Bonding In Sula

865 Words2 Pages

Once more the bond between Nel and Sula in Toni Morrison‟s Sula (1973) has remained one of the most celebrated relationships in the quantity of women’s novel. In the expression of the author herself, “Friendship between women is special, different and has never been depicted as a major focus of a novel before Sula. Nobody even talked about friendship between women unless it was homosexual, and there is no homosexuality in Sula” (qtd. in Barat 53). In reality female friendship is central to the fiction of Afro-American women writers. Alice Walker in her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Color Purple (1982) offers a typical example of the relatives spirit among women that enable them to surmount all hardships. The variety of female …show more content…

All these writers have tried to light up the emotional underpinnings in female friendships. Even British writers like Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen have explored female psychological process in their works only to determine how emotional fulfilment is achieved through stable female bonds. Female bonding is viewed, by feminists, as a structure of empowerment that helps women face an assortment of challenges. Louise Bernikow feels that it is a strapping sense of ‘oneness’ that lies at the base of female friendship , and it is this very sense of unity that advocates empowerment …show more content…

She herself confirms it when she says in an thesis for Bold Type, “. . . I find myself focusing my writing on friendships with women, and trying to balance them with the conflicting passions and demands that come to us as daughters and wives, lovers and mothers.” (n.p.). In deed so she identifies herself with the occidental quite than with the oriental. Her fiction relates to the tradition of the West, since Indian writers from Anita Desai to Arundhati Roy have uncared for sisterhood in their focus on feminine issues. In addition, her work with MAITRI, a helpline for harmed South Asian women immigrants in the US , has provide the necessary motion for her predestined choice of the theme of sisterhood

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