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 immaculate and well organized, while Sula's is dirty and disheveled. The reader follows the duality through Nel's marriage to a local man while Sula goes away to college and beds down multiple men. As Nel lives a life that is approved by society, Sula's life exemplifies all that society condemns.
The interesting twist in this otherwise neat duality is that Nel is the daughter of a woman who was herself the daughter of a prostitute. The daughter(Nel's mother(does her best to eliminate ...