“A Guide to Bad Motherhood”: Failure of the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Sula
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This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Sula(1973) as a fictionalized rendering of Sigmund Freud’s observations in "Female Sexuality"(1931/1964); in this novel, Morrison scrutinizes the mother-daughter relationship and its correlation to female sexuality and ultimately offers Sula as a critical survey of African-American motherhood. To this end, Morrison arguably posits three separate sets of mother-daughter relationships and three distinct women whose sexualities are very much the result of this crucial relationship. In so doing, Morrison rewrites the narrative of motherhood in Sula by presenting Sula and Nel as surrogate mothers of one another. The failure and fatality of "real" mother-daughter bonds engender a parallel relationship between Sula and Nel as the two turn to each other for motherly love and nurturance. Subsequently, I submit that Sula and Nel’s relationship should be understood in the context of the erotic underpinnings of mother-child relationships, rather than that of lesbians; reborn to their surrogate mothers, Nel and Sula re-experience Freud’s infantile psychosexual stages, in hopes that their surrogate mothers will better prepare them in their road to integration with society. This relationship, however, also falls short of their expectations in this world of bad black mothers and isolated daughters.
Abstract
This essay reads Toni Morrison’s Sula(1973) as a fictionalized rendering of Sigmund Freud’s observations in "Female Sexuality"(1931/1964); in this novel, Morrison scrutinizes the mother-daughter relationship and its correlation to female sexuality and ultimately offers Sula as a critical survey of African-American motherhood. To this end, Morrison arguably posits three separate sets of mother-daughter relationships and three distinct women whose sexualities are very much the result of this crucial relationship. In so doing, Morrison rewrites the narrative of motherhood in Sula by presenting Sula and Nel as surrogate mothers of one another. The failure and fatality of "real" mother-daughter bonds engender a parallel relationship between Sula and Nel as the two turn to each other for motherly love and nurturance. Subsequently, I submit that Sula and Nel’s relationship should be understood in the context of the erotic underpinnings of mother-child relationships, rather than that of lesbians; reborn to their surrogate mothers, Nel and Sula re-experience Freud’s infantile psychosexual stages, in hopes that their surrogate mothers will better prepare them in their road to integration with society. This relationship, however, also falls short of their expectations in this world of bad black mothers and isolated daughters.
참고문헌 (23)
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