Studies in American Fiction

Introduction

In Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula, the two protagonists are girlfriends whose relationship crosses boundaries, physical and psychic.¹ In childhood, we are told, Nel and Sula find “in each other’s eyes the intimacy they [are] looking for.”² Their connection with one another is so deep they often have “difficulty distinguishing one’s thoughts from the other’s” (83). What is sometimes referred to as the “lesbian merger” theory³ signifies the notion that two lesbians may become indistinguishable from one another because of their desire for one another. In the case of Nel and Sula, whose friendship is predicated on their sameness, we see such a merger physicalized first in their sexual play in the grass as adolescents, when they are closest emotionally, and second in Nel’s disgust at Jude’s act of infidelity with Sula, when they are furthest from one another emotionally. In the former case, Morrison delays explication of the emotion the girls feel in the moment in order to focus instead on their physical actions. The latter collapses the two into a singular pronoun, “they,” which allows the reader to modify whom is referent with each reading of the pronoun. In each case, we are alerted to Nel and Sula’s collapse into one another through formal elements: metaphor and innuendo, then syntax.

In the realist mode, we generally assume the psychic/emotional and physical planes to be distinct planes of existence, even as they may be related. Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) has a deep relation to the realist mode, presenting things as they are so well that its subject matter continues to be reason the book is banned.⁴ However, with Sula and, a few years after, Song of Solomon (1977), we see a more magical realist mode develop in her prose. At this early point in her literary career, we should [End Page 249] note, Morrison was constructing what would be a world-renowned style, and with Song of Solomon, a critical success, she joined the literary establishment. Using the framework of queer phenomenology, this article makes the case that the relationship at the center of the novel disrupts both the spatial planes on which the characters exist and the form of the novel itself. The effect this has is a queering of relation, gender, and form. I choose phenomenology because space and subjective perception seem to be quite important to Morrison’s oeuvre. From The Bluest Eye’s traumatized protagonist to Beloved’s haunting history, Morrison’s fiction could very well be characterized by the “ways of inhabiting and being inhabited by space.”⁵ Using this and other frameworks developed by queer of color theorists Gloria Wekker as well as Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith’s theories⁶ will bring into focus how Nel and Sula’s relation to one another is so close—so intimate—that the traditional separation of the physical and the psychic planes is collapsed. The ramifications of that collapse manifest in the form of the novel.

This article disputes the notion that Black queer studies began with the writing of Audre Lorde, Gloria T. Hull, and others in the late 1970s and 1980s.⁷ Instead, this queer reading of Morrison’s second novel, published in 1972, combined with the theorizing of Morrison’s contemporaries pushes the foundation of Black queer studies to Sula, notably a novel Smith herself reads as “inherently lesbian” in her field-defining work “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.”⁸ The text, we will see, stands as a Black feminist text like no other because it extends back the commencement of Black queer studies and inserts this discipline into literary-aesthetic methods of critique, such as formalism.⁹ The text is as multifaceted, that is, as the discipline it ushers in, concerned as it is with complex notions of relation, temporality, and the erotic. We will attend to the queer relation between the two protagonists of Sula—an area of scholarship that has been recently overlooked in labeling Morrison’s work heteronormative and androcentric,¹⁰ even as one of the...