THE SMASHED SELFHOOD: TONI MORRISON’S SULA AS AN ABANDONED BLACK LADY

Abstract

Toni Morrison set forth in her novels to retrieve the African-American women’s lost identity which is wrecked, shattered or wiped out. The search for identity is the predominant theme in her novels. Each of her novels stresses the need for self-discovery and self-identity leading to self –actualization. White women at least get support from their men, but that is not the case with African-American women. Selfhood is consistently provisional in the fiction of Morrison. This study examines the image of the female protagonist in her quest for identity. The parallel theme of search for selfhood in the female protagonist is discerned. The study also emphasizes Sula’s need to define herself within her own culture that is threatened by the community’s inability to acknowledge Sula’s individuality that culminates in her isolation and death. Morrison actuates Sula’s independent search for selfhood by her outright rejection of the black community’s definition of a woman. Blackness is used consciously as a symbol of radical identity that her female protagonists must rename and reown by reclaiming their cultural history for an integrated black American identity. Morrison, has beautifully fused, western literary models with her black oral traditions, to argue for evolving an African-American consciousness in her female protagonists.