True Black Motherhood

True Black Motherhood
A black woman writer, Toni Morrison, represents the affirmative meaning of black motherhood in her novel Sula (1973). She intends to reevaluate the positive experience of the black mothers who had no choice but to strategically accept the value of self-sacrifice for the survival of the black community and their children under the late twentieth century’s oppressive conventions. Nevertheless, there have been long controversies whether the Eva’s burning her own son or Helene’s manipulating her own daughter could be estimated as an authentic motherhood in a contemporary sense. Some critics claim that several scenes such as Eva’s self-mutilation of her leg to receive insurance benefits to support her children or Hannah’s
whorish sexual relationships with any man in the Bottom render traditional maternal love distorted and destructive. However, what we had believed as the most common and stereotypical black female figure of fat, religious, nurturing, loving and above all enduring did not really exist in the black community but merely in the ideology accorded to the white middle-class women. Thus, how violent and raunchy the motherly images could be, we should not forget Toni Morrison’s representation of black motherhood in Sula centers on the contexts by which black women’s mothering experience is affected; for they are not only under the circumstances of their own survivals within the white and male-dominated society, but also under the concerns for their children’s survival in the late twentieth century of America. In this regard, I will defend the motherhood of Eva, Hannah and Helene by describing its indispensable incompleteness in delivering nurturing due to the contradictory context in the black community, illuminating their naturally innate motherhood as well. And then I will focus on the mothers’ influences from which Nel and Sula, the daughters, could benefited, which is related with the process from the self-negation to the affirmation of a true black womanhood at the end.
First of all, motherhood is a universal identity imposed upon women which encompassing caring, nurturing, self-sacrificing or even sublimity in some cases.
Though, within the black community, this wholly idealized motherhood is hard to be witnessed for it being violated under the oppressive realities shaped by poverty, racism and class hierarchy. First, in the village Bottom, most black men are out of the realm of economic supporting and appear as failures, leading to their counterparts bearing dual roles of providing and nurturing. Boy-boy, Eva’s husband, left home leaving her and the three little children with $1.65, five eggs, and three beets. Then Eva, confused and desperately hungry, went out and returned with money and one leg. Hannah’s husband is dead and Nel’s father Weley Wright is never at home wandering in the sea. Tar Baby, one of the tenants in Eva’s house is an obscure one who came to the Bottom to find a private place only to drink and die, and Plum is a failure who regrets his existence after the war. The grotesque three Deweys who never grow are a mystery in the novel and Nel’s husband, Jude abandons his family after having sex with Sula. Other black men in the Bottom also fail to get a job in the tunnel construction field due to their skin color. Thus, the women in Sula are inevitably caught in the survival struggle and have neither the time nor the patience for affection toward their children. For instance, compelled to take the role as a provider, Eva even chose to sacrifice a part of herself, let alone playing with her children, which seems quite destructive but at the same time symbolizes her great maternity with physical power. Meanwhile, Helene’s formation of motherhood is slightly different from that of Eva. Helene as a daughter of a creole whore is constantly aware of her fragility against the white and other pure black people. So Helene decides to conform to society by accepting the white middle-class values and often gets caught in the
in-between status as what happened in the train during the journey south to attend Cecile’s funeral, receiving contempt from both the white and black. In this sense, Helene’s motherhood naturally comes to be fraught with the obsession with flawlessness and she tries to protect Nel by manipulating her to be assimilated to the white middle-class, escaping from the oppressive realities in which Helene lives. To sum up, Eva and Helen are still loving and affectionate mothers in that they try to secure their children although the idealized motherhood gets distorted under the influence of conflicting context. Furthermore, their natural nurturing and loving instinct also exists in their inner consciousness as observed in Eva’s immediate hurling herself out of the second-story window to save her daughter or Hannah’s remarks to her friend that she anyhow loves her daughter.
Ironically, despite all the toils the mothers have dedicated to the daughters above, Nel and Sula had not approved of their mother’s struggles when they were young and immature to understand the black community they live in. Hoping to exist not as mothers nor as the lovers of men, but as independent individuals, Nel and Sula, despite their different family backgrounds, both resist being defined by any of the stereotypical roles imposed upon them by both white and male society. Rather they use their friendship as an alternative to an unsatisfactory mother-daughter relationship and a drive for self-exploration. Nevertheless, Nel was a typical product of education which instills woman with the idea of passivity under the influence of her mother, so she finally completes her ego in otherness by marrying Jude Green. This one’s betrayal simultaneously let Sula search for her freedom and another comrade to rely on for next ten years, but much alienated from other people and from her own self, Sula finally returns to the Bottom like a dangerous artist with no art form. In this regard, we can infer that the quest of Nel and Sula for self-fulfillment, which begins with the escape from their black mothers’ maternal realm, finally ends up in a failure. Yet, as the story goes on, Nel gradually understands Helene’s maternity by rearing up her own children and by being deserted from Jude and growing children at the same time. So Nel starts to preserve the values of black motherhood from which she inherited in the Bottom and makes a remark on a true black womanhood to Sula. Also, lying on the upstairs in Eva’s bed, Sula too realizes the feelings of Eva in the face of the death, watching window that Eva jumped out of and ‘looking at those four wooden planks with the steel rod slanting across’, which described as ‘the peace (Sula) had’. In this final scene, the word ‘peace’ not only implies her own name but her peaceful state of mind, which means Sula eventually has begun to see Eva in a transformed view. To summarize, Nel and Sula both finally get to understand and sympathize with their mother’s life in black communities, affirming their relationship with mothers and above all resisting the contradictory condition that distort the value of motherhood.
In conclusion, as inexperienced girls, Nel and Sula did not apprehend that their mothers could not ideally express their love, living up to their daughters’ expectations under the pressure of society. Also, they did not recognize their mothers’ self-sacrifice or protection as the expression of the maternal love. And it is not until Nel and Sula go through same oppressive environment as their mothers did before that they finally realize the true black motherhood and even attempt to resist against the pressures. Furthermore, understanding the contexts of oppressive realities allows Nel and Sula to define herself as a positive being while trying to find a fulfilling life through her connection with the black community, the Bottom. Despite of the fact that what they saw, heard and learned from their own motherhood were distorted, Eva, Hannah, Sula and Nel’s lives are paradoxically abundant in love in that these women have a strong line of love, confirmation and bondage in black community.