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Sexuality in literature
Sexuality in literature
Character analysis of sula
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Companionship in Sula
Humans need to be with other humans. They need the companionship and they need to know that other people care. Most of the time, this companionship that humans seek with each other will evolve into friendship. At other times, the companionships will evolve into love. Differentiating between friendship and love is difficult because there are no clear cut boundaries on either side. What one person might feel as love, the other might distinguish as friendship or vice versa. The differentiation between love and friendship can be so difficult that not even the people involved in the relationship could realize it. The people involved would only believe that their relationship was simply friendship, not realizing that they are in fact in love. This idea has been explored in countless movies, music, and books. One such book where this idea was explored is Sula. In the novel, Sula Peace and Nel Wright maintain a close-knit friendship, so close that the reader can infer that line between friendship and love has been blurred, but Sula and Nel do not realize it.
The first instance of homosexual undertones arise when the narrator is discussing their childhood. "Their meeting was fortunate, for it let them use each other to grow on… they found in each other's eyes the intimacy they were looking for." (52) This quote from the novel embodies the ideal relationship. People explore serious relationships (such as love and marriage) with each other because they are searching for intimacy. Even as children, they knew that they found within each other something that they thought they might not be able to find anywhere else. They needed each other to grow, much like how two people in a serious relationship will grow ...
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... was for sure that they would be married.
Everything in the novel seems to lead up to their relationship with each other, and how integral it is for them to have each other in their lives. The mental connection that the two of them shared surpassed that of Jude's and Nel's, and even with Sula seeing so much more of the world than Nel has, she never found a man that could fill that void for her. A key point of that is that she explicitly says that she was never able to find a man able to make her feel the way that Nel made her feel. It's extremely possible, that by exploring this relationship between them, Nel and Sula would have ended up much happier than anyone could have ever perceived. Only by exploring the boundaries between friendship and love, can the boundaries ever be drawn. If these boundaries are never drawn, then true happiness can never really be found.
What I’ve noticed in the film is that the two main characters fit two standard archetypes of gay men. One who welcomes their sexuallity and one suppresses it. Ennis Del Mar is a man who before the story started was engaged to a woman named Alma. When Ennis and Jack begin their sexual relationship and Ennis tells Jack that he wasn’t queer,
The symbiotic nature between Sula and Nel began during their adolescent years. Sula depended upon Nel for sturdiness and comfort, while Nel preferred the unpredictable nature of her counterpart. They used the other's lifestyle to compensate for their shortcomings by placing themselves in the other's surroundings. When Sula visited Nel's home, "Nel, who regarded the oppressive neatness with dread, felt comfortable in it, with Sula" (Morrison 29). In the same way, Sula found comfort within the walls of the Wright home. They took solace in each other's presence. Each one finds comfort i...
...ways to learn the arts of passion and to express their emotions. Hints about homosexual attraction among women, especially within the same family compound, suggest that it was not considered abnormal or unhealthy. Young girls might have an opportunity to observe
The friendship between Nel and Sula features two girls with different personalities that when combined bring to the relationship what the other lacks. Nel is the calm and controlled side which possesses maturity that Sula lacks. Sula is the wild and adventurous one that can also easily be scared. Each girl lends a characteristic that the other does not have which creates one identity between the two.
Love is a concept that has puzzled humanity for centuries. This attachment of one human being to another, not seen as intensely in other organisms, is something people just cannot wrap their heads around easily. So, in an effort to understand, people write their thoughts down. Stories of love, theories of love, memories of love; they all help us come closer to better knowing this emotional bond. One writer in particular, Sei Shōnagon, explains two types of lovers in her essay "A Lover’s Departure": the good and the bad.
Where many novels focus on the men and how they are the dominant figure in the society, Sula has the entire focus on the women, with men coming in only as sexual objects. Throughout the novel, the two main girls did not have male figures in their lives. Nel had a father but he was often away on trips, leaving her mother to raise her. Sula did not even have a father. The men she saw in the house were often there to have sex with her mother, Hannah, or exchange in flirtatious conversation with her grandmother, Eva. The man in this story is not the type to stay with his wife or to be faithful. Sula’s grandfather left, her father died, Nel’s father is never around. Hannah often slept with recently married men, and Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband, Jude, causing him to leave
Robert Nozick’s Love’s Bond is a clear summary of components, goals, challenges, and limitations of romantic love. Nozick gives a description of love as having your wellbeing linked with that of someone and something you love. I agree with ideas that Nozick has explained concerning the definition of love, but individuals have their meaning of love. Every individual has a remarkable thing that will bring happiness and contentment in their lives. While sometimes it is hard to practice unconditional love, couples should love unconditionally because it is a true love that is more than infatuation and overcomes minor character flaw.
Within the novel, however, the word "homosexual" is never used. If it were, perhaps, then such a homoerotic interpretation as this would be redundant. There are, however, certain, rather ambiguous, words that Stevenson uses that have Victorian homosexual connotations.
Nel is able to express her feelings and emotions when she is with Sula, which is good because she can’t do that at home because she has to be the obedient one. They understand each other completely, they never argue or compete with each other. Their relationship is invaluable; they met each other at the time where they both needed it the most. Their friendship is not dependent on obligation, compassion, or love, but on their conjuction of sameness and autonomy. At this point they are together because they want to, not because they have to or need to be. When Sula and Nel meet it’s the time when they realize that their spot in society is disadvantage, “because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be” (Morrison, 50). They are best friends mainly because they grew up in the same neighborhood, they are the same race, gender, and age. They understand the needs of each other and each other’s problems. They experience the intimacy they were looking for in each
Love is essentially the key that unlocks all aspects that are carried throughout friendships. Friendship without love is like having an imaginary friend because it is not actually there. Rat Kiley and Curt Lemon's companionship was a prime example of how love is disturbed in friendship. They were two peas in a pod and would do everything together so when Lemon died Kiley took it hard. He had wrote a letter to Lemon's sister explaining how good of a man Lemon was as a way of trying to show that he really loved Lemon. He also killed a harmless animal as his way of retribution to show that he had not forgotten about his best friend. Love in Friendship is having that other person with you even when they are not actually present. Lt. Cross had a
Love is affection, devotion, passion, desire, warmth, respect or loyalty. You choose. It doesn't really matter which one because they are all forms of love. Some are powerful and demand attention while others are more subtle and just below the surface. In recent years, love has drifted from these subtle levels to the more noticeable ones, namely passion. In my opinion, our society downplays the real necessity for genuine affection. By this I mean that we, as a society, spend so much time focusing on only one level of love (passion) that we tend to neglect and not recognize the need for closeness and trust (friendship). Love is an all-encompassing emotion that can be powerful and demanding, but also rewarding and pleasurable.
First there is the presence of the old stereotypical woman character, a woman split between the conventional and nontraditional roles of women. No differences are apparent initially between Morrison's Sula and any other women's literature in the past. Women are depicted either as docile servants to men, like Nel, or ball-busting feminist monsters like Sula. The hidden aspect of the novel lies underneath these stereotypical surface roles, in the incomprehensible and almost inappropriate bond of the two women. In the final scene of Sula, Nel comes to the realization that the emptiness inside her is due to the loss of Sula, not Jude (Morrison 174). Her friendship with Sula is all that matters.
Love is an interpersonal relationship developed, maintained, and possibly destroyed through communication, but also can be enhanced by communication. Love is often described as a feeling of closeness, caring, intimacy and commitment between two people. There are six different types of love: eros, ludus, storge, pragma, mania, and
What is love? This question has probably been asked or thought about since the beginning of time. The definition of love cannot be defined as something concrete but something that is infinite. It is something that can evolve to everyone's personality and something that everyone can choose to create for him or her. The idea of love can change as the seasons change throughout the year. But for some, finding love is not an easy path and the search for love can become a façade to cover their true identity. In Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, the main character seems to be confused about his life and more importantly about love. He not only struggles to find his sexuality but he uses the notion of love to fill the void in his life at any given time. David becomes so enveloped by his desires, wants, dreams, and idea of manhood that he cannot truly find what love means to him.
Friends who love each other want to make each other happy; they want to be there as confidants, cathartic outlets, and company. Friendship love is often compared to the love between siblings. In many cases, a sibling is just as good a friend as any. Society will not accept romantic love between relatives, but friendship love is encouraged and is a lovely thing to see when it does happen. So now that we can see the difference between romantic love and friendship love, do we understand love better? Perhaps not. Everybody experiences love in a different way and may not agree with the definitions offered here. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not your kind of love fits into any category. Love is personal, and the important thing is that it makes people feel good. When people love each other, there is no room for