In-SULA-rity as Authorial Censorship: Character and Form in Toni Morrison’s Sula

Abstract

This paper argues that for all its achievements, Morrison's Sula fails to live up to the writer's self-claimed aim that Sula is a genuinely new literary character, being “new world black and new world woman.” I find two main reasons for Morrison's failure: first in her desire and need to cater to the publishers' target readership (which she knows only too well) that is mostly white, and second in her formal concern to control the uncontrollable eponymous character. Form and character do not cohere in the novel. In the end, Sula proves to show Morrison's apprehension and anxiety of self-revelation as the female black reader approaching the world of a male white writer (Tennessee Williams) and as the female black writer in the face of white readership.