Give me a two-part argument on the following question:
In Toni Morrison’s novel, Sula makes space for women (and women’s friendship) to be something beyond just a partner for a man. Women’s friendship and capability is a kind of love beyond or separate from that.
What does the love or intimacy between friends look like, and does Sula bring that love to Nel (or vise versa)?
Use lots of integrated quotes and separate your thoughts into two claims – one for each paragraph. The quotes should be from these two passages:
Passage 1:
Their evidence against Sula was contrived, but their conclusions about her were not. Sula was distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full rein, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life–ever since her mother’s remarks sent her flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the second that there was no self to count on either. She had no center, no speck around which to grow. In the midst of a pleasant conversation with someone she might say, “Why do you chew with your mouth open?” not because the answer interested her but because she wanted to see the person’s face change rapidly. She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments–no ego. For that reason she felt no compulsion to verify herself–be consistent with herself. She had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self, only to discover that she and Nel were not one and the same thing. She had no thought at all of causing Nel pain when she bedded down with Jude. They had always shared the affection of other people: compared how a boy kissed, what line he used with one and then the other. Marriage, apparently, had changed all that, but having had no intimate knowledge of marriage, having lived in a house with women who thought all men available, and selected from among them with a care only for their tastes, she was ill prepared for the possessiveness of the one person she felt close to. She knew well enough what other women said and felt, or said they felt. But she and Nel had always seen through them. They both knew that those women were not jealous of other women; that they were only afraid of losing their jobs. Afraid their husbands would discover that no uniqueness lay between their legs.
Passage 2:
“You look fine, Sula.” “You lying, Nellie. I look bad.” She gulped the medicine. “No. I haven’t seen you for a long time, but you look… ” “You don’t have to do that, Nellie. It’s going to be all right.” “What ails you? Have they said?” Sula licked the corners of her lips. “You want to talk about that?” Nel smiled, slightly, at the bluntness she had forgotten. “No. No, I don’t, but you sure you should be staying up here alone?” “Nathan comes by. The deweys sometimes, and Tar Baby… ” “That ain’t help, Sula. You need to be with somebody grown. Somebody who can… ” “I’d rather be here, Nellie.” “You know you don’t have to be proud with me.” “Proud?” Sula’s laughter broke through the phlegm. “What you talking about? I like my own dirt, Nellie. I’m not proud. You sure have forgotten me.” “Maybe. Maybe not. But you a woman and you alone.” “And you? Ain’t you alone?” “I’m not sick. I work.” “Yes. Of course you do. Work’s good for you, Nellie. It don’t do nothing for me.” “You never had to.” “I never would.” “There’s something to say for it, Sula. ‘Specially if you don’t want people to have to do for you.” “Neither one, Nellie. Neither one.” “You can’t have it all, Sula.” Nel was getting exasperated with her arrogance, with her lying at death’s door still smart-talking. “Why? I can do it all, why can’t I have it all?” “You can’t do it all. You a woman and a colored woman at that. You can’t act like a man. You can’t be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like, taking what you want, leaving what you don’t.” “You repeating yourself.” “How repeating myself?” “You say I’m a woman and colored. Ain’t that the same as being a man?” “I don’t think so and you wouldn’t either if you had children.” “Then I really would act like what you call a man. Every man I ever knew left his children.” “Some were taken.” “Wrong, Nellie. The word is ‘left.'” “You still going to know everything, ain’t you?” “I don’t know everything, I just do everything.” “Well, you don’t do what I do.” “You think I don’t know what your life is like just because I ain’t living it? I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.” “What’s that?” “Dying. Just like me. But the difference is they dying like a stump. Me, I’m going down like one of those redwoods. I sure did live in this world.” “Really? What have you got to show for it?” “Show? To who? Girl, I got my mind. And what goes on in it. Which is to say, I got me.” “Lonely, ain’t it?” “Yes. But my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.” Nel sat back on the little wooden chair. Anger skipped but she realized that Sula was probably just showing off. No telling what shape she was really in, but there was no point in saying anything other than what was the truth. “I always understood how you could take a man. Now I understand why you can’t keep none.” “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Spend my life keeping a man?” “They worth keeping, Sula.” “They ain’t worth more than me. And besides, I never loved no man because he was worth it. Worth didn’t have nothing to do with it.” “What did?” “My mind did. That’s all.” “Well I guess that’s it. You own the world and the rest of us is renting. You ride the pony and we shovel the shit. I didn’t come up here for this kind of talk, Sula… ” “No?” “No. I come to see about you. But now that you opened it up, I may as well close it.” Nel’s fingers closed around the brass rail of the bed. Now she would ask her. “How come you did it, Sula?” There was a silence but Nel felt no obligation to fill it. Sula stirred a little under the covers. She looked bored as she sucked her teeth. “Well, there was this space in front of me, behind me, in my head. Some space. And Jude filled it up. That’s all. He just filled up the space.” “You mean you didn’t even love him?” The feel of the brass was in Nel’s mouth. “It wasn’t even loving him?” Sula looked toward the boarded-up window again. Her eyes fluttered as if she were about to fall off into sleep. “But… ” Nel held her stomach in. “But what about me? What about me? Why didn’t you think about me? Didn’t I count? I never hurt you. What did you take him for if you didn’t love him and why didn’t you think about me?” And then, “I was good to you, Sula, why don’t that matter?” Sula turned her head away from the boarded window. Her voice was quiet and the stemmed rose over her eye was very dark. “It matters, Nel, but only to you. Not to anybody else. Being good to somebody is just like being mean to somebody. Risky. You don’t get nothing for it.” Nel took her hands from the brass railing. She was annoyed with herself. Finally when she had gotten the nerve to ask the question, the right question, it made no difference. Sula couldn’t give her a sensible answer because she didn’t know. Would be, in fact, the last to know. Talking to her about right and wrong was like talking to the deweys. She picked at the fringe on Sula’s bedspread and said softly, “We were friends.” “Oh, yes. Good friends,” Sula said. “And you didn’t love me enough to leave him alone. To let him love me. You had to take him away.” “What you mean take him away? I didn’t kill him, I just f***ed him. If we were such good friends, how come you couldn’t get over it?” “You laying there in that bed without a dime or a friend to your name having done all the dirt you did in this town and you still expect folks to love you?” Sula raised herself up on her elbows. Her face glistened with the dew of fever. She opened her mouth as though to say something, then fell back on the pillows and sighed. “Oh, they’ll love me all right. It will take time, but they’ll love me.” The sound of her voice was as soft and distant as the look in her eyes. “After all the old women have lain with the teen-agers; when all the young girls have slept with their old drunken uncles; after all the black men f**k all the white ones; when all the white women kiss all the black ones; when the guards have raped all the jailbirds and after all the whores make love to their grannies; after all the faggots get their mothers’ trim; when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit; after all the dogs have f**ked all the cats and every weathervane on every barn flies off the roof to mount the hogs… then there’ll be a little love left over for me. And I know just what it will feel like.” She closed her eyes then and thought of the wind pressing her dress between her legs as she ran up the bank of the river to four leaf-locked trees and the digging of holes in the earth. Embarrassed, irritable and a little bit ashamed, Nel rose to go. “Goodbye, Sula. I don’t reckon I’ll be back.” She opened the door and heard Sula’s low whisper. “Hey, girl.” Nel paused and turned her head but not enough to see her. “How you know?” Sula asked. “Know what?” Nel still wouldn’t look at her. “About who was good. How you know it was you?”
“What you mean?” “I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.”
