Embodying freedom, adventure, curiosity, unpredictability, passion, and danger, Sula takes little from others and gives even less. She is not ruthless; rather, she is spontaneous and unable to moderate or temper the sudden impact her actions might have on her community. She often seems perpetually stuck in a kind of childlike impetuosity. Morrison tells us that Sula "had no center, no speck around which to grow"; her life is like an open rainbow for experimental freedom that often touches the edges of danger.
Sula must experience events in order to reflect on them: She watches her mother burn, she commits her grandmother to a nursing home, and she has a sexual affair with her best friend's husband. As flawed as Sula is, however, she never surrenders to falseness or falls into the trap of conventionality in order to keep up appearances or to be accepted by the community. As Morrison notes of her, "She was completely free of ambition, with no affection for money, property or things, no greed, no desire to command attention or compliments — no ego."
Faced with a racist world and a sexist community, Sula defends herself by creating a life, however bizarre, that is rich and experimental. She refuses to settle for a woman's traditional lot of marriage, child raising, labor, and pain. The women of the Bottom hate Sula because she is living criticism of their own dreadful lives of resignation. Their resentment of her is foreshadowed in the novel's epigraph, from Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo, which hints at the independent nature of Morrison's title character. In Williams' play, Serafina delle Rose, an Italian-American woman, mourns for the recent death of her husband, Rosario, who, Serafina's gossipy and cruel neighbors claim, was having an extramarital affair before his death. None of the play's characters understands Serafina's fierce commitment to her dead husband's memory; her questioning his love for her would effectively negate the pride — the glory — she has for herself. Her shallow neighbors think that Serafina has "too much glory," just like the Bottom's black community despises Sula because she has an independence that contrasts to the community's own small-mindedness.
