Toni Morrison’s Sula is a cautionary tale told in a panoramic omniscient point of view style in which the narrator is an all-powerful creator able to tell readers about her characters’ internal stimuli and visceral effusions.
In Sula, Morrison reenacts a black township during the era of segregation whose moniker seemingly is to live by Booker T. Washington’s clarion call to African Americans to start life from the bottom up and not the other way around. As a result, college education is the least of the folks of Bottom’s perturbation, and everything in the township seems antithetical to its ontological and teleological appropriation.
A meticulous reading of the novel also evinces it as fit enough to satisfy the paradigmatic structure and paragon of the Blues. Sula also brings to mind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” in which an attempt to efface Georgiana’s mysterious birthmark leads to her death.
In Sula, however, the opposite occurs. Ajax (Albert Jacks) merely thinking of having Sula’s birthmark effaced to turn her into a spotlessly beautiful woman leads to his death. Most of all, however, loud dreaming by characters in the novel is a specter that eerily portends and prefigures their death.
The first character who dreams aloud and leads to his death is Eva Peace’s last child, Ralph, also known as Plum. When Plum returns to Bottom from World War I in 1920, he is no longer the vivacious and energetic young man the town had known before he left for the war. Plum has become a casualty of the war, a statistic no longer useful to his family and community.
His spatial subjectivity is replaced by a state of nothingness, a state further ossified and intensified by his own helplessness. To redeem him from his helpless and hopeless state, Morrison makes him dream aloud to end his misery.
As the narrator points out, “Plum on the rim of a warm light sleep was still chuckling….He opened his eyes and saw what he imagined was the great wing of an eagle pouring a wet lightness over him. Everything is going all right, it said. Knowing that it was so he closed his eyes and sank back into the bright hole of sleep” (47). Indeed, everything was all right for Plum as Eva incinerates him after his loud dream to stunt his misery forever.
After Plum’s demise, Hannah firmly establishes herself as the next victim of her own loud dream. Before Hannah has her loud dreams, she is accused of scaling the boundaries of morality to flirt with others’ husbands, some of them her own friends’ husbands. Hannah has a conversation with her mother to see if she could solicit a legitimate reason from Eva for killing Plum.
However, the fierce courage and sheer bravado that apparently goaded her to place one of her legs on a railway line to be run on by a train to enable her to get insurance money to feed her three children, sagaciously place limitations on any desire she might have to divulge any information to her first child.
Soon after her conversation with her mother, Hannah is “struck by a sudden sleepiness; she went off to lie down in the front room….She dreamed of a wedding in a red bridal gown….” (Morrison 73). In an attempt to light a yard fire, the fire caught Hannah’s dress as “the flames from the yard fire [licked] her blue cotton dress making her dance” (Morrison 75).
Hannah dies from the fire in spite of Eva’s stupendous attempt to save her daughter. Again, Hannah’s notoriety for sleeping with the husbands of newly wedded couples compels Morrison to redeem her through death to save her from the vituperative invectives of the town folk.
Sula, the title character, is the next victim of loud dreaming. She returns to Bottom after a decade’s hiatus only to come and seduce the husband of her best friend, Nel. Sula’s penchant for picking men, including white men to sleep with, not because she loves them but to exercise her independence as a liberated woman, soon begins to irk the people of Bottom.
As a result, she is accused of witchcraft and branded as a harbinger of bad luck because of her stem rose birthmark. Because of the accusations and the deafening aloofness of her only friend, Nel, Sula seemingly is ostracized by the Bottom community.
Ajax capitalizes on her solitary condition to shower Sula with occasional gifts. In one of their love-making sessions, Ajax, in a stream of consciousness reverie, dreams of how beautiful Sula would look if her birthmark is removed.
Ajax dies soon after that, and Sula dreams of wearing a blue cobalt dress. After her dream, she falls sick, and following an excruciating pain, she dies not too long after. Eva becomes the last character to dream and die a lonely death in an old people’s home.
Clearly, loud dreaming is a narrative technique Morrison uses to foreshadow death in Sula. Dreams can be sweet and mollifying, but in Sula, to dream is to die. However, death is administered not as a form of punishment just to swell the growing numbers of the dead, but death devolves into a redeeming tool to provide salvation for Morrison’s characters because of their foibles.
Work Cited
Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Plum, 1982.
Samuel Doku - Samuel O. Doku is a full time lecturer at Howard University. Before switching professions, he was a seasoned journalist with the ...
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