Powerlessness In Sula And Their Eyes Were Watching God

Eternal Struggle with Powerlessness in Sula and Their Eyes Were Watching God Is everyone really given an equal opportunity for success? So many different factors work against an individual. Think about all the things one does not have control over. People are held back by their race, gender, and history. In Zora Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Tori Morrison's Sula, both authors use metaphor, imagery, allusion, and arrangement to demonstrate their purpose; that purpose is to show that it is impossible for black women to entirely rise above powerlessness in their communities and reach their full potential due to the many things they cannot control. To begin, Morrison uses metaphor in Sula to portray how Nel is helpless because

“Us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways” (Hurston 16). Hurston compares black people to plants without roots to show how, like these plants, they have no connection to the world. Therefore, they have no power in the world. Janie, as a growing young woman said to be without roots, is expected to be abnormal and not as independent as a white woman would be due to her lack of ancestry on this continent. Janie is powerless because of this non-existent connection. “Lacking roots, then Nanny sees no real structure ordering life and society for blacks” (S. Jones 185). Society views blacks as people who have nothing holding them down because they have no roots. Hurston compares them to branches without roots to show that they cannot control their own lives. No one expects blacks, especially females, to find a way in society or have any

“He expected his story to dovetail into milkwarm commiseration, but before Nel could excrete it, Sula said she didn’t know about that” (Morrison 103). Jude assumes Nel will just feel sorry for him automatically. Her expected response is described as milky, warm, and able to be excreted, like a mother nursing a baby. Women are expected to be the caretakers, never stating their real opinions. “In a novel populated by mothers, maternal imagery abounds: the image of Nel ‘excret[ing]’, ‘milk-warm commiseration’ for her husband” (Morrison and Lister 246). Women are expected to be maternal beings at the mercy of their husband and children and are not given the option of taking another route. This imagery highlights that black women do not have the power to choose a different path easily and are merely looked at as only having the power to be potential mothers, nothing