Thus, she sacrifices her leg for insurance money to feed her children and throws herself out a window in a vain attempt to smother the flames killing her daughter Hannah. Eva's efforts extend from her immediate family to the larger community. Indeed, Eva's house becomes a kind of extended family when she takes on the matri- archal role of demanding that the young married women room- ing there prepare timely suppers for their husbands and other- wise pay attention to conventional niceties. The house becomes a kind of social center for men, who leave intellectually and emotionally refreshed. Further, Eva takes in homeless waifs. In all these ways she becomes a corvnective force in the community, her traditional goodness a generative force for those around her.

The models of women-centered psychology do not yet in- clude this expanded caretaking which does not erode the caring self. The Stone Center researchers do, however, suggest an ex- planation for the fate of three of the waifs. Three boys of dis- parate ages, races, and temperaments under Eva's tutelage grad- ually merge into one entity. Seeing them in her house for the first time, when their differences are still evident, Eva names each one Dewey. Questioned about how others will be able to tell them apart, Eva answers, '"What you need to tell them apart for? They's all deweys"' (32). This chilling obliteration of indi- viduality permanently stunts the boys: Not only do they become physically indistinguishable, they stop growing at 48 inches and never learn toilet training. Like Sula's later attempt to manipu- late A. Jacks, Eva's mangling of the Deweys grotesquely parodies Nel's "good" treatment of Jude. This suffocation of individual- ity through a conventional maternal morality reinforces male fears of intimacy. Eva's care of the waifs, lacking an understand- ing of their individuality, lacks empathy, a crucial element in completing the process of female development.

Women psychologists at the Stone Center have just begun to elucidate the role of empathy in the morality of care. In work- ing out a psychology of women, they assume that the self devel- ops "in relation" with other people, that psychological growth occurs by "participating in and fostering the development of others" (Miller, "The Development" 13). In these researchers' view, "Relationship implies a sense of knowing oneself and others through a process of mutual relational interaction and continuity of 'emotional-cognitive dialogue' over time and

36 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

space" (Surrey 10). Mutuality and reciprocity in relations lead to an unfolding of intersubjective worlds in which the self is seen and clarified; in a sense, there is no self apart from relationship.

Critical in the development of the relational self is the ca- pacity for empathy, "the central organizing concept in women's relational experience" (Surrey 2). In "Empathie Communica- tion," Alexandra Kaplan identifies two dimensions in accurate empathie responses, the cognitive and the affective. Affectively the empathie experience is one of interconnection, "an interpén- étration of feeling" (14). Once one has perceived affective cues in the other, one "surrenders to affective arousal in oneself—as if the perceived affective cues were one's own" (Jordan, "Empa- thy" 3). The cognitive part of empathy recognizes that the self is separate from the other and from what has happened in the momentary identification. Both dimensions must coexist if "a genuine sense of understanding and being understood" (Jordan, "Empathy" 3) is to occur. The one experiencing empathy has her experience validated by the affective response from the other yet feels her differences accepted. As Jordan states, "Growth occurs because as I stretch to match or understand your experience, something new is acknowledged or grows in me" ("The Mean- ing" 7). But Eva's lack of empathy does not allow for growth or change.

Unlike Helene and Nel Wright, however, Eva maintains a self in her relations with others. Her autonomy and her inde- pendence of others' judgments rest on ability to perceive and admit truth about herself and her relations. Her morality, then, extends beyond conventional definitions of self-sacrifice. Re- maining within the network of her family, friends, and com- munity, she takes responsibility for her choices, a critical com- ponent of a morally mature vision: "To be responsible for one- self, it is first necessary to acknowledge what one is doing. The criterion for judgment thus shifts from goodness to truth when the morality of action is assessed not on the basis of its appear- ance in the eyes of others, but in terms of the realities of its in- tention and consequence" (Gilligan, Different Voice 83). Eva alone, of all the female characters, demonstrates this commit- ment to a sometimes very painful truth. Unlike Shadrack, who distances himself on the basis of his knowledge, she both weaves the filaments of the communal web and lives among them.

This truthful dimension of Eva's morality appears most strikingly when she discusses her decision to kill her drug addict

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 37

son Plum. Eva's shocking action has, in the absence of critical analysis of the psychology of caretaking, given rise to some odd interpretations. Philip Royster refers to "Eva's fantasy that her son. Plum, an alcoholic [sic] veteran of World War I, wanted to return to her womb" (161-162, emphasis added), while Barbara Christian calls Eva's homicide "presumptuous" and opines that Eva has recurrent dreams of incest with Plum (160). Critics have by and large simply ignored Eva's own rationale (for exceptions, see Faith Pullin and Elizabeth Ordonez). This rationale refuses to temporize about Plum's degeneration, a threat both to Eva's individual self and to the community of the household:

'There wasn't space for him in my womb. And he was crawlin' back. Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreamijig baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room enough in my heart, but not in my womb, got no more. I birthed him once. I couldn't do it again . . . and he'd be creepin' to the bed trying to spread my legs trying to get back up in my womb.' 62)

Eva's language hardly expresses sexual desire, nor does the metaphor of returning to the passivity of the developing fetus seem fantastic when applied to the parasitic junkie. (Plum has regressed completely; almost entirely passive, he becomes active only to steal from everyone in the house.) At his bedside, Eva identifies the contents in a soda bottle as blood and water—a birth image connected, of course, with Plum's attempted re-en- try. Eva claims that her own needs must be primary, that she cannot again take on the all-sustaining maternal role which she has already performed for Plum. Eva's refusal to accept an adult baby is reminiscent of Edna Pontellier's less articulate summa- tion in Kate Chopin's The Awakening that she would give up her life for her children but not her self. Eva's consideration of her own needs as well as Plum's indicates that at this point her connections are authentic, based on a solid self rather than the need to serve.

The critical disapproval of Eva's perception of Plum stems, we believe, not only from her action but from the critics' discomfort with the notion that extreme circumstances warrant extreme reactions to defend the individual self—Malcolm X's "any means necessary"—when that self is female. Although Eva's actions in sacrificing her leg for insurance money and

38 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

throwing herself out a window in a vain attempt to save Han- nah are as violent as her murder of Plum, they do not occasion the same attacks because they defend others, Eva's children rather than Eva herself. The critics imply that Eva's action arises from thinking characteristic of Gilligan's first stage, where all at- tention is focused on individual survival and amoral perception makes external punishment the only brake on behavior. Eva mourns Plum, however, before she burns him, grieving that her child's personality has died. Her consideration and her decision simply do not seem the act of a panicked and selfish individual lightly denying another's rights. Crucially, when Hannah asks why she has killed Plum, Eva does not lie. Unlike Nel, Eva forces herself to recognize the truth of her own needs, to act on them, and to communicate the truth when asked.

Of the three Peace women, Eva has the most capacity for authenticity in caretaking. The extremity of her early life as a caregiver forced her to recognize her own as well as others' needs. She neither leaves the community permanently nor compromises herself in her relation with others. In large mea- sure she dictates the terms of social life in the community for young married couples, the Deweys, and the men who come to court her. Only Sula is sufficiently independent to rebuff her prescriptions. When Eva asks Sula about plans to marry and have children, Sula replies, '"I don't want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.'" Eva inveighs with the verdict used against women who do not conform: '"Selfish. Ain't no woman got no business floatin' around w îthout no man.'" Iron- ically, as Sula points out to her, "You did" (80). And in fact Eva has, like her daughter Hannah and now her granddaughter, made herself without depending on others, but at the expense of supportive emotional connections that allow for the expression of a full range of inter subjective experiences.

Whereas Nel must distance herself from her mother's dominance and shallow social vision to gain her identity, the Peace daughters must find some way to connect with each other, to close distances between them that vary with the generations and have variant effects. Although Hannah is not a fully devel- oped character, the reader notices a continuity between Eva and her daughter—after her husband Rekus's death, Hannah es- chews a definite commitment to any one man. She does, how- ever, move back into Eva's house "to take care of it and her mother forever" (35), precisely the commitment which Sula re-

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 39

fuses both when her mother burns and when she sends Eva to the nursing home. This difference may reflect Hannah's and Sula's divergent experiences with their mothers. Hannah may have been in doubt about Eva's feelings for her, but Sula learns early the true state of her mother's affections, having overheard Hannah say that she loves her but cannot like her. This rejec- tion unfits her for conventional female morality, which as- sumes that care irrevocably connects individuals through em- pathie understanding. The distance between Peace mothers and daughters in Sula, then, allows the daughters considerable free- dom in creating a self, but it restricts the daughters' capacities for emotional nurturing, empathy, and connection.

A true ethic of care, in women-centered psychology and moral development, requires reciprocity between the person cared for and the person who cares. Eva rarely experiences being cared for, i.e., being interdependent; generally, she performs the caring activities, i.e., is depended upon. As she withdraws more and more, her daughter and granddaughter learn few caretaking skills. The clumsiness of the untrained caretaking impulse is noticeable in one of the few links between Eva and Sula: As Eva sacrifices her leg to feed her children, so Sula slashes her finger to protect Nel, but Eva's desperate solution is appropriate to des- perate circumstances while Sula's is wildly disproportionate to the threat—ordinary means are simply not part of Sula's vocab- ulary because she has not experienced traditional care. Urüike Nel, who has inherited from her mother what Gilligan terms "the conventional feminine voice" (Different Voice 79), Sula has inherited an unconventional feminine voice for which there is no consistent, understanding audience. As a result of growing up in Eva's chaotic household where she is "never scolded or [given] directions," Sula "could hardly be counted on to sustain any emotion for more than three minutes" (45). Sula will thus have difficulty in sustaining connections, a difficulty foreshad- owed when Chicken Little, having "slipped from her hands" (52), drowns. This inability to experience connection is most ob- vious in Sula's experience of sex, which she pursues in order to feel most intensely her loneliness and isolation. Although free, Sula lacks nurturance and the training to care for others, experi- ences which could give her freedom connected meaning. Morri- son clearly identifies the two most formative events for Sula as hearing Hannah's avowal of dislike for her and losing Chicken Little's grip: "The first experience taught her there was no other

40 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either" (103). Sula thus lacks both the terms necessary to any ethic of service; without either a coherent self or a consis- tent other, the exchange of caring cannot exist. Sula's moral voice develops out of a shock of recognition of her separateness from others. Unlike Nel, who cannot differentiate sufficiently (first from her mother and later from her children), Sula experi- ences fortified boundaries, both with her mother and with the community as a whole. Thus the intersubjective worlds of other women do not unfold for Sula, except, of course, briefly during her relationship with A. Jacks and more continuously in her adolescent relation with Nel.

Women-centered psychology has discovered the impor- tance of empathy and described the process of its growth; its next task is to confront the effects of poverty and racism on caretaking and its necessary precursor, empathy. Morrison's social vision does not, however, show poor women as crushed, with nothing to offer, even if they are not empathie. In fact, partially because poverty has forced social experimentation and made conven- tional falsities impossible, poor women may provide middle- class women (and researchers) with impetus toward self-recogni- tion. Their unconventional voices do not, in Morrison's view, become masculine: Unlike BoyBoy and Jude, Eva returns for her children; unlike Shadrack, Sula returns to Nel. The unconven- tional female voice remains essentially female—and essential.

III. Nel and Sula:

Mutually Creative Selves-in-Relation

The friendship between Sula and Nel in many ways nur- tures both girls by supplying the lacks in their mother-daughter relationships. Nel, for example, finds support for her nascent separation from her mother: Basking in Sula's approval, she stops using the clothespin which her mother hopes will reshape her "too-broad" nose. Sula, on the other hand, finds compan- ionship to replace the distance in her family; Nel sees her fully. The attachment to Nel prevents Sula from operating totally out of unsocialized selfishness, Gilligan's first stage. Without Nel, she would be, to use Gilligan's terms, "constrained by a lack of

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 41

power that stems from feeling disconnected and thus, in effect, all alone" {Different Voice 75). Although Sula considers Nel and herself identical, Nel is at crucial moments aware of their boundaries. When Sula sacrifices the top of her finger to scare off hoodlums frightening the two girls, Nel notices as they walk away that Sula's face is "miles and miles away" (47).

In their childhood friendship, Nel's and Sula's antitheti- cal strengths and weaknesses assure them mutual dependency and thus equality of participation. Sula's preservation of her self allows Nel to limn boundaries between herself and her mother; in turn, Nel's attention to details of connection and her calm consistency allow Sula's rigid boundaries to become more fluid, as when they work together digging holes in the earth or when Sula empathically discovers "Shad." In describing the relation- ship, the narrator points to the development of individuality necessary to any moral maturity: "In the safe harbor of each oth- er's company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things" (47). After identifying with each other in the areas they define as fun- damental (Abel), they, nevertheless, complement each other in a way which anticipates the possibility of a mature moral vision; both Sula's freedom of self-expression and Nel's consistent re- gard for others are necessities for authenticity. Their friendship empowers them until the end of their adolescence, when care- taking must be extended to the adult world of love and work.

This marvelous friendship does not exist in a social vac- uum, however, and just as the girls' images of themselves are modified by the surrounding society, so is the course of the friendship. Although Sula and Nel value each other highly, they realize that their valuations are eccentric—they know that they are not white or male, the social elites. As the surrounding society beam in, they internalize social contempt. While buying ice cream, they are deemed "pig meat" (43), a phrase replete with the ambiguous compliments of a sexist society. Afterwards, they dig circular holes with sticks, enlarge the holes so that they join in a larger circle, and then fill the entire "grave" with trash (50). The scene shows clearly their subconscious recognition of their femininity in their construction of the yonic symbols and their conception of themselves as one (either defined by gender or joined sexually—for an interpretation of Sula as a lesbian novel, see Barbara Smith). Unfortunately, they cannot rejoice in this unity; their actions recreate the social trashing of their female

42 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

identity. The surrounding society impinges on the friendship in another way. Nel's conventional response to Jude causes her first lasting divergence from Sula, who has not been trained in the usual ways of keeping a man. In a heterosexual society, Nel is expected to refocus her commitments from her female friend to her husband, an expectation so strong that Nel thinks for years that she has done so.

The primary force that raptures the friendship is not the direct impact of the surrounding society, however, but Nel's and Sula's conflicting modes of moral perception. The confrontation occurs in a particularly damaging way because neither woman is aware even of potential divergence. Nel thinks that talking with Sula has always been like talking to herself (82), while Sula thinks of "Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self" (103). In Sula's ten-year absence, Nel has developed into the very conventional feminine voice "proclaiming its worth on the basis of the ability to care for and protect others" (Gilligan, Dif- ferent Voice 79) for which her family has trained her. Sula, in contrast, has learned to take care of only herself and to take re- sponsibility for her actions. Working from this conceptual framework of independence, Sula objectively evaluates degener- ative goodness in a critique resembling Gilligan's description of women in the second stage of moral development. Although Sula has not learned conventional caretaking behaviors, she has "scrutinize[d] the logic of self-sacrifice in the service of a morality of care" (Gilligan, Different Voice 82), a capacity critical to au- thenticity, in which "the morality of action is assessed not on the basis of its appearance in the eyes of others, but in terms of the realities of its intention and consequence" (83). Sula's lack of in- terest in social appearance unfits her for social conversation "be- cause she could not lie" {Sula 105). Significantly, among the lies that she cannot tell are those denying the costs of women's self- sacrifice in their service to husbands and children (105).

Some truths also escape her, notably, the possibility of au- thentic connections in which neither individual is forced to mirror the other. Thus, Sula cannot conceive of the possibility of hurting Nel if Sula herself is pleased, and she has sex with Jude with no idea of the likely consequences to her friendship with Nel. Nel, on the other hand, sacrifices her real feelings for those socially expected and earns Sula's disgust for her dishon- esty. As Gilligan notes of the two modes of self-definition, "These divergent constructions of identity, in self-expression or

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 43

in self-sacrifice, create different problems for further develop- ment—the former a problem of human connection, and the lat- ter a problem of truth" {Different Voice 157). Nel joins with the community to view Sula as a "pariah" (105), a "selfish" woman who has only her own interest at heart. Sula, for her part, judges Nel as "one of them. One of the spiders whose only thought was the next rung of the web. . . . It had surprised her a little and saddened her a good deal when Nel behaved the way the others would have" (103-104). Exposing both modes of perception to the scathing critique of the other, Morrison refuses to sentimen- talize or deny their inherent limitations: Both necessary to au- thenticity, they remain in their isolated states, destructive to both themselves and their community.

Nel's rejection of Sula is a microcosm of the community's rejection, for the Bottom's judgment of a woman living an ex- perimental life is severe. Sula's functions as scapegoat (Royster) and as negative definition for the community (Christian, Ogun- yemi, PuUin) have often been the subject of critical commentary. The quality of life in the community improves when Sula be- comes the embodiment of a threatening evil and individuals unite to defend themselves. The community might, however, have adopted another means of incorporating Sula, that of lis- tening to her insights. Instead, Sula's actions speak louder than her words; that is, the community reacts to its definition of her actions while her voice, speaking its radical re-definition of her own acts and those of others, remains inaudible. As Nel reflects in remembering Sula's effects, Sula "simply helped others define themselves" (82).

The community cannot listen to Sula because she does not care for it, either literally or figuratively. Sula's general fail- ure to develop empathy—temporarily accepting another's per- spective as one's own—leaves her moral vision incomplete and inaccessible to the community. Remaining incapable of em- pathizing with real individuals (the trapped Nel, the aged and ill Eva, Hannah on fire), Sula weeps instead "for the deaths of the littlest things" (106), like children's cast-off shoes and wedding rings in pawn shops, sentimental representations unconnected to known individuals.

Empathy by itself, of course, does not guarantee the in- tegrity of a moral system or its use to the community. Without reciprocity, it becomes a tool of pity or venom. As Nel's degen- erative goodness clearly indicates, empathy may be used to bind

44 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

another in dependency. In one of her few empathie moments, during her relationship with A. Jacks, Sula feels "flooded with an awareness of the impact of the outside world on Ajax" (115). Instead of using this insight to understand his subjective truth, though, Sula says the fatal "'Lean on me'" (115). When A. Jacks bolts from this blatant attempt to violate his independence and make him into another Jude, Sula recognizes her own failure, as Nel never does: "T did not hold my head stiff enough when I met him and so I lost it just like the dolls'" (117). Earlier Sula muses on women's difficulties with emotional boundaries while making love with A. Jacks: "I will water your soil, keep it rich and moist. But how much? How much water to keep the loam moist? And how much loam will I need to keep my water still? And when do the two make mud?" (113). Caring or oth- ers, whether individually or communally, requires a giving of one's self and "selfless" effort to experience with the other, yet these very acts can both entrap the self in the "restriction [they] impose on direct expression" (Gilligan, Different Voice 79) and exploitatively convert the vulnerability of another into depen- dency. Moral authenticity requires both truth and empathy. Without truth, degenerative goodness coopts empathy in the service of control. Without empathy, truth destroys the possibil- ity for connection.

Morrison's exploration of the female voice struggling to- ward maturity and authenticity climaxes in Sula and Nel's dis- cussion at Sula's deathbed. There they confront the limitations of their respective moral visions. Frightened by Sula's detach- ment, even in the face of death, Nel is unable to hear Sula's truth; irritated by Nel's self-sacrifice in the name of conven- tional goodness, Sula fails to appreciate Nel's pain. In their final actions, Sula and Nel openly and reciprocally care for the other in a recognition of interdependence: After Sula dies, her first thought is to tell Nel of the experience; years after Sula's death, Nel feels her presence and makes a crucial step toward authen- ticity. The emotional connections between Sula and Nel tran- scend the hostility of their immediate society and the vagaries of their conflicting moral perceptions. Death cannot sever the only genuine emotional connection which Sula experiences, nor can it obliterate the influence which moves Nel toward authentic emotional and moral maturity.

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 45

IV. Collaborative Conclusions:

Toward Selves-in-Community

In Sula the moral work of the women caretakers—work ignored or devalued by the male world—sustains both personal and community identity. Yet as the tunnel scene suggests, none of the conventional caretaking has prevented damage to indi- viduals or ultimately obliteration of the Bottom community. Unlike Sula, Nel, and Shadrack, many in the Bottom hoped for someone else to save them from the grips of racism and poverty. (For discussion of this passivity, see Lounsberry and Hovet.) T'hus, conventional caretaking encouraged passivity rather than mature activity: Hoping for abatement of their pent-up anger, the townsfolk crawl into the tunnel-womb, and like Plum in his desire to retreat to the safety of total dependency, they suffocate. However, Nel's final synthesis of the two necessary constituents of authentic selfhood, empathie caring and self-assertion, argues for actual individual growth and potential interdependence among members of a community. Morrison hopes to create a different community, one composed of the readers of her novels ("Rootedness" 341). Thus, the exchanges between women-cen- tered psychologists, minority women writers, and readers of both might constitute the speech of a new community.

Significantly, this community is not solely female. Sula shows damage done to both male and female characters: the iso- lated Shadrack and Jude, the conglomerated Deweys, the melted Helene, the lonely Sula. Furthermore, A. Jacks and Nel, the only two successfully integrated personalities, represent both genders. The end of the novel, often read solely as Nel's recog- nition of her bond with Sula, in fact also shows a continuing dia- logue between male and female points of view: Just before Nel's recognition, she passes Shadrack (the male who reminds her of Sula); just before she articulates her insight, she smells "overripe green things," surely a reference to Jude Greene. Female bonds do not exist in isolation but in a community which necessarily includes men.

Both the community within the book and the community of readers outside the book communicate in an erratic and flawed manner, of course—witness the broken relationships of the novel, on the one hand, and the gap between women-cen- tered models of middle-class white female development and

46 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

Eva's experiences, on the other. Morrison demonstrates how much she values these attempts at communication, however, by contrasting the imperfect community of the Bottom with its re- placement, the archetypal symbol of white suburbia—the golf course. Nel recognizes the loss when she thinks, "Maybe it had- n't been a community, but it had been a place. Now there weren't any places left, just separate houses with separate televi- sions and separate telephones and less and less dropping by" (143). This separation has resulted from the monologue of the controlling voice in the Western social context, a male defini- tion of sociality in search of abstract principles to guarantee indi- vidual autonomy and freedom. Morrison suggests that dialogue with the female perspectives of self-in-relation and self-in- community will both empower women and offer a chance for stronger communities. The dialogue between women writers and women psychologists, therefore, not only elaborates theoret- ical moral perspectives for women's experiences, but also takes on particular urgency in a society operating largely on abstrac- tion, separation, and detachment.

Note

^ In a crucial scene, Sula discovers from his driver's license that the man whose name she has always heard as "Ajax" is in fact named "A. Jacks." The novel offers some justification for literary critics' unanimous choice to use "Ajax"—"Ajax" occurs not only in Sula's consciousness but once in the narrator's usage after Sula's death (page 139 lists among the victims of the tunnel disaster "some of Ajax's younger brothers"). Morrison often depicts the interaction of myth with quotidian reality, and in The Bluest Eye the myth is specifically Greek. The mythological implications of "Ajax," however, seem a poor fit with this character, who does not resemble either of the Iliad's two Ajaxes. Barring the discovery of another Ajax to offer enriching characterization, then, the critics' preference for "Ajax" ignores Sula's discovery.

On the large scale, this usage obscures Morrison's exploration of ambi- guities in language; on the smaller, it devalues Sula's self-examination and screens Morrison's connection of Eva and Sula. Morrison begins here a concern which figures more prominently in her next novel. Song of Solomon (the double meanings of "You can't just fly off and leave a body" and "Sing"). The whole in- cident offers a fascinating opportunity for discussing the complex interactions of oral and print traditions: Sula accepts a printed document's correction of her oral understanding of her lover's name, but that oral understanding was based on the printed version of an originally oral epic poem.

Within the context of Suia's characterization, "A. Jacks" underlines the limitations of both Sula's and Eva's characters. Contemplating why she

Who Cares? Women-Centered Psychology in Sula 47

has lost her connection with Albert Jacks, Sula considers her misidentification of his name as emblematic of her inability to know and respect his true self. As this essay argues later, Eva's misnaming of the Deweys indicates a similar failing, her inability to perceive and value their separate selves.

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48 Diane Gillespie and Missy Dehn Kubitschek

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pdf for articles to choose/document(2).pdf