Female Bonding

 Female Bonding

Dr Manisha Patil 

We read about Ajax and Achilles willing to die for each other but very little about the friendship of women and them having respect for each other like it’s something new. But black women had always had that, they have always been emotional life supports for each other.20

The main focus of the novel is on the friendship between Nel and Sula since childhood, through their adult years, not till the death of Sula but till Nel discovers the true value of that friendship almost twenty-four years after Sula’s death. In the chapter ‘1920’, Morrison presents Nel as the only child of a fastidious mother and absent father. Her father Wiley Wright, a cook on a ship, stayed at the port for only three days out of every sixteen. Nel’s mother Helene was born in south as the only daughter of a Creole whore. She was raised by her grandmother and kept away from the corrupting influence of her mother. The over-cautious grandmother married Helene of at a young age and social and economic security of marriage suited her well. Helene wanted to be as different from her mother as possible. So, she cultivated very dignified manners in herself and also raised her daughters to be obedient and polite. Like Geraldine in The Bluest Eye, her house was neat and well-ordered but devoid of emotions. Neatness of her house oppressed Nel. In contrast, chapter ‘1921’ describes Sula’s house a big, untidy and busy household overflowing with lodgers. Sula’s lame but influential grandmother Eva ruled this house. Eva gave shelter to many needy people like Tar Baby and three Dewey’s but burned her own son Plum. Hannah, Sula’s mother, though a widow had a steady sequence of lovers. Hannah’s unintentional yet offensive remark, “I love Sula. I just don’t like her” (57) made Sula detached from her family. As a result, although living in ‘a household of throbbing disorder constantly awry with things, voices and slamming of doors’ (52), Sula was as lonely as Nel sitting ‘on the silence of her mother’s incredibly ordered house.’ (51). Their familial settings have both similarities and differences. Both lived in predominantly female households marked by absent fathers. Yet their upbringing differed – Nel’s imagination was impeded by the stultifying restrictions of bourgeois white values while neglect suffered by a girl child in a busy household provided Sula the opportunity to ‘make’ herself. Nel and Sula’s friendship was based on the shared experience of black femaleness: ‘Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be. Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on. Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers (Sula’s because he was dead; Nel’s because he wasn’t), they found in each other’s eyes the intimacy they were looking for.’ (52) Despite the differences of their family background Nel and Sula were so similar that they became alter egos for each other. Morrison says that even before their actual meeting, they had first met in the dreams. “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.” (51) They shared every thought, feeling and experience. They even discussed and compared their encounters with boys and most important of all, their perfect friendship was untarnished by jealous competition for boyfriends. They were ‘two throats and one eye’ (147) (as Sula described years later) meaning though their methods of expressing themselves were different, essentially, they were one and the same. Nel seemed calmer, stronger and more consistent than Sula who was feeble but headstrong. That’s why when Nel was harassed by the white boys, Sula took charge and cut her own finger with the knife challenging the boys, “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” (55) Their ‘mutual admiration’ (55) had turned them into the mirror images so that even Nel acknowledged: ‘Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself.’ (95) However, their silent communion was so perfect and wholesome that no other form of communication was required. 

Sula lifted her head and joined Nel in the grass play. In concert, without ever meeting each other’s eyes, they stroked the blades up and down, up and down. Nel found a thick twig and with her thumbnail, pulled away its bark until it was stripped to a smooth, creamy innocence. Sula looked about and found one too. When both twigs were undressed. Nel moved easily to the next stage and began tearing up rooted grass to make a bare: spot on earth. When a generous clearing was made, Sula traced intricate patterns in it with her twig. At first Nel was content to do the same. But soon she grew impatient and poked her twig rhythmically and intensely into the earth, making a small neat hole that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig. Sula copied her and soon each had a hole the size of a cup. Nel began a more strenuous digging and rising to her knee, was careful to scoop out the dirt as she made her hole deeper. Together they worked until the two holes were one and the same. When the depression was the size of a small dishpan, Nel’s twig broke. With a gesture of disgust, she threw the pieces into the whole they had made Sula threw hers in too. Nel saw a bottle cap and tossed it in as well. Each then looked around for more debris to throw into the hole: paper, bits of glass, butts of cigarettes, unit all of the small defiling things they could find were collected there. Carefully they replaced the soil and covered the entire grave with uprooted grass. 

Neither one had spoken a world. (58-59) 

This grass play scene is an emotionally and sexually charged scene in the novel. Like Clarissa and Sally in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nel and Sula’s intense friendship contains at least the potential for romantic love. But breaking of Nel’s twig and her ‘gesture of disgust’ forecloses any such possibility. Similarly, their covering the ‘grave’ foreshadows the death of Chicken Little. ‘Sula picked him up by his hands and swung him outward, then around and around. His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water, they could still hear his bubbly laughter.’ (60-61)

The former incidents of Sula’s cutting her finger and the grass play throw another light on the killing of Chicken Little. Nel’s domain is that of thinking and feeling while Sula’s domain is that of acting. While Nel suppresses her impulse to act, Sula’s impulsive actions manifest Nel’s unspoken wishes.

According to John Duvell, what Sula’s act does at a literal level is to rid the girls of the unwanted male who intrudes on their play at a moment in their development when they stand between innocence and experience; that is they are aware of their budding sexuality though they have not yet experienced sex.21 Eva Birch sums up the communion of the two in the following words.

Sula and Nel develop an intimacy, which some feminist critics interpret as subconsciously lesbian...In adulthood both girls find fulfillment in heterosexual relationships, and even allow these to subjugate an emotional bond founded in the lonely interdependence and the shared dreams of girlhood. Together they discover sexuality in the tentative sexual invitations thrown out by boys. They also learn that as females they are destined to become sex objects in a hierarchical society, which assigns them the least important role. They grow into a world first fashioned for whites, then for males and lastly for black women. In a society constructed on racial and gender differentiation they discover that “all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them”. Their answer to these social realities is to establish a “something else” in a friendship so intense that, when Nel is threatened by young white boys, Sula, like Eva, is prepared to mutilate herself, cutting her own finger with the knife, with the warning, ‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?’ (55) This initiation into blood intimacy, which is traditionally associated with the initiation of men into brotherhood, is emphasized in a strangely sexual and ritualistic digging and filling of a hole, as if the girls are subconsciously anticipating an adult sexuality that they know will signal the end of girlhood. This communion of shared but unspoken knowledge is consummated in their joint complicity in the accidental drowning of a small black boy.22

This incident is a turning point in Sula’s life. For Sula, it is the second blow to her self-concept. The first one was overhearing her mother say, “I love Sula. I just don’t like her” (57), which made her aware of the hollowness of relationship. In the second case, her accidental drowning of Chicken Little introduced her to the inside nothing. These two incidents together taught her neither to count on somebody else nor to count on one’s own self.

Nel however thrived on the crisis. While Sula drowned Chicken Little, Nel watched. When Sula went to Shadrack’s house to enquire whether he saw it and possibly to ask for help, Nel hushed up the matter. It also marked Nel’s moving away from Sula. During the funeral, Nel stood apart from Sula. ‘There was a space, a separateness between them’. (64) Sula cried and cried ‘simply’ and ‘soundlessly’ but Nel afraid of being caught distanced herself from Sula (‘Nel and Sula did not touch hands or look at each other during the funeral’ [64]) and casted herself as the innocent victim (“Although she knew she had ‘done nothing’, she felt convicted and hanged right there in pew”. [65]) Once the coffin was buried Nel and Sula again came closer. ‘...the space that had sat between them in the pews had dissolved... as they stood there their hands were clenched together’. (66) However, Nel’s behavior foreshadows her deserting Sula and turning conventional.

In fact, Nel’s marriage to Jude is not the cause of Nel’s turning conventional, but rather result of it. The process had begun long back and by 1927 it was almost complete. ‘Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had.’ (83) As a result, though internally Nel and Sula were identical – having same thoughts, feelings and ideas (‘their friendship was so close, they themselves had difficulty in distinguishing one’s thought from the other’s... In those days, a compliment to one was a compliment to the other and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.’ [83-4]) – outwardly Nel’s ‘response’ to Jude ‘selected her away from Sula’. Nel herself was flattered by her unique status (as against shared experiences with Sula) and so prioritized marriage over friendship. (‘Greater than friendship was this new feeling of being needed by someone who saw her singly’ [84]). Though initially even Sula was excited over Nel’s marriage, during the reception, she realized that Nel had deserted her for Jude (Nel ‘raised her eyes to him for one more look of reassurance’ [85]). In response to Nel’s withdrawal, Sula left Medallion to explore herself as a separate person. 

Years back, as a ten-year-old girl, Nel had got her only chance to leave Bottom for a trip South to New Orleans. It was an exhilarating but fearful journey. Though it was her first intense encounter with racism in America, it was her first and last chance to break the mould and find her own identity. “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me”. (28) It is Sula who after Nel’s marriage went on a long trip for ten years and came back as an independent individual. However, the question remains, why did Sula return to Bottom? During those ten years, Sula had attended college but her main search was to find an emotional substitute for Nel. Unfortunately, there was no substitute for Nel and so Sula came back to reclaim Nel. However, during those ten years Nel and Sula had moved further away in the opposite directions. Nel had accepted the standards of Bottom and became ‘an angel in the house’ while Sula had refuted all those standards and so was termed as ‘bitch’ by the Bottom people. Nel and Sula, themselves unaware of the change in their perspectives, cheered up at the thought of renewed friendship but soon their differences become clear. Rachel Lee rightly points out that, ‘After Sula’s return to Medallion, she and Nel engage in familiar yet unfamiliar banter: “You been gone too long, Sula”. “Not too long, but may be too far”. “Want some cool tea?” (96) While the reader may variously interpret Sula’s suggestion that she has gone ‘too far’ (i.e. she has reached a different value system or has overstepped consensus boundaries) Nel doesn’t conjecture these meanings. Rather, the conversation turns to the distancing etiquette of proffered ‘tea’. Nel’s puzzlement over what Sula ‘means’ is in itself an oddity, for the two women’s history has been marked by an uncanny unison of thinking and movement that does not require words.’23

 Seen in the above light, Sula-Jude affair reveals another meaning. Nel conventionally regarded it as a betrayal and dispossession. She felt doubly wronged by both her husband and the best friend and the pain of this double injury was unbearable. ‘That was too much. To lose Jude and not have Sula to talk about because it was Sula he left her for.’ (110) Sula’s intention however was not to hurt Nel. ‘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. She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude. They had always shared the affection of other people, compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available and selected from among them with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close to.’ (119) Eva Birch says, ‘incapable of feeling possessive herself, Sula does not regard Jude as Nel’s possession, and views her own ensuring affair with him as a sharing rather than a dispossession. Nel however sees it as a betrayal, and both marriage and friendship are destroyed.’24

On Sula’s deathbed, Nel accused Sula of mistreating her. Nel asked Sula, “But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think about me? Didn’t I count? I never hurt you…We were friends…and you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away”. Sula counter-questioned her, “What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him, I just fucked him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” (144-5) 

Similarly, John Duvell also says, ‘Sula’s having sex with Jude, I wish to argue, is not a function of her interest in him per se or in men and heterosexuality generally but rather in her desire to better know her female friends desire.’25

Unfortunately, it turned Nel into an enemy. Then Sula again focused on herself and went on with her mission of making herself. John Duvell notes that, ‘Sula is an individual who should have but did not become an artist.’26 Morrison writes, ‘In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her carving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paint or clay or knew the discipline of the dance or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with him for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.’ (121) In lack of an art form, Sula turned her body into a medium. She used sex as empowering means of defining herself: ‘there was almost irony and outrage in lying under someone in a position of surrender, feeling her own abiding strength and limitless power’. (123) She was not interested in sexual aesthetics. Initially she considered lovemaking as ‘a special kind of joy’, then ‘wicked’, then empowering and finally as a means of ‘solitude’. Her coupling with men did not reduce but rather aggravated her loneliness. She started yearning for the ‘post coital private ness in which she met herself, welcomed herself and joined herself in matchless harmony’. (123) 

Then came Ajax who approached her as an equal. Years back he had shouted the word ‘pig meat’ towards Nel and Sula and they had experienced their first sexual excitement. Since then she was curious about him. Unconventional like Sula herself, Ajax too was aroused to curiosity by her ‘elusiveness and indifference to established habits of behavior’. (127) He did not bring any money to her but two milk bottles which he picked up off the porch of some white family. The bottles ‘looked precious and clean and permanent. She had the distinct impression that he had done something dangerous to get them’. (124) He also gave her the ‘real pleasure’ by talking to her. Apart from Nel, nobody else had respected her mind as Ajax did. ‘They had genuine conversations. He did not speak down to her or at her, nor content himself with puerile questions about her life or monologues of his own activities. Thinking she was possibly brilliant, like his mother, he seemed to expect brilliance from her and she delivered. And in all of it, he listened more than he spoke. His clear comfort at being in her presence, his lazy willingness to tell her all about fixes and the powers of plants his refusal to baby or protect her, his assumption that she was both tough and wise – all of that coupled with a wide generosity of spirit only occasionally erupting into vengeance sustained Sula’s interest and enthusiasm’. (127-8) Ajax allowed Sula to take up culturally masculine position (‘He liked for her to mount him so he could see her towering above him and call soft obscenities up into her face’ [129]) and imagine herself as an artist – sculptor. She imagined three layers of Ajax’s body – black gold, alabaster – which if removed one by one using cloth, nail, chisel and small tap hammer would ultimately reveal ‘the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs…I will put my hand deep into your soil, lift it, shift it with my fingers, feel its warm surface and dewy chill below… 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?’ (130-1) Here Sula gave free reign to her imagination associating Ajax with loam, herself with water and their communion as mud. However, her proportion of loam and water went wrong. In Sula-Ajax relationship, she tried to replicate two different relationships – first Nel and Sula and second Nel and Jude. In the first, she compared Ajax with Nel – someone who allowed her to be her authentic self and reflected it back to her in his/her own self. In the second, she tried to convert Sula-Ajax relationship into Nel-Jude relationship – two of them making one self. She discovered possession as ‘new and alien a feeling’. By possessing Ajax, he tried to possess Nel (by herself taking up Nel’s role of an ideal wife) and thereby her own self. However, when Ajax left leaving his only trace in his driving license which referred to him as ‘A. Jacks’ and not Ajax, Sula finally confronted the impossibility of creating a wholistic self by fusing self and other together. John Duvell comments, ‘In this gap opened in the phonetic misapprehension – a space between signifier and signified – Sula’s sense of the stability of both Ajax’s and her own identity dissolves, a moment that simultaneously calls into doubt Sula’s heterosexual relationship with Ajax as the grounding of her authentic self.’27 Here readers are reminded of Sula’s earlier discovery: ‘She had been looking all along for a friend and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman’ (121) 

The next meeting of Sula and her comrade Nel took place directly in 1940, when Sula was terminally ill with neither money to buy medicine nor anybody to take her care. Greeting Nel as if there had been no interruption in their friendship, Sula again challenged the accepted notions of the society which were now represented by Nel.

“You can’t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t”. […]

“You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man? […]I know what every colored woman in this country is doing [...] Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those red – woods. I sure did live in this world […] I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me”.

“Lonely, ain’t I?”

“Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondary lonely”. (142-3)

Their differing attitudes leave the reader, like Sula asking Nel if she is so sure that she was right. Rita Bergenholtz comments, ‘Toni Morrison clearly wants us to recognize that although Nel and Sula appear to be quite different – one the epitome of goodness and the other the embodiment of evil – they are also quite similar. That is, if Sula is evil for watching Hannah dance in pain as flames melt her lovely skin, then Nel is also evil for experiencing a sense of pleasure and tranquility when Chicken Little disappears beneath the water. (170) The “Wright” approach to morality judges an action evil only if it is witnessed by others. In contrast Morrison suggests that the distinction between good and evil is rarely so clear-cut as Helene and Nel suppose, consequently, there is some good and some evil in both Sula and in Nel. The most significant difference between the women might be that Sula accepts the fuzziness of moral categories with her usual good humor, whereas Nel refuses to look at the unacceptable aspects of herself, aspects which confound her clichéd thinking. In fact, Sula’s ability to laugh at herself may be her most redeeming quality.’28 Sula greeted even death with smile and thereby transcended it. ‘Sula felt her face smiling. “Well, I’ll be damned”, she thought, “It didn’t even hurt. Wait till I tell Nel”‘ (149) It is significant that Sula’s abiding thought at the moment of death is that of Nel and not Ajax as Sula had rightly recognized that ‘the other half of her equation’ is nobody else but Nel. Nel, however, blinded by her binary thinking, avoided the truth for almost 25 years. All these years, she stubbornly clinged to the misapprehension that she was good and Sula was bad. It is finally in 1965, when she went to the old age home to see Eva that she is forced to remove her blinkers and confront the truth. Eva bluntly asked her, “Tell me how you killed that little boy?” Nel tried to wash her hands of the matter saying, ‘I didn’t throw no little boy in the river. That was Sula”. But Eva insisted, “You. Sula. What is the difference? You was watched, didn’t you? Me, I never would’ve watched”. (168) Eva further emphasized, “Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you”. (169) Nel, for the first time in forty-three years, introspected, ‘Why didn’t I feel bad when it happened? How come it felt so good to see him fall?’ Then she realized, ‘All these years she had been secretly proud at her calm, controlled behavior when Sula was uncontrollable, her compassion for Sula’s frightened and shamed eyes. Now it seemed that what she had thought was maturity, serenity and compassion was only the tranquility that follows a joyful stimulation. Just as the water closed peacefully over the turbulence of Chicken Little’s body, so had contentment washed over her enjoyment.’ (170) This realization led Nel to other insights. She recognized that Eva was mean, town’s people were spiteful. (‘The same spite that galloped all over the Bottom. That made every gesture an offence, every off-center smile a threat’ [171]) and all the while she had missed Sula (‘All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude…we was girls together…O Lord, Sula, girl, girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’ [174]) Nel’s mourning for Sula completes the female bonding which reclaims the feminine as the balancing force in the 20th century racist, sexist and classist world. 

Dr Manisha Patil