Narolyn
Mendez
Sula
Reading a novel by Toni Morrison is similar to being a
detective in how you have to search for the meaning that is attached to a
sentence or passage. Sometimes you’re forced to read a passage or sentence
multiple times because of the complexity and significance her analogies and
metaphors carry. They’re filled with so much meaning that so much is intended
without blatantly saying so. Morrison uses adjectives to describe a scheme of
feelings, situations, relationship and people in ways that are almost
unimaginable. While reading Sula,
Morrison’s unique style and one of a kind and uncommon descriptions by way of
adjectives and analogies is very much evident and dominant from page to page.
At
times she presents events that although the reader knows is loaded with meaning
is not very clear until further explanation is given. An example of this is
Eva’s killing of her son Plum. All the trouble of picking up her own weight and
going down the stairs with one leg on crutches does not make any sense until
she sets him on fire. Naturally the shocked feeling of how a mother could
possible commit such a monstrous act leads way to many questions. A mother is
the person that usually is responsible to give a person life and taking it away
seems like the drastic opposite.
Plum’s
drug addiction did not make him the ideal son that every mother wanted to have
but it did not make him a necessarily bad person either. Many say that there
are not many things that can compare to a mother’s love, because of how
immensely deep and unconditional it is. Killing seems to exemplify the opposite
of what love is, usually an act of hate that spews from deep dislike and threat.
Although this is predominantly the negative connotation that is associated with
killing, it might be an act of love also. Eva gives Hannah a very emotional
explanation when she says, “ After all that carryin’ on, just getting’ him out
and keepin’ him alive, he wanted to crawl back in my womb and well…I ain’t got
the room no more even if he could do it.” (71). Eva obviously loved her son
very much, the way any mother loves her son or maybe even more, and how she
cared for him in the beginning of his life is evident of this. The passage
speaks to how Eva loved Plum so much that she just could not bear to watch him
grow dependent on her all over again because of his addiction to drugs. His dependency made him a child all over again
in her eyes and she had raised a man with dignity and respect. Plum’s actions
demonstrated the opposite of this and so it was heart-breaking for her.
Eva never stopped loving her son,
but some things are not matters of the heart and love is not always blind. She
states,“I had room in enough in my heart, but not in my womb, not no more.”,
which is proof of this ( 71). It seems that she looked at her son and
recognized all she had ever given him in love and life had gone to waste and
since she had given him the beautiful gift of life, she also had the power to
take it away. She had the power to take him out of his misery that she much
less than he, had the ability to accept.
Although
all of this might be Morrison’s intended meaning, it is one that is hard to
agree with. It’s hard to say if killing out of an act of love is actually
helpful for someone like Plum that was an addict. It would have been easier to
recognize how much love was in the act if Eva would have tried to intervene
with his problem or had tried different solutions to get him sober. Her
insistence would have spoken clearly to the reader, but killing is such a
drastic alternative that it is hard to see just how much love Eva, as a mother
had for her son.
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