ABSTRACT
Whether or not Toni Morrison had encountered semiotics before writing Sula, the novel reveals the persistence of the cultural codes that shape our understanding of the social world and underlie the production of literary meaning. She grasps the endurance of black middle-class culture and its semantics far better than the myriad critics who consistently discover reversals of bourgeois social, political and economic codes in her work. It is now commonplace to say that we best value Sula by appreciating the way in which the author inverts genres and expectations created by middle-class American ideology. In this critical climate, Morrison’s book and her corpus make much of their striking impression. Her allegedly subversive literary discourse extends a late twentieth-century tradition which represents authentic blackness as a figurative process: the deferral, revision, or undoing of the established social and cultural codes of white Western civilization. Figuration of this sort makes Sula part of feminist literary canons that define their members by subversive literary strategies. From a conventionally modernist point of view, Sula exemplifies the dérèglement of Western conceptions of the self, of patriarchal social arrangements, or of bourgeois American culture itself. These critiques, however, are marked by the writers’ recoil from some of Sula’s assaults on bourgeois norms.1 And that recoil illustrates the irony which this paper explores. Morrison’s attack on the limits of middle-class life is framed in such a way that the text reinstates those limits in the minds of readers who affirm its subversive tendencies.
