This novel is called Sula, named after the woman who takes the conventions of her small hometown and turns them completely on their head, but the story itself wouldn't be complete without her friend and counterpart who embodies these conventions, Nel. While overall this is not a very realistic novel, Morrison builds these two characters realistically out of their two very different upbringings. One girl has her imagination stifled and is always surrounded by order and cleanliness, with a mother who is a moral pillar of the community, while the second grows up in a family in constant disorder, without male role models and an openly promiscuous mother. Despite their very different origins, the two girls find each other and build a strong bond of friendship. By introducing the reader to these two friends who ultimately choose opposite paths in their adult lives, Morrison expresses his criticism of people who blindly succumb to social conventions, revealing them as a flaw that can be detrimental to a person's humanity. Sula's "evil" actions provide a dialectic to the rest of the Fund's people who seem to thrive on conformity. What exactly is evil and why is it dangerous to live a compliant life like Nel? These are the questions I tend to explore in this article. First of all, however, it is necessary to understand where these two women come from by investigating the important events of their childhood. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Grandmother teaches Helene Wright to be ashamed of her prostitute mother as she is raised in religion, "under the painful eyes of a multicolored virgin Mary," (17) and passes this harsh education on to her own daughter Nel, after moving on as far away as possible from his New Orleans home in The Bottom. Because Helene wanted a well-mannered and obedient daughter, she represses her imagination making the girl vulnerable to the grip of convention, "All the enthusiasms shown by little Nel were calmed by her mother until she drove her daughter's imagination underground."( 18) to oppose or even think of opposing conventions, an individual must have imagination, which will give him the ability to think for himself. Respecting conventions requires no imagination, one simply joins the crowd without thinking. Nel is also negatively affected by the train accident, which is a crucial moment in her life. It is not the growing racism and presence of segregation on the trip south that deeply affects Nel as much as the look she sees in black clothing. soldiers' faces when his mother smiles at the racist white driver. "It was on that train, trundling toward Cincinnati, that she decided to always be on her guard. She wanted to make sure that no man would ever look at her that way. That no night's eye or marbled flesh would ever approach her and turn her to jelly."(22) At this point, Nel makes a conscious decision to avoid the disapproving gaze at all costs, which means, later in her life, that she must follow society's rules or suffer the same misfortune again. Helene had already instilled in the girl the tendency to conform by forcing her imagination, and after this incident, Nel herself decides to avoid confrontation, completing the education that makes her incapable of resisting conventions. A look at the friend Nel acquires after this trip reveals a completely different situation. The House of Peace was a place, "...where all sorts of people came; where newspapers were piled up in the corridor and dirty dishes left for hours at a time in the sink..." (29); far from order andby the discipline of the Wright family. The physical structure of the house itself is also confusing, with inaccessible rooms and doors continually being added to by Eva, who is the family's demigod mistress, and this confusion and disorder translates directly into family relationships. Sula's two main role models, who were her mother Hannah and Eva, never had a stable relationship with any male outside of their respective husbands who weren't around for a long time. Instead, there was a constant flow of strange men in the house, consisting of Hannah's daily lovers and the gentlemen who visited Eva. Aside from Boyboy, the one man she hates, Eva loves men in general: "It was male love that Eva bequeathed to her daughters... The women of Peace simply loved virility, for its own sake .”(41) When Sula is older, she inevitably falls right into line with this behavior. While Nel's mother never teaches her anything about sex, Hannah "lived on sex" (42) and Sula drew her conclusions about it directly from her mother's behavior, "Seeing (Hannah) enter the pantry so easily and emerge exactly as she did when she entered, only happier, she taught Sula that sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable... So she watched her mother's face and the men's faces as they opened the pantry door and took a decision."(44) For Sula, sex has nothing to do with love or even friendship; it is nothing more than an act that two people of the opposite sex do to make each other happy. What could be simpler while still going against every moral standard in society? The girl's behavior as an adult is a reflection of these seemingly immoral lessons she learned from her mother as a child. Nel and Sula as individuals both lacked a certain respect: Nel was unable to "think outside the box" without Sula, while Sula herself was unable to make reasonable decisions not fully governed by her emotions without Nel. The two halves form a whole. Morrison states that, “…they had already known each other in the delirium of their noon dreams2E” (51) One girl is so separated from the other that they knew each other before they physically met. Together, the two friends embarked on the path to womanhood, always trying to find a place in white America, "Since each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph were forbidden to them, they began by creating something 'other than being...Daughters of distant mothers and incomprehensible fathers...they found in each other's eyes the intimacy they were looking for.'(52)Thus these two little girls, who grew up in completely different worlds, manage to finding in each other a compliment to their personalities and an intimacy that they have been unable to recover from their otherwise inadequate parents.2E It is within this relationship that they have their first encounter with the idea of ​​evil : The Chicken Little incident. While it is Sula who actually lets go of Chicken Little's hand, Nel is the one who taunts him to begin with, involving him in the interaction that results in his death. The two inadvertently collaborate in the boy's death, and the first thing Nel says after he disappears under calm water, when you would expect her to cry out in pain or even disbelief is, "Someone saw." After the funeral, Nel's guilt becomes even more evident: "Although she knew she had 'done nothing,' she felt condemned and hanged right there on the pew."(65) She is not worried about the loss of Chicken Little , only the idea of ​​being guilty of an evil act disturbs her. In contrast, “Sula simply cried” (65), which exemplifies her remorse over the child's death. Ironically, it's the girlwho will later be considered evil by her community for mourning the loss of her life and her "moral" friend for only caring about herself. This blurring of the line between good and evil only becomes apparent to the forty-year-old Nel. three years later when Eva brings up the topic and confuses her with Sula. After Nel protests to Eva that it was Sula and not her who killed the boy, Eva replies: "You. Sula. What's the difference? You were there. You looked, right?" (168) and even goes so far as to say : "Just the same. Both of you. There was never any difference between you."(169) After this meeting, Nel consciously remembers "The good feeling she felt when Chicken's hands slipped."(170) This awareness makes Nel aware that she is really no different from Sula as they are both human, and therefore imperfect. Part of this fundamental human imperfection is the fact that we all have a dark side, whether we would like to admit it or not. Nel watched Chicken Little become part of the river with the same sick fascination that turns heads at an accident scene or secretly hopes for a car crash during a race. To understand this secret side of ourselves, we must first be able to recognize its presence, which the people of the Bottom, including Nel before his confrontation with Eva, are incapable of doing. Since they cannot understand the side of themselves that the woman Sula comes to represent, the people of the Bottom shun her and label her evil. Because the Bottom community, as Morrison continually points out, recognizes the fact that evil is an inevitable part of life, they are too quick to label anyone who deviates from their accepted conventions as evil. They know that "(God) was not the three-faced God they sang about. They knew well enough that he had a fourth and that the fourth explained Sula," (118) but the flaw in this logic is that people do not they apply to themselves and consequently fail to recognize the evils inherent in their conformism. Sula is simply representing the life that the rest of the community desires in her secret subconscious, "she lived her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full control, without feeling obligated to please anyone unless their pleasure she liked it." (118) This type of life may seem completely selfish, and it is, but it is also very honest. If Nel and her companions took a sincere and honest look at their own hopes and desires, then they would realize that selfishness does not necessarily mean a total rejection of others. By loving someone, a person loves that other person brings out the best in themselves, which is essentially a selfish, but not evil, goal. Unfortunately, society's conventions attribute very negative connotations to this word, which make a person like Sula, openly selfish, an object of dissent and evil. He becomes a pariah because he admits what no one else will; that first and foremost a person must live their life for themselves and, in turn, this honesty will leave them open and more able to share their self-love with others. Nel and Sula's childhood friendship is an example of selfish love that benefits both parties. During this time, the two girls were able to witness the false sense of morality that consumed the adults around them. While Sula still carried this feeling with her into her adult life, it is the fact that Nel no longer feels this way due to her complete integration into society that comes between the two friends." (Sula) knew quite well what the others felt women, or said they had feelings. She and Nel had always seen them. They both knew that those women were not jealous of other women;,.