Toni Morrison's Sula and Love

In her two novels Sula and Love, Toni Morrison writes stories with different plots but with a common underlying theme(duality. Each novel has characters that are in some way opposites juxtaposed against one another. In Sula, Sula's promiscuity is contrasted with Nel's propriety. In Love, the triangle of Christine, Heed, and Junior is intertwined with righteous indignation at having been wronged and outright manipulation to wrong each other. As Morrison explores the differences and similarities between each set of characters involved in the duality, she leads the reader one step farther. "What if," her stories suggest, "the opposites actually exist within just one person?" Morrison's sharp characterizations delineate substantial differences between the "opposite" characters, yet there is a pervasive feeling throughout both novels that these opposites exist side-by-side inside the average person, to some degree or another. We all have both devil and angel inside us, and the person who leads the exemplary life can identify with the one who lives in the gutter. Morrison's novels demonstrate that there is a fine line between apparent opposites and a common thread that ties them together at the heart.

In Sula, Morrison explores the duality of Nel and Sula by contrasting Nel's orderly, upstanding life with Sula's messy, promiscuous one. Even the two women's houses reflect the differences in their character; Nel's house is

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that is both/and, full of shifts and contradictions" (p. 89). Bergenholtz states that "Binary thinking operates on the notion that one term of an opposing pair will be privileged" but quotes Morrison as saying of Sula, "I was interested...in doing a very old, worn-out idea, which was to do something with good and evil, but putting it in different terms" (p. 89). Morrison explains that she "started out by thinking that one can never really define good and evil. Sometimes good looks like evil; sometimes evil looks like good - you never really know what it is. It depends on what uses you put it to" (Bergenholtz, p. 89). Analysis of Love Morrison carries the theme of duality through Love, as well. In this novel, it is Junior who represents the promiscuous woman portrayed by Sula in the previous novel. However, here there is not the clear-cut contrast between Junior and the other women that there was in Sula. Christine and Heed are both guilty of envy, unforgiveness, strife, and underhanded dealings, and both are victims of such. Here, the duality between good and evil is more nebulous. Junior as the Sula-like character has her good side of greater maturity and understanding than the other two women, although i

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