Rereading “Sula” After the Fall of Roe

Kelly Marie Coyne revisits Toni Morrison’s “Sula” in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s overturning.

By Kelly Marie CoyneMarch 10, 2025

• Fiction

• Politics

IT WAS IN 1973, the year of Roe v. Wade, that Sula was ultimately published. At the time, Toni Morrison was a single mother of two boys, working a full-time job in Manhattan and living in Queens. She had divorced almost a decade prior and began writing fiction shortly thereafter.

Sula is about an intense friendship between two women, the novel’s titular character and Nel, in early 20th-century Ohio. In its preface, Morrison wrote of her fascination with outlaw women, “not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” The latter half of that quote is crucial, especially today, as we launch into a second Trump presidency. It has been over 50 years but not so much has changed. Women who violate unwritten norms reveal the structures that bind us. It’s the very act of violation that makes these laws visible.

Today, Sula faces bans in states such as Nevada, Florida, and Iowa. Today, the definition of “outlaw,” especially for Black women, is quickly changing. And today, just having a uterus, not even seeking an abortion, can render a person a potential outlaw. In 2023, Amari Marsh, a college junior in South Carolina, spent 22 days in prison after miscarrying in her bathroom. When she was accused of going to a Planned Parenthood to obtain a medication abortion, she not only denied it, but also framed herself as a law-abiding citizen: “I’ve never been in trouble. I’ve never been pulled over. I’ve never been arrested,” Marsh said. “I never even got written up in school.” Brittany Watts, another young Black woman, was also criminally charged for miscarrying in her bathroom and trying to flush the remains down the toilet. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession (2023), attributed Watts’s arrest to the haziness of today’s norms, post-Dobbs. In her words, “There’s no how-to guide about what you should do if you experience a miscarriage at home. So it’s also, I think, unusual for prosecutors to be holding Brittany Watts to a standard that wasn’t written down anywhere when she made the choices she did.” Ziegler said there is little precedent for abuse-of-corpse charges being applied in a miscarriage case: “If you think about abuse of a corpse, you’re thinking of people mistreating remains for medical experimentation, or you’re thinking of people, after a homicide, dismembering bodies to hide the crime. This almost never would be a charge you would see applied in a miscarriage case.” In other words, our current lack of clarity around abortion and around what constitutes “outlaw” behavior once again renders women “illegal from birth,” always vulnerable to punishment.

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In Sula, Morrison “wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship.” The implication here is that friendship between women might be predicated on escaping “the rule of men.” This was immediately visible to literary critics at the time, who pored over how the novel depicted female friendship, and specifically Black women’s relationships with each other. Barbara Smith deemed Sula a “lesbian novel”—not because the characters are lovers, but because the direction of the text is not what a procreation-oriented culture comes to expect, in terms of both sentence structure and narrative resolution. Smith’s claim is based in the novel’s depiction of the friendship between Nel and Sula as well as Morrison’s “consistently critical” orientation toward heterosexual, marital, and familial relationships.

Indeed, Morrison, in the preface, argued that sexual freedom, economic freedom, and the freedom to choose one’s life path, including the ability to prioritize friendships as highly as romantic relationships, are intertwined; without the latter, the other two crumble. As Morrison writes, “Female freedom always means sexual freedom, even when—especially when—it is seen through the prism of economic freedom.” Sula suggests that relationships between women, unfettered by men and by the assumption that our most intimate relationships need to include sex or biological kinship, are contingent upon an escape from patriarchal expectations. “Friendship between women is special, different,” Morrison said in an interview with Claudia Tate. “[B]efore Sula,” she continued, “nobody ever talked about friendship between women unless it was homosexual, and there is no homosexuality in Sula. Relationships between women were always written about as though they were subordinate to some other roles they’re playing.” If women’s lives are meant to resemble the structure of a novel—the narrative resolution being a house, a husband, and a baby—Sula suggests that an escape might be the ability to put your role as a friend above your role as a wife. But such priorities might also render you an outlaw. By Morrison’s logic, relationships between women that are unfettered by the forces of marriage, sex, and the nuclear family are relationships outside the law. At the same time, Morrison frames Nel and Sula’s friendship as a refuge—or temporary escape—from the conditions that accompany growing up Black and female in the United States in the early 20th century. In Morrison’s words, “In the safe harbor of each other’s company they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perceptions of things.”

In contrast to the egalitarian nature of friendship, Morrison frames marriage as a relationship predicated on male dominance. Jude, Nel’s husband, is initially attracted to her because of her subservience: “Except for an occasional leadership role with Sula, she had no aggression. Her parents had succeeded in rubbing down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had. Only with Sula did that quality have free rein.” Marriage automatically elevates Jude over Nel: for without a wife, “he was a waiter hanging around a kitchen like a woman.” But married to Nel, “he was head of a household pinned to an unsatisfactory job out of necessity.” Nel’s marriage to Jude is contingent upon her being under Jude’s rule—in other words, by marrying, Nel chooses the route of a law-abiding citizen: she becomes a wife, and then a mother. Sula, on the other hand, meets the imposition of social codes with disdain. Her grandmother asks her, “When you gone to get married? You need to have some babies. It’ll settle you.” But Sula responds, “I don’t want to make somebody else. I want to make myself.”

Morrison frames the Sula-Nel friendship as reliant on Sula’s violation of sexual and familial norms—and, through Sula, Morrison allows her readers to imagine what possibilities might be enabled by Roe v. Wade. Throughout the novel, Sula engages in sex without the fear of pregnancy—a fantasy for women pre-Roe. Even from girlhood, Sula is an outcast with a slightly threatening air about her. When a group of white boys taunts Nel on her way home from school, Sula reaches into her coat pocket, pulls out a paring knife, and slices off the tip of her finger. She asks the boys: “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” It’s a powerful threat. She is invoking castration, and treating her own body as an instrument, reclaiming a power reserved for men.

The relationship between Sula and Nel goes both ways; it is mutual and equal, devoid of the hierarchies of family. As girls, Sula and Nel act “in concert”—“a compliment to one was a compliment to the other, and cruelty to one was a challenge to the other.” In girlhood, Sula “had clung to Nel as the closest thing to both an other and a self.” One day, lying outside, Sula and Nel run their hands up and down blades of grass and stick twigs in and out of the earth, engaging in play that mimics masturbation. The two, when together in girlhood, understand their sexualities outside the demand to be subservient to boys and men (it is no surprise that their play happens outside the home—the locus of women’s intimate lives, of marriage, of family). Otherwise, their relationships with boys and their nuclear families are fraught from the very beginning, becoming only more so in womanhood. As Morrison frames it, maintaining this kind of friendship in womanhood requires becoming an outlaw: unfettered relationships between women are contingent upon the ability to refuse marriage and babies. 

After Nel gets married, Sula consummates a series of affairs with men. It is through these affairs that she discovers “she had been looking all along for a friend” and that “a lover was not a comrade and could never be—for a woman.” In their own ways, both Sula and Nel embody the idea that women must give romance the good old try before being allowed to choose friendship. The overall suggestion seems to be that Nel’s marriage is an interruption to the natural course of her relationship with Sula, who never quite understands that the two no longer share absolutely everything in their lives. They have a falling-out when Sula sleeps with Nel’s husband, even though for Sula, the affair means nothing; she had “no thought at all of causing Nel pain,” for, in girlhood, “they had always shared the affection of other people.” She didn’t understand that “marriage […] had changed all that.”

Though Sula lives in a pre-Roe America, she acts as if the freedoms of Roe are available to her—she occupies a sexual freedom that is usually reserved for men. She sleeps with any man she wants—even her best friend’s husband—as though there will be no consequences. She never fears pregnancy or ostracization. When she is ostracized, when she is treated like a leper by her community, she doesn’t really care. True to form, she has no regard for the burdens women are meant to shoulder. Sula never gets pregnant, but she is exiled when other women realize that she doesn’t see their husbands as off-limits, that she wants sex but does not want to become a wife or mother. Nel, in choosing marriage and children, “belonged to the town and all of its ways,” while Sula merely belongs to herself.

In the end, of course, Sula is punished for her behavior. She dies. Nel, despite following all the rules, also suffers a kind of death—she realizes that her marriage prevented a lifetime of companionship with her friend. Nel mourns this newfound realization. After the affair, she thought the person she missed was her husband, but of course, she was wrong. It was Sula.

In A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960 (1993), Jeanine Basinger observes that at the end of many women’s films, a promiscuous female protagonist is usually put in her place. Basinger refers to this character as a “surrogate woman” because women viewers are meant to identify with her. In Basinger’s words,

When the end of the movie came around, the surrogate woman was usually dead, punished, or back in the fold, aware of the error of her ways. Since the stories were so obviously cracked, and since the heroines paid dearly for their unrestrained behavior, it all seemed a perfectly safe form of pseudoliberation for women to enjoy.

Basinger’s thought provides insight into a variety of texts for and about women. In the classic sitcom I Love Lucy (1951–57), for instance, most episodes follow Lucy as she makes a mess, as she enters the public sphere, as she does things a woman is not supposed to do. The end of each episode finds her back in her place: returned to the home, having learned her lesson. Basinger’s thinking also explains why storylines that chronicle female liberation often end in unplanned pregnancy. Through an unplanned pregnancy, a woman is put in her place. As audiences, these stories allow us to experience a sanitized version of freedom.

Even if Sula was put in her place at the end, Morrison’s own life—she was in middle age when Roe was decided—is a portrait of escape. In Sula’s preface, Morrison emphasizes what divorce gave her: creativity, but also kinship with other single mothers. In her words, “Cut adrift, so to speak, we found it possible to think up things, try things, explore.” Morrison’s escape hatch might not be available soon. Today, opportunities for escape are shrinking. No-fault divorce, access to contraception, freedom for women to love each other unfettered by men—these portals are closing, the locks clicking into place behind them.

Rereading Sula today, in contrast to the other times I have read it, was a confining experience. It felt like watching Hillary Clinton run for president in 2016 and Kamala Harris campaign last year: a fleeting moment of possibility. Watching Sula behave as she does is reminiscent of growing up in a world characterized by the possibilities Roe v. Wade presented, before being shown that—of course—those rights are only temporary.