Comparison of womanhood
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Sula challenges the social norms that deny women their rights. She breaks all blood links and relationships in search of herself. She works hard to escape all the traditionalism related to women. Sula refuses to obey and submit to the needs of her community blindly. She uses men as sex objects, disregards them, and continues normally with life. She also rejects the roles society assigns to black women. In doing so, men describe her as a devil. The community regards her as evil, and by doing so, she unifies the community by objectifying its danger. She even treats her grandmother violently, making women start treating their children with love and concern from the fear of being treated like Sula’s grandmother later on. Sula is a novel that addresses the mysteries of human emotions and relationships and concludes that social convections are not adequate as a foundation for somebody’s life. The writer tries to show the personality of a black American woman who is struggling for identity.
In the incidents in the life of a slave girl, enslaved women could be easily separated from their children at any time. This is because motherhood was an institution where mothers had only biological claims to their children. The relationship between slave women and their offspring is very complex since it involves individual agency, resistance, and power. As a slave, she suffered sexual abuse and eventually devised a way of using her sexuality to avoid exploitation from her masters. A slave has destabilization of blood relations, which requires the female to make the new term of radical self-determination. In the book, motherhood is represented as a force resistible to slavery.
In both instances, both women defy the set norms and find their own ways to liberation from the traditional views of womanhood.
References
Ribeiro, A. C., & Santos, J. D. P. D. (2017). Rethinking Motherhood and Motherly Love in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Ilha does Desterro, 70(1), 69-79.
O’Neill, C. (2018). “The Shape of Mystery”: The Visionary Resonance of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Journal of American Culture, 41(1), 56-67.