Double Consciousness In Toni Morrison's Sula

Who has ever had the humanity to consider the psychological toll conflicting lovers who commenced a war took on Helen? While in contemporary times Trojans and Greeks have been conflated, during the time of Homer’s Iliad the two made up ends of a binary. Helen of Troy found herself caught in the middle. Yet her struggle is never examined. Toni Morrison harkens back to this irony with her character Helene in Sula. Helene, like Helen of Troy, fights to find a middle ground between ontological extremes in her life, a struggle that history has yet to examine. Helene’s only relevance in Sula is that she mothered Nel, the main character’s best friend, but Morrison utilizes a small section about Helene’s life to explore the bigger ramifications of
Washington's desire for racial uplift through economics as a solution for double consciousness created by class disparities. Double consciousness, a term coined by Washington’s academic rival W. E. B. Du Bois, encompasses the psychological crisis of an individual’s identity being divided into separate parts according to external and internal expectations. Du Bois especially pointed to race as a contributing factor in double consciousness for black and mixed Americans, their identities split due to racism and contrasting cultures of whites and blacks. Helene struggles with such, but also with double consciousness resulting from class and gender. Being the “daughter of a Creole whore who worked” at a brothel (17), Helene spent her adult life getting “as far away from” the lifestyle and class she was born into as possible (17). Her grandmother raised her to have the poise and manners established by the upper class (white) society. When Helene was married, the most important aspect of her marriage emphasized was the “lovely house with a brick porch and real lace curtains” that her husband afforded her (17). Helene reconciled the double consciousness of being born a mixed girl to a prostitute by reaching the opposite