The novel focuses on the mental maturity of the black girls as well as their struggle towards individuality repressed by her class conscious mother, Nel Wright matures into an unimaginative woman, whose affection for her friend, Sula Peace is stronger than the emotion she feels for her parent or later her husband. The more imaginative Sula consciously rebels against her family, the community, and a world apparently dominated by men. She watches with curiosity when her mother is burnt to death, institutionalizes her grandmother so as to gain control of the family home, carelessly takes and abandons men, including Nel’s husband, to satisfy her sexual curiosity, and defines the community, and considers it as a monstrosity.
Sula received generally excellent reviews from the critics. They praised Morrison’s prose style, her ear for dialogue, and her deft characterization. Sula is the dramatization of the conflict between self realization and community allegiance dramatically played out in this novel. Other themes portrayed in the friendship between women, mother daughter relationship, and the connections between good and evil. In the author’s structuring of Sula and Nel, they are fewer people in their own right than representations of a rebel and conformist, which is the author’s view as the black women’s intrinsic conflict. Particularly, with Sula, the writer seems to be going beyond such representation, addressing herself to the idea of the great rebel the one who tries to