Mothering In Toni Morrison's Sula

The first shrill scream pierces the air collapsing under the weight of anticipation, the one cry that a mother aches to hear; her baby is alive. Becoming a mother is one of the most natural concepts known to man, tracing its roots back to the Bible’s story of Adam and Eve. Historically, a woman’s capacity to bear children, to bring a gasping new life into the world, to carry on her husband’s namesake is seen as her greatest contribution and potential. Mothering is the oldest occupation, yet there is no uniform manner to ensure its success. Each new mother is simultaneously oblivious and inundated with advice; she must determine how she wants to raise her child. Females critique each other’s mothering, attempting to become the ideal mother and …show more content…
Without these, the child’s rate of survival is drastically lowered. A majority of mothers make these basic needs a priority, but they vastly differ in their approaches to satisfy their child’s need to be loved. This is a concept explored throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Sula. Since the novel follows the lives of two young girls growing up with a low socioeconomic status, it influences the way their mothers show love. A prolonged embrace, kiss goodnight, and caress of a cheek still plump with baby fat are not part of daily life for these girls, but does that mean that they are not loved? The lack of these traditional displays of affection brought an adult, Hannah, who had her own child by then, to ask her mother, Eva, “Mamma, did you ever love us?”. Eva is appalled at this critique of her mothering; she keeps her children alive by all possible means. She physically alleviates her baby’s constipation, throws herself out a window to save her burning daughter, and irradiates her son’s pain in the only way she knows how. To have her own daughter question her love is a smack in the face, but it demonstrates how the expectations of affection differ even within the same