Essay On The Harlem Renaissance In Sula

The "New Negro," the Black writers in 1920/30, tried to get out of the dominant white assimilation and practice their own tradition and identity in autonomous and active attitude. In virtue of their activities, the Harlem Renaissance became the time of sprouting the blackness. It offered the life of the black as the criterion to judge how well the democracy practices in America and to weigh the measure of the dream of America. Their vitality and artistic spirit, and dreams were so impressive that the Harlem of the 1920s has never been eluded out from the memory of American (Helbling 2).
Sula, the second and the only chronicled novel of Morrison, describes how the Harlem Renaissance influenced the common blacks in a little community of Medallion. They keep the black tradition of "the ancient properties", taking care of the orphans, the old, and accept even the prostitutes as their neighbors. The protagonist, Sula, enjoys her free life without marrying and concentrates on her own pleasure unlike the other villagers to criticize the community spirit of her village. As a result, they turn their backs on Sula and exclude her from all relationships, accusing her a devil.

In Sula, three main characters, Sula, Shdrack and Eva, represent the three types of black consciousness in their history.

The first type, Eva, the preserver of traditional community spirit, just follows the old custom without any particular criticism. The second type, Sula represents the new value of the New Negro, while her grandmother Eva does the established value of traditional community based on the white supremacy, and another character, Shadrack stands in the middle of these two, the awakening of the black identity. Sula notices the miserable status of her race in the society and practices her new value in daily life but her arrogant intelligence makes people turn their backs on her, so she dies alone being

misunderstood.
Shadrack realizes the status of the black in the society, and tries to warn his villagers the danger in a peculiar way, like the enacting of "The National Suicide Day" with the bell and the hanging rope, nobody can't understand. These three show the stage of the black conscious development from the ancient to the modern, from the old to the new, which can be found through all their history.
Sula's peculiar characteristic attracts many critics' attention from the various point of views. Pessoni analyzes that Sula is a female archetype to act the role of goddess in Medallion. Spillers and Galehouse read that Sula is a new woman revealing the revolutionary aspects. O'Reilly discusses that Sula's childhood cut off from the motherhood makes her strange activities, Jones assumes that Sula is a same kind of person as Cain, the first evil man in the Bible. Most of them are in a voice that Sula plays the pioneering role of self-love as a black woman.
Self-love, surely, is the most important aspect of Sula's character. But there are few studies how she gets her selfish behaviors which separate her from the others. One assumes that this issue concerns with the periodical background of this novel. Sula stays in the big cities from 1927 to 1937, in the period of the Harlem Renaissance, in the middle of the first perceived sexual revolution, at the stage of building one’s persona and training oneself as an adult. Therefore, her tendency of self-love appears clearly after coming back to her hometown.
As a result, the new ideas on the black pride and self-love in contrast to her community people with the established idea cause a severe conflict between values. In short, the conflict between the new value and the old value consists of the main discussing point in this paper. Another issue to be focused on is about her family custom concerning her willingness to accept the new ideas, which relates to her excessive self-love, another struggling issue among critics.
Therefore, this paper will point out on two aspects, the influence of the Harlem Renaissance and Sula's family atmosphere. Jung's youth theory, Kohut's self-theory are used to explain how Sula's character builds. Finally, this paper discusses what Morrison tries to say with Sula.