Analysis Of Sula And The Bluest Eye

The name Jim Crow comes from a popular minstrel, a performance which included songs whose lyrics told the stories of distant places or of existing or imaginary historical events (http://www.american-historama.org/1866-1881-reconstruction-era/jim-crow-laws.htm), during the 1950s. This minstrel was surrounded about the character of Jim Crow, a Black African American that was thought to have been a trickster. In traditional African culture the Trickster is depicted as a shape-shifting crow named "Jim." Thus, the reasoning for the name. Jim Crow was played by a White man painted with black paint and his character was to be dumb it was made to continuously ridicule African Americans. Later on Jim Crow became the name for laws made specifically for

These literary structures appear in both Sula and The Bluest Eye. Sula tells the story of two girls, Sula and Nel, who grew up together as childhood friends. As the girls grow up it is revealed that they are polar opposites. Multiple characters go through the same type of experiences, death and love, and react in unique ways. In the Bluest Eye a young girl, Pecola, is outcasted by society and abused by her parents. Pecola eventually gets raped by her father which causes her to become pregnant. This forces the young girl grow up and face adulthood at a young age. After a close analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula and The Bluest Eye, it is evident that Morrison utilizes techniques such as collective voice and African American literary traditions, in order to express the inverted interpretations of love by the

Morrison exemplifies this by using collective voice. Sula is confident, sleeps with multiple men, and does not look her age, women in the town despise Sula for these reasons. Sula does what she wants and the entire town believes Sula is the devil:

When Sula said no, the boy turned around and fell down the steps. He couldn 't get up right away and Sula went to help him. His mother, just then tripping home, saw Sula bending over her son 's pained face. She flew into a fit of concerned, if drunken, motherhood, and dragged Teapot home. She told everybody that Sula had pushed him, and talked so strongly about it she was forced to abide by the advice of her friends and take him to the county hospital. (Morrison, check page#)

This scene causes the town to assume that Sula has an evil spirit. Teapot’s mother would tell the town it was Sula’s fault and they would believe her because if Sula did something malicious, it would not be a surprise. They trusted that anything to do with Sula was evil. “Mr. Finley sat on his porch sucking chicken bones, as he had done for thirteen years, looked up, saw Sula, choked on a bone and died on the spot”(Morrison, check page#). With a glance Sula kills a man, at least that is what the town thinks. By using collective voice, this scene shows that the town assumed Mr. Finley died because he looked briefly at Sula. Both of these scenes demonstrate the town’s feelings toward