Mama's Baby By Ann Spillers: An Analysis

In Spillers’ essay, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, she describes herself as “a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth.” (65) Spillers’ explains that society not only puts into her identity but also takes out from who she is. With the context of the history of her ethnicity and her gender, Spillers points out that a part of her identity is defined by the white race and therefore serves as a “living laboratory.” (68) In this female-focused essay the ability of identifying one’s self is unclear, but is clearly placed by historical context, “In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made in excess over time, assigned by a particular …show more content…
Throughout the book, Sula’s birth mark is presented to the reader in multiple different ways, “it was not a stemmed rose, or a snake. It was Hannah’s ashes marking her from the very beginning.” (114) Each perspective of the birth mark not only shows us how Sula was perceived in her community, but also the freedom and willingness Sula had to explore herself and because no one else in Bottom had that willingness, they all leaned on Sula to explore what they were afraid to do. (Talk about sula’s birthmark as the representation of her independence. Talk about the different perspectives of the birthmark (rose, snake, etc) as a transition of different identities so that sula can find her true …show more content…
Since she grew up with what her mother taught her, she struggles to find her own identity without Sula, when she goes off to college, and settles for what she’s most comfortable with.
Spillers points out that she is a “marked woman” or in other words an “other.” She recognizes that although all of her different identities come from the “nation”, they still depend on her as the self depends on the other. As much as the community would deny it, they were dependent on Sula. Although Sula resides outside of the order, in which a person must accede to participate in the dominant society, we see Bottom struggling to survive and ironically missing the infamous pariah after her death. Through Nel, the pariah’s long lost friend, we see the emptiness that Sula, aka the “other”, leaves with her death, “It was a fine cry, loud and long, but it had no bottom and it had not top, just circles and circles of sorrow.” It was a necessity for them to have an “other” for them to define themselves and find