Sula Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 70 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Sula.

Sula Essay

This Study Guide consists of approximately 70 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of Sula.
This section contains 296 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Sula Study Guide

In the following essay, McKee discusses how Morrison uses physical space to represent "the placement of experience" within a context.

In Sula, spacing—that is, closing down or opening up distances between things and persons— has extraordinary urgency. Houses and bodies are the sites of hyperactive mechanisms of containment and expulsion working to effect identity and distinction: of inside and outside, of self and other. Spacing, moreover, becomes crucial to issues of representation and meaning in the Bottom, the place in Medallion, Ohio, in which most of the action of the novel occurs. Houston A. Baker Jr. has called attention to the importance of place in Sula: "What Morrison ultimately seeks in her coding of Afro-American PLACE is a writing of intimate, systematizing, and ordering black village values," he suggests. But although the manipulation of persons and things in space can produce a symbolic order, Morrison seems...

(read more)

This section contains 296 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy the Sula Study Guide
Copyrights
Gale
Sula from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.