Sula: 1921 Summary & Analysis

Eva, deprived of one of her legs, is seemingly imprisoned in her own body, to the point where she can barely move where she wants to go. And yet Eva doesn’t seem like a prisoner at all. She “rules” her house, and seems to command great respect over the people of the Bottom.

BoyBoy’s story is a good example men maintaining power over women: women are confined to a domestic sphere, while men have more agency to escape responsibility and travel independently. This also shows another way people cope with suffering and tragedy—Eva centers her life around her children as a way of dealing with her husband’s abandonment.

BoyBoy’s name—especially given his relationship with a powerful white employer—was probably given to him by a white man, who condescendingly called him “Boy” until the name stuck. BoyBoy’s very name is thus a sign of his social inferiority to whites, and also a reminder of the power of naming.

Morrison has written, “Black women seem able to combine the nest and adventure.” Here, we see Eva being adventurous—going out into the world and even losing a leg—and yet also being a highly capable mother. Eva subverts the clichés of femininity: she takes care of her children, and yet doesn’t confine herself to the “nest.”

In this scene, we see the real difference between Eva and BoyBoy. It’s not so much that BoyBoy is worldly and Eva is domestic—rather, it’s that Eva is capable of responsibly acting the part of a complete human (she can travel and care for her children) while BoyBoy can’t handle responsibility, and remains a “boy.” Eva doesn’t confront BoyBoy to his face—her hate wells up inside her, setting the tone for her character.

We get the sense that Eva takes on more responsibilities to prove to herself that she’s more of an adult than BoyBoy—it’s her way of avenging his betrayal and proving her own strength.

Here we see the importance of names for the community as a whole. Eva is old and respected, and so she’s given the authority of naming the children. It’s also here that we get an extreme, almost fantastical example of why names are important, and how something’s name affects the very character of that thing. For the deweys, their name is like a self-fulfilling prophecy: by giving children the same name, Eva ensures that the children are forever bound together. The danger of this kind of collectivism (i.e., a group of children all being “the deweys”) is that none of the children in the group can ever be an individual, and therefore none of the children can ever really grow up.

It’s not clear if Eva is right or not—Tar Baby could be half-black, or a particularly pale-skinned black man—but it’s the interpretation that matters. Race is an infamously fluid concept, and even if Tar Baby is genetically black or part-black, the fact that the community perceives him as white means that on one level he really is white. We get the sense that Tar Baby has come to the Bottom because he is depressed, as if he’s drawn to the general misery of the community.

The novel has the texture of a family saga—in order to tell the story of one character (this chapter, it had seemed, was supposed to be about Sula), the narrator has to tell the stories of half a dozen other characters. Eva recognizes that BoyBoy isn’t representative of all men, and ultimately seems to advocate social stability at all costs: control, balance, and harmony between men and women (even if this means women being submissive).

The fact that Sula catches Hannah having sex will be important later on in the book. Because of what she sees, Sula already seems to view sex dispassionately, but also as a very common, even central thing—and this is precisely why she finds it so unremarkable. Sex is important and ever-present, but not sacred, sinful, or strange.

Plum experiences the same things as Shadrack: the agonies of World War I, and then the return to a society that offers him no thanks, help, or comfort. But whereas Shadrack finds a tragic compromise in his miserable Suicide Day ritual, we can surmise from Morrison’s description that Plum has turned to drugs, presumably heroin (he doesn’t eat anything, and uses a spoon for cooking).

Eva clearly loves Plum—she was willing to sacrifice her own health to make sure that he survived as a baby—and there’s some ominous foreshadowing of how that fierce love will try and cope with Plum’s new, miserable state. The glass of watery blood may be some part of Plum’s heroin ritual, but it also suggests, on a more symbolic level, the “water and blood” of giving birth. This is an apt symbol, given that later on in the book, Eva will describe what she does next as an alternative to giving birth.

In this frightening scene, Eva murders her own son, seemingly the child she loved most. It’s impossible to fully grasp why Eva would do such a thing—the complexity of motives behind the act is too great—but even here, there’s an element of harsh mercy in her behavior. She knows that Plum is in pain, and she can’t stand to see him that way. It’s also slightly comforting that we see this from Plum’s perspective, and recognize that he feels his death as something pleasant and welcome. This scene introduces fire as an important symbol in the book: something simultaneously comforting, purifying, and destructive. It also foreshadows another tragic scene of a mother killing her child out of mercy—the central act of Morrison’s famous novel Beloved.

We can sense that Hannah knows what Eva did, though it’s not clear how. Eva’s ambiguous act of harsh love (or deferred responsibility) will have repercussions for years, as it affects every member of the family, not just Eva and Plum.