Romantic love loves the impetuous passion, the intangible bliss of love, not the body. Throughout the past century stereotypical roles and expectations of men and women have been roughly the same in romantic relationships. Where women are the caretakers, emotional people in desperate need of love from men. Men are less emotional, the ones in control and the providers. In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula, she subverts the traditional notions of romantic love by undermining the conventional roles and expectations of men and women in relationships. Often women are portrayed as sexual objects and individuals who depend on men for their emotional well-being. With very few exceptions, the female characters in Sula are fiercely independent, tenacious…show more content… Accompanying the overwhelming matriarchal structure of the homes and romantic relationships, there is also an absence of fathers and romantic men in Sula. Morrison portrays men as jobless people who are dependent on women and incapable of raising families. Men like BoyBoy and Jude are fine examples, they abandon their paternal roles and commit adultery. BoyBoy left Eva after many years of physical abuse and womanizing. Nel and Jude get married, Nel needs someone to care for, Jude wants to be cared for but Sula ends their already unhappy marriage by sleeping with Jude. Sula’s notion of love is as impeding as her attitude to sexuality, and they both resulted in her dismantling the relationship between her and Nel. She does not see sex as exceptional, which is why she is incapable of understanding the wound that she has inflicted on Nel by having sex with Jude. She is not able to relate sex to love. “ Yes my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made by somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.” (Morrison p. 1052) Sula rather be lonely on her own term, than let a man dictate her happiness. Sula highlights the fact that loving a man only results in emotional pain and loneliness she believes that love is an annoyance and eventually can result in burdening her
