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Sula never competed.-Toni Morrison, Sula 1 What, at bottom, is Toni Morrison's feminist classic Sula, first published in 1973, about? The novel keeps us focused on this question by being so uncharacteristically explicit about what it is not about: a jealous rivalry between two women over a man's affection. Nothing seems to close the book on this question with more finality than the novel's last two paragraphs. It is here that Nel Wright, who has been trying to release a howl of pain ever since discovering her friend Sula Peace and her husband Jude on all fours naked finally finds herself capable of doing so only upon realizing, twenty-eight years after the incident, that her emotion is actually for the loss of Sula: 'All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.'And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat. 'We was girls together, she said if explaining something. 'O Lord, Sula,' she cried, 'girl, girl, girlgirlgirl' (Morrison 2004a, 174). With the layer of indirection it contributes, the as if in the tag clause as if explaining something, almost seems added to mitigate an embarrassment hovering about the fact that something is being explained to us: that, contrary to what we and Nel may have thought for the past seventy pages, Sula is a story not of competition but rather of intimate friendship between women. While divorcing itself from the theme of female competitiveness in this pointed, yet curiously belated way, the novel widens its embrace of the idea of female solidarity beyond the duo of Nela and Sula to women in general, evinced by the presence of a third girl in Nel's actual howl: 'girlgirlgirl.' Indeed, Nel's final utterance in the novel is one in which we can see the two comma-separated signifiers immediately preceding it ('girl, girl') literally pressed together into a new term for compound femaleness. But in an experimental, complex, and writerly novel that abounds in paradox and ambiguity, this final rush to explain sticks out like the eponymous character's self-mutilated thumb (Nissen 1999, 264; McDowell 1995, 104). Likewise, Sula's effort to ensure that it will finally not be remembered a story about an unhappy clash between two women over a shared of seems oddly out of character for a novel so otherwise unshy about assigning not-so-nice feelings to its female characters.' This is the case even we come to suspect, given Jude's weakness a draw of narrative interest (a total of five sentences is devoted to his thoughts in the novel) that he may not be anyone's object of desire at all-an insight leading critics to argue that the two characters who do strongly compel our interest, NeI and SuIa, Jude less for his own sake than for the way he enables each woman to test the boundaries of her relationship to the other.2 As vocalized by Nel, Sula's closing, compassionate declaration thus seems to disclaim any affiliation with what Rene Girard calls the novel of envy, jealousy, and impotent hatred arising from mediated (1965, 14). For Girard, this narrative form is endemic to a secular, postRevolutionary modernity in which subjects, having lost the ability to spontaneously, only by copying the desires of those they identify with or admire-role models who then ironically become jealous rivals in the pursuit of the mutually desired object. Girard's point that rivalry intensifies when the social distance between the subject and her role model narrows, while growing more benign when it increases, reinforces the widespread insight that envy arises only between relative equals (Ferguson 2002, 891).3 In this manner, nothing seems further removed from Girard's account of rivalry than the political solidarity of women in feminism that the we-was-girls-together moment in SuIa anticipates. Here, individuals become allies on the basis of desiring the same (or achieving the same goal), whereas in Girard's account, they become bitter antagonists for exactly the same reason. …
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