Sula

In their life, at one point or another, people deny to themselves and others what they really feel and what really happened. Some people go on living their entire lives denying their true emotions. In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, characters constantly denied their feelings and their actions. Sula Peace, her best friend Nel Wright, and Nel’s mother do not listen to their feelings and hide from their true emotions. Sula Peace is one of the protagonists of the novel. She is born to a very unstable family and is from that moment treated differently in “the Bottom”, the black section of Medallion, Ohio. From the time that she was very young, right up until her death, Sula denied her true emotions. She refuted her need for love and did not acknowledge her family and its impact on her. Sula’s need for love was first expressed in the beginning of the novel when she is twelve years old. Not realizing that Sula is nearby, Hannah, her mother says: “I love Sula. I just don’t like her.” Sula “only heard Hannah’s words, and the pronouncement sent her flying up the stairs. In bewilderment, she stood at the window fingering the curtain edge, aware of a sting in her eye.”(57) Sula did not show that her mother’s words truly

For her trip Helene sewed herself an elegant dress hoping that it would ease some tension of the fact that she was black. Nel married Jude because she thought it was the proper social thing to do, to accept a marriage proposal. Sula"tms best friend and the other protagonist of Sula was Nel Wright. Ten years later when Sula returned to The Bottom, she slept with Jude. Sula just went on to continue playing with Nel like nothing happened even thought the words of her mother would ring in her head forever reminding her of the hurt and betrayal she felt when those words left her mother"tms lips. "(78) Eva agreed with them, "but inside she disagreed and remained convinced that Sula had watched Hannah burn not because she was paralyzed, but because she was interested. She ran away from the problem when she heard Nel call for her. Nel was the picture of innocence and purity; Sula had a birthmark in the shape of a rose over one of her eyes, giving an impression of something mysterious. Sula put Eva into a nursing home because Eva brought back memories of how Sula watched her own mother die. Once again Sula ran away fro her past trying to change the future. Jude ashamed of what he did left Nel and their three children on a one-way ticket to Detroit. "She seemed receptive but hardly anxious" (82). Although Helene Wright was not a protagonist in the novel, she like Sula and Nel ran away from her problems and her past.