Sula/"The Laugh of the Medusa"

I've written up a bit of contextual information that will help us place Toni Morrison's Sula in conversation with Helene Cixous and the broader landscape of 1970s feminist and psychoanalytic literature: By 1973, Sula was not the only woman, fictional or otherwise, succumbing to a seemingly uncontrollable fever. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, American women began forming "consciousness raising groups," in which they expressed grievances, dreams, and story ideas before returning to their daily lives as wives, mothers, girlfriends, and other chronically underpaid and underappreciated jobs as secretaries, nurses, and teachers (if they were lucky). Shulamith Firestone, who published the feminist treatise The Dialectic of Sex at the age of 25 in 1970, led one of the early feminist consciousness raising groups in New York. (Ironically, "Sula" is a Hebrew nickname for "Shulamith." Firestone began to show symptoms of schizophrenia during the late 1970s after the coverup of her brother's suicide in 1974.) Eventually, these groups evolved into reading clubs, in which women either collectively read a popular feminist text or workshopped the writing of other women in the group. 

Toni Morrison was a member of such a reading group during the late 60s/early 70s, aptly titled "The Sisterhood." Other members of the group included Ntozake Shange, Lucille Clifton, Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Paule Marshall. Gabrielle Dudley has written a great summary of the Sisterhood's legacy here: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/marbl/2020/02/19/she-puts-things-in-toni-morrison-and-the-legacy-of-black-women-writers/ In the Foreword to the 2004 re-issue of Sula, Morrison writes, "Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore. Use what was known and tried and investigate what was not. Write a play, form a theater company, design clothes, write fiction unencumbered by other people's expectations. Nobody was minding us, so we minded ourselves" (Morrison xv). Because Morrison was the only Black woman editor at Random House during the 1960s and 70s, she was able to advocate for the publication of books about the psychic and everyday experiences of Black American women, including Lucille Clifton's poetry collection An Ordinary Woman (1974), June Jordan's Things I Do in the Dark (1977), and Gayl Jones' novel Corregidora (1975), whose themes of intergenerational and interracial sexual abuse during slavery anticipate the dramatic arc of Morrison's novel Beloved over a decade later. However, this genealogy of Black women's writing is often read in isolation from the deluge of women's psychological fiction and criticism that appeared in print during the 1970s. The limitations of the discursive "universe" of second-wave American feminism that Hortense Spillers identified in 1984 in "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" (in which Black women existed as silent "beached whales" "awaiting their verb") had already begun to take root in the print culture of 1970s women's literature and early women's consciousness-raising groups. 

To string together a different constellation of ancestry, I read Sula in relation to texts such as Erica Jong's novel Fear of Flying (1973) and Flora Rheta Schreiber's Sybil (1974), a novelization of a psychiatric case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder and grande hysterie. Fear of Flying tells the story of Isadora Wing, a 29-year old Jewish poet who feels trapped in a sexually and emotionally unsatisfying marriage to a male psychoanalyst. Much of the novel is devoted to Isadora's pursuit of a "zipless fuck," which she describes as being "absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not 'taking' and the woman is not 'giving'. No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn. And I have never had one." Isadora's obsession with the zipless fuck is not only about the possibility of experiencing sexual pleasure--the novel is threaded together by Isadora's constant despair, panic, and angst that she lacks control over her own body and mind. Isadora's literal fear of flying on planes can also be juxtaposed against Sula's fascination with free-falling, a sensation which she believes can only be accessed through intercourse. 

Andrea Dworkin's assessment that all intercourse is a form of violation because of the ways that capitalism and patriarchy inscribe "men" and "women" into unequal social roles that are confirmed during sex could be useful here. If we take Dworkin to be correct, Sula and Isadora's exploration of a sexual grammar of the self via an external (male) other would be completely futile. If the act of (heterosexual, cisgender) intercourse itself is designed to confirm the reality that Sula and Isadora are trying to reject, each sexual encounter would only masochistically push them further toward "madness," if madness is defined here as the constant experience of having one's interpretation of reality and language denied. Or rather, one's interpretations, as in the case of Sybil Isabel Dorsett of Sybil, who created multiple personalities of varying ages and abilites after suffering extreme physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother as a child. Some of her personalities were skilled artists. 

By the time we meet Sula in the chapter and year "1939," she is a 28-year-old woman who has suffered a great deal of sexual abuse, maternal trauma, and neglect. At 12, she accidentally killed her male playmate Chicken Little as her best friend Nel watched; at 13, she watched her mother Hannah "with interest" as she burned to death in a possible act of suicide; at 18, Sula left her hometown, the Bottom, for ten years to attend college and travel the world after Nel got married. At 26, Sula returned to the Bottom, bringing with her feelings of deep cynicism about the logic of the outside (white) world and the mirroring of its hierarchies of power in the all-Black town of The Bottom. Soon after her return, Sula gets into an argument with Nel's husband, Jude, about the privileged position Black men hold within the Black community. In response to Jude's presumptuous plea for Nel and Sula's emotional labor, Sula retorts, "Colored women worry themselves into bad health just trying to hang on to your cuffs. Even little children--white and black, boys and girls--spend all their childhood eating their hearts out 'cause they think you don't love them. And if that ain't enough, you love yourselves. Nothing in this world loves a black man more than another black man. You hear of solitary white men, but niggers? Can't stay away from one another a whole day. So. It looks to me like you the envy of the world." (Morrison 104). 

Sula's comments to Jude carry anticipatory echoes of Helene Cixous' identification of a feminine antinarcissism and the rigid absurdity of penis envy in "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976). Cixous describes antinarcissism as "a narcissism which loves itself only to be loved for what women haven't got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove" (Cixous 878). Within this logic, women's fear of lack (of a penis, of power, of bodily autonomy, of the "right" words) is a disciplinary tool to prevent women from collectivizing, writing, and speaking the unique, embodied, and poetic contours of their own private realities. For Cixous, women's participation in the libidinal economy of penis envy (such as sleeping with artists when you really want to be one) confirms the power of a "signifier that would take you back to the authority of a signified!" (Cixous 892). To visualize Cixous' idea here through the lens of semiotics, the penis is the sign, the written word itself is the signifier, and the concept of the phallus—within a phallocentric grammar—is the signified. Thus, for a woman to exist as anything other than a ventriloquized phallus, she would have to reject the authority of the constructed ties between signifiers and signifieds in order to create an entirely new and endless universe of signs that has the ability to signify and inscribe the feminine. Cixous is adamant about women inscribing a feminine language with their bodies because the bodily experiences, traumas, and desires of women have been denied for as long as the category of "woman" has existed as an economically and emotionally exploitable entity. 

There is a reason why there are no words to describe what happened to Sula, Sybil, Isadora, and many others. However, the efforts of Morrison, Jong, Cixous, and other women writers during the 1970s (and now) were an attempt to inscribe the feminine in language that could be disseminated and inherited for decades to come. They left a trace of proof on paper that Sula, as well as classical Greek heroines such as Cassandra and Antigone, could not. The feminine is inscribed in the future anterior tense; it is the palimpsest that will have been beneath the inscription of the hieroglyph. 

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