Clara Boothby, 2nd Half of Sula

            Having so recently read Passing with the dichotomy of Irene Renfield and Clare Kendry, I was tempted to categorize Sula and Nel’s friendship as another pairing of opposites.   I could have simply pigeonholed Nel as the equivalent of Irene, the family-oriented, lady of bourgeois society, and Sula as Clare, the homewrecker with no emotional connection to family.  At the end of Sula’s life, even Nel sees herself as Sula’s polar opposite as she argues bitterly with Sula who is on her deathbed.  Nel insists that Sula wouldn’t be selfish if she was a mother (142) and she takes a shot at Sula for being unable to “keep a man” (143) in the same ways that Irene accused Clare of being selfish and laughed at her sham of a marriage. 

But if I had taken that perspective, this journal entry would have been a great deal shorter and more boring.  The strange thing about Sula is that it wouldn’t let me neatly categorize Nel and Sula as I’d been able to do with Irene and Clare.  Interestingly, the Sula gave Nel in response to her condemnation echo some things that Nel had thought herself earlier in life.  For example, Sula is proud of owning herself and says, “Girl, I got my mind. And everything that goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me” (143). Sula’s independence and embrace of self flies in the face of Medallions conventions as they are voiced by Nel.  The independent Sula does not keep a man, like the rest of the women of medallion, nor does she want to; the independent Sula is not lonely, even when she has no one but herself, because she finds her own mind to be a satisfying companion. 

 But as Nel was commenting that Sula must get lonely without any connections to husband or family, Nel forgets that as a young girl, she had been delighted by the idea that she only belonged to herself, “‘I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel, I’m me. Me.’ Each time she said the word me there was a gathering in her, like joy, like power, like fear” (28). Nel loved the freedom of being detached from her mother and grandmother, and was empowered by the knowledge that she was herself.  This old declaration of self from Nel’s childhood is sharply contrasts her condemnation of  Sula’a satisfaction with owning only her own mind.  If Nel’s childhood hides the same declaration of “Me-ness” that she scorns as an adult, I have to question if Nel was really meant to be cast as Sula’s opposite.  Although Nel’s words make her sound like another upright woman who follows Medallions’ conventions, her actions cast a subtly Sula-like attitude.  The way Nel’s children are barely mentioned in the narrative indicate that she is somewhat detached from them. After Jude commits adultery and leaves her, Nel is unable to cry for her husband, and later she finds that she never missed him to begin with.  It is Sula who Nel discovers she had missed the whole time.  Nel was more like Sula than she was ever like the family oriented woman she appeared to be.  Nel’s image as a good mother and wife was a façade that her upbringing had imposed on her, as Sula tells her, “But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is someone else’s. Made by someone else and handed to you. Ain’t that something, a secondhand lonely” (143).

Sula is a book that challenges the reader’s belief that the world is divided into extremes, so there must be more behind Nel’s relationship with Sula than the shallow interpretation that Nel and Sula represent complete opposites.  Once Nel discovers that she was more like Sula than any other woman in Medallion, she muddles the seemingly distinct roles of the upright woman and the renegade.