Interpersonal Relationships In Sula By Toni Morrison

Sula’s best friend Nel also has an uncertain relationship with her own mother, Helene Wright. Helene is the daughter of A prostitute. She is ashamed of her history and so tries to conform to what she understands as the proper way for a woman to behave. Helene imposes these expectations on her daughter, and grooms Nel for domesticity. Helene’s need for respectability is imposed on her daughter as the ideal of romance rather than more practical information about self information about self awareness and personal development. Helene needs her daughter’s life to vindicate the legacy of her mother’s occupation. As a result, Nel enters into an unfulfilling marriage and wastes most of her adult life mourning its loss. In turn, after her marriage fails, …show more content…
Discrimination of African Americans is still strong which is clearly visible in the denial of job opportunities for African American inhabitants of Medallion. The Bottom men’s fears of emasculation and their attempts to win the respect of the dominant society result in the men’s frustrations which they consequently project in their personal relationships with African American women and with their children. The major problem of the novel’s characters is their acceptance of the dominant society’s ideas of masculinity and femininity and their submission to the dominant society’s views of marriage and social roles. Most male characters in the novel are looking for a submissive woman who would help them feel better about their own masculinity. The only male character who is not interested in proving anything to the mainstream society and who does not accept the defined notions of masculinity and femininity is Ajax, who leads a more contended and satisfactory life than the rest of the men in the …show more content…
Through flashbacks to past tragedies and deeply symbolic delineations of continued emotional and psychological suffering, the novel explores the hardships endured by a former slave woman and her family during the Reconstruction era. Eliciting a variety of thematic interpretations, Beloved has been variously categorized as a Gothic romance, a ghost story, a holocaust novel, and a feminist doctrine, and critics extol Morrison’s use of historical detail, startling imagery, and African-American colloquialisms in portraying the emotional aftermath of slavery in America. Toni Morrison looks at the writing of the novel Beloved as a revisionist history, where she projects a factual account of the fugitive slave mother, Margaret Garner who killed her daughter to save her from the horrific life of the institution of slavery. Its narrative which is primarily concerned with the painful resurrection or rebirth of buried memory and repressed psychological motivation is thus crucially informed by the paradigms of master and slave, colonizer and colonized, power and powerlessness, which have dominated the lives, identities and relationships of all the novel’s Black