Toni Morrison’s Sula challenges the heteronormative ideas about women and their sexual identities by characterizing both Nel and Sula as a protagonist. Beginning in the year 1919, the novel highlights moments of adversity and various experiences that have influenced these women’s lives in Medallion, Ohio, a confined black community. As the story follows the friendship of the two women who seemed inseparable, their relationship is corrupted by the roles women are expected to fulfill in their patriarchal society. Sula is confident of her sexuality and does not conform to the role of a wife or mother in this patriarchal society, leading her to become a pariah in her community. On the other hand, Sula’s childhood friend Nel grows to be an honorable
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The description of the two girls actions in the forest implies sexual feeling and intimate emotions. Before the girls participate in “grass play” (58) the narrator sets up the tone of the following passage stating “Then Summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things” (56). “Blossomed things” suggests the girls are developing from girls into women and establishes the basis of following scenes regarding the women’s sexual identities. As adolescents, Nel and Sula are still unfamiliar with the feelings that they are experiencing, prompting them to explore their bodies. They are aware of “their small breast just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort when they were lying on their stomachs” (58). Sula and Nel join each other in this “grass play” suggesting that they are in the process of discovering themselves as sexual beings, yet during this process they don’t meet eyes insinuating a sense of shame for what they are doing. The girls both find a twig, which is a phallic symbol, and they use this twig to find a bare spot in the earth. Nature and the earth specifically are commonly regarded as to as a woman so in this scenario the earth and the soil, which they are playing with, is like an untouched vagina. Nel’s urge to poke the twig into the earth signifies her desire for sex. Nel “rhythmically and intensely” making a hole into the earth “that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig,” insinuates the performance of heterosexual
The description of the two girls actions in the forest implies sexual feeling and intimate emotions. Before the girls participate in “grass play” (58) the narrator sets up the tone of the following passage stating “Then Summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things” (56). “Blossomed things” suggests the girls are developing from girls into women and establishes the basis of following scenes regarding the women’s sexual identities. As adolescents, Nel and Sula are still unfamiliar with the feelings that they are experiencing, prompting them to explore their bodies. They are aware of “their small breast just now beginning to create some pleasant discomfort when they were lying on their stomachs” (58). Sula and Nel join each other in this “grass play” suggesting that they are in the process of discovering themselves as sexual beings, yet during this process they don’t meet eyes insinuating a sense of shame for what they are doing. The girls both find a twig, which is a phallic symbol, and they use this twig to find a bare spot in the earth. Nature and the earth specifically are commonly regarded as to as a woman so in this scenario the earth and the soil, which they are playing with, is like an untouched vagina. Nel’s urge to poke the twig into the earth signifies her desire for sex. Nel “rhythmically and intensely” making a hole into the earth “that grew deeper and wider with the least manipulation of her twig,” insinuates the performance of heterosexual