Friendship in Sula Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Friendship in Sula - Essay Example In the very first place, women are sexual products that, once used, can immediately be left behind. This male-female relationship is essentially a consumer-consumed relationship which is utterly in contrast with female relationship. This relationship is more of a friendship based on a sense of fellow-feeling and integrity that the male-female relationship lacks. Indeed Sula’s friendship with Nel represents the existing relationship among the women of Bottom. This friendship is platonic to a great extent platonic. Though both of them maintain relationship with men, and even though their approaches to men are quite different from each other, they continue a relationship between themselves. Nel’s approach to men is quite conventional and society-acknowledged, whereas Sula’s relationship with men is dominated by her sense of independence. This continuity of Sula-Nel friendship in the face of such contradiction essentially reveals that unlike the sex oriented male-fem ale relationship, Sula-Nel friendship is based on a sense of equality and fellow-feeling. The amity that Sula and Nel share with each other is different from other women's romantic relationships since their friendship presents a sense of integrity that the male-female relationships in Bottom lack. ... I just don‘t like her† (Sula 57). In the same manner, the women of the community of Bottom love their children and husbands; meanwhile, it is also evident that they do not like them since both their husbands and children are some necessary parts of their lives, but neither of them renders a sense of completion. Indeed the relationship between a husband and a wife in Bottom can be compared to the relationship between a host and its parasites. But a women’s relationship with other women is totally different from such host-parasites relationships. Female relationship or friendship exists because of the inherent symbiotic benefits that they receive from it. Again the heterosexual relationships or practices among the people of Bottom are in contrast to female friendships. Whereas female friendships are based upon affinity, the heterosexual relationships depend on the neediness of the men in Bottom. Though the traditional male-expectation in Bottom is that a woman must r emain under the supervision of their parents or husbands, Nel did not care for Jude till the last moment of her friendship with Sula. The difference between Nel’s friendship with Sula and her relationship with Jude is that though Jude needs Nel more than she needs him, he maintains a make-belief superiority to Nel. Though Jude is superfluous to Nel’s life, social conventions of Bottom hide this fact from her. He needs to marry Nel in order to prove his manhood when he was denied to work with the white road laborers; he needs Nel for mental support during odd days, and to bear his children in order to prove his masculine abilities. Yet Nel does not have the feeling of completion from her relationship with Jude because society imposed inferiority of Nel to