She is willing to confront people-the whole business with cutting off the tip of her finger in an encounter with a group of boys. She doesn't seem to care what other people think about her. Keith Byerman: I think there is something about the character of Sula that in some curious way represents certain values and a certain consciousness that we traditionally and conventionally associate with men, as opposed to Nel, for example. Participant: She enjoyed her conversations with Ajax and that free love.ĭr. Keith Byerman: Part of what my student said was that it's not only the novel but also the character Sula that men would like. Participant: My friend said he liked it because Sula and Hannah had a love-him-and-leave-him attitude, and they didn't show attachment.ĭr. Participant: Maybe because Sula’s betrayal of her friends and the sexual encounter with her husband may support the men's perspective that women will do anything to get a man and let their friends fall by the wayside. Why was that? This is a hypothetical question. She didn't pick Song of Solomon as the one that men would like. I found it intriguing, given that it's a book about the friendship of women, given that it's a book in which we have characters named Boy Boy, Tar Baby, and Chicken Little, and they act out their names in a lot of ways.Īre there reasons why this novel would appeal to men? She obviously was a person who had read a lot of Morrison. She said, "That's not surprising." She said, " Sula is a novel that men like." I wonder how you respond to that. At that point that was my favorite Morrison novel, and in some ways it still is. We started the conversation by talking about which Morrison novel we liked the most. She was interested as much in questions of craft and audience as she was in the traditional kinds of stuff that we'll be looking at. We were reading a couple of Morrison novels. She was looking for more levels for the kind of work she was interested in doing. She wanted to do an independent study course with me on African American women writers. I remember when I was teaching at the University of Texas twenty years ago, I had a young African American woman who was interested in creative writing. Then we'll deal with a couple of other questions and some of the issues related to Sula. Keith Byerman: I want to start with a story related to a question that I want to pose, because I've never quite resolved it. A frequent presenter at seminars and institutions for high school and college teachers, he is a leading scholar on contemporary African American literature, especially Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman. Keith Byerman is a professor of English at Indiana State University and author of many books on African American fiction, including Fingering the Jagged Grain.
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