How does hannah die sula

Related Symbols: The Plague of Robins. Related Themes: Race and Racism. Page Number and Citation : Cite this Quote. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance. Sula also lives with her grandmother—a BoyBoy was an abusive husband—he drank too much, Hannah married a man named Rekus who died when Sula, their child, was three. Strangely—considering how Hannah is an Hannah has filled her bowl with beans.

Now, she takes the bowl and asks Eva Such a time. The night before their conversation, She is standing outside, and her dress is on fire. Eva immediately rushes, in A group stands around Hannah as she lies on the ground, screaming in pain. Eva lies in her hospital bed, trying to understand what has happened. The red Cite This Page. Even more important about this scene is the contrast of Eva and Hannah with Sula as a bystander to the drama of their struggle. In some sense, the image of Eva handicapped, aging, slow, and bloody hurrying to Hannah burning, aloof, young, and beautiful represents what death to youth does to a woman, but also what knowledge and hardship can do.

Oh Jesus, make me wonderful. This friendship makes her wonderful, replacing the desires to travel as she never leaves Medallion again, and allows Nel to create an identity independent of her family and home. In her novel Sula, Toni Morrison instils a sense that certain lives and narratives are worth more than others.

Throughout the descriptions of the lives of Sula and Nel, as well as their encounters with people other than their families, Morrison introduces certain characters through animalistic or generic epithets and, by not awarding them any name, connotes the disposability of their lives. Sula invites him to climb trees and play, but the boy falls into the river and drowns as both girls watch. The introduction of this character as an animal has a double effect on how his narrative is understood.

First, his being equated to a chicken and referred to as one establishes a hierarchical difference between him and Sula. This latter name also conjures a sense of innocence to his character, which is further corroborated by the way Sula accompanies him during the game.

Eventually, Nel consoles Sula and dismisses any real concerns about the implications of their actions. This report is full of racial slurs and outright justifications that the body would not be rescued had it not been a child. Toni Morrison often writes about love and portrays its different expressions through various characters in Sula. For example, Hannah asks Eva whether or not she loved her, to which Eva responded defensively and demonstrated how her love was unconditional.

A love based on necessity and survival not compassion and empathy. This scene continues and Hannah finally confronts Eva about killing her only son Plum. Equally, it may demonstrate the trauma he faced in World War I, unable to cope with his memories, reverting instead to drugs and the refuge of his mother. These descriptors illustrate her admiration for her son but the loss of hope and faith she has in him. In a converse reading, Morrison also plays with the role of the patriarchy in the s.

Helene is the sharp contrast to Hannah, yet this contrast does not prevent a connection between their daughters, rather their deeply opposed upbringings is what brings the two girls together in friendship, each finding what they cannot at home, in the households of the other.

In order to understand this contrast, and how it has pulled Sula and Nel together, the reader must first understand their respective upbringings. The heaviness of the fabric, and the very material it is constructed from, deep brown velvet and wool, are reflective of the way Helene raises Nel. Everything in their home is clean and proper, red velvet sofa and white lace curtains.

The significance of the handmade velvet dress does not lie in what it is, rather what it represents. This dress represents Helene in an object, and as Nel looks at the dress as the pair rides south on the train.

As a child, Nel dreamt of languishing on a bed of flowers, floral cushion beneath her, awaiting her prince. And too, she wished for a companion to share in her longing. Elsewhere, Sula crouched behind a linoleum roll in her attic, attempting to escape the activity of her household.

When they found each other, they found sisterhood. However, their dreams proved too disparate to coexist in adulthood: Nel craved passivity and Sula action.

Nel remained content to wait for a man and settle. But Sula demanded movement in her life. As adults, they no longer dreamt of fantasy but of hell.

Sula tells Nel that hell is stagnation, to do one thing for the rest of eternity. Hannah dies on the way to the hospital. Recuperating in the hospital from the injuries she sustained from jumping out of her window, Eva remembers seeing Sula merely standing on the boardinghouse's back porch, calmly watching her mother perish in the conflagration of flames.

This chapter focuses on the importance of omens to the people living in the Bottom. Morrison baits our curiosity by beginning the chapter, "The second strange thing. We don't yet know what the first strange thing is, but by the end of the chapter Morrison's lengthy list of odd occurrences gives us valuable insights into the intensely superstitious beliefs in the Bottom.

These strange things include a choking dry wind; Eva's missing comb, which previously has never been out of place; Hannah's fiery red dress in her wedding dream, superstitiously believed to foretell a death; and Sula's sullen, shifting mood and her shadowy, changing birthmark. Morrison purposely presents events out of order to highlight the disordered nature of the Bottom. Nothing is the way it should be. Eva identifies the source of this disorder, this evil, in her haunting, matter-of-fact recollection of Sula's passivity as her mother burns to death.

She condemns Sula for watching as Hannah is consumed by flames rather than seeing her mother as the woman who gave birth to her — and trying to put out the fire that ignites her flesh.

Eva implies that Sula has a disturbing, unnatural curiosity about her mother's burning body. All the signs were evident — the dreams, the omens, the coincidences — that prefigured Hannah's tragedy.

And, according to Eva, the source of the disorder lies in Sula. Hannah's death on the way to the hospital is ostensibly the result of fire, but Morrison adds the doubt-raising phrase "Or so they said," which suggests that Eva's maternal altruism might have resurfaced: Rather than have her daughter live out the rest of her life painfully and grotesquely disfigured, Eva, who was placed in the same ambulance as her daughter, might have smothered Hannah.

Order and nature are askew here. Recalling the ambivalence surrounding Plum's death, what is evil — Eva's possibly suffocating her daughter — may be good, and what appears to be good might well be called murder — or evil. After Hannah's death, the community never completely trusts or accepts Sula the way it accepted her mother.

The chorus of community women mourn Hannah as a communal treasure; they weep for her "as though they themselves had been her lovers. She was merely unconventional, and, like Shadrack, the community knew what to expect of her.