The Fluidity in Becoming Women: Being Both the Nightshade and Blackberry in Toni Morrison’s Sula

Abstract

Female identity and female relationship are the cores of Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, as she declares in the forward “what is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What are the risks of individualism in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static, community?” By creating troubled, or outlaw, women, Morrison challenges the binary thinking that women can either survive or perish depending on their subordination to males; instead, she argues women can be both evil and good by challenging the conventions scripted by patriarchy. Indeed, this empowerment originates and sustains itself from female relationships, like maternal relationships and womanly friendships. This article begins by employing Judith Butler’s theory of performativity that gender is essence-lacking compelled social fiction, and then it pays particular attention to female characters and their intersected relationships. In this way, I argue that the troubled women in Sula provides alternative “theatre space” for females to practice peculiar performance, thus challenging the conventions set by patriarchy and finding the heterogeneous “me-ness.” The article concludes that “becoming a woman” is fluid, not static. Because it is constantly shaped by their intermittent female relationships in the conditioned space, there is possibility for modulating the conventional gender roles embodied in the society.