Sula portrays the story of black community in the Bottom and the spiritual characters of Eva and Sula: how they fight against the crucial treatment to black female. This paper focuses on comparing Eva to Sula and analyzing their ethics of living in the following ways: the formation of their ethics, the consequence of their ethics, and the essence of their ethics. Eva and Sula represent the conformality and rebel to conventional values in patriarchy.
Eva’s ethics of living is to ensure survival at any cost. When Eva is abandoned by her husband in 1895, she is put into an extreme harsh condition: ‘Eva had $1.65, five eggs, three beets and no idea of what or how to feel. The children needed her; she needed money, and needed to get on with her life.’ (Morrison, 32) The demands of feeding her children to ensure survival have constituted all of her living. Eva has to beg for food from neighbors and takes care of her child every day and night. Eva has endured some extreme situation: ‘She shoved the last bit of food she had in the world up his ass. Softening the insertion with the dab of lard, she probed with her middle finger to loosen his bowels’ (34). She sacrifices her last bit of food and tries every possible way to save Plum from …show more content…
Although Eva manages to survive the harsh environment and feed her family on her own, she never truly escapes from the hierarchy control under patriarchal society. As the new generation of black female, Sula turns to pursue self-realization because survival is longer her priority. Sula seeks for independence and living for herself, her rebel to patriarchal rules challenges the established privilege of black male and destructs the ‘united’ black community in the Bottom. From Eva to Sula, Toni Morrison successfully portrays how they fight against the crucial treatment to black female and reveals the evolutional progression of how black female fight against
Eva’s ethics of living is to ensure survival at any cost. When Eva is abandoned by her husband in 1895, she is put into an extreme harsh condition: ‘Eva had $1.65, five eggs, three beets and no idea of what or how to feel. The children needed her; she needed money, and needed to get on with her life.’ (Morrison, 32) The demands of feeding her children to ensure survival have constituted all of her living. Eva has to beg for food from neighbors and takes care of her child every day and night. Eva has endured some extreme situation: ‘She shoved the last bit of food she had in the world up his ass. Softening the insertion with the dab of lard, she probed with her middle finger to loosen his bowels’ (34). She sacrifices her last bit of food and tries every possible way to save Plum from …show more content…
Although Eva manages to survive the harsh environment and feed her family on her own, she never truly escapes from the hierarchy control under patriarchal society. As the new generation of black female, Sula turns to pursue self-realization because survival is longer her priority. Sula seeks for independence and living for herself, her rebel to patriarchal rules challenges the established privilege of black male and destructs the ‘united’ black community in the Bottom. From Eva to Sula, Toni Morrison successfully portrays how they fight against the crucial treatment to black female and reveals the evolutional progression of how black female fight against