Sula, the protagonist of the novel Sula (1973), a black female is a continuum of self discovery. At the tender age of twelve she finds no role models in her grandmother Eva and indifferent mother Hannah. She suffers rejection in her childhood and negation in her adulthood by her society. She does not receive the necessary nurturing to create a self within her own black culture. Her search for self is to the exclusion of her community of which she was a part. It is the black culture which imposes and enforces its own definition of a woman as wife, mother and man's lover. The racist and sexist realities in which Sula is placed, she challenges and subverts for forging an African American female identify. Sula and her friend Nel are versions of the same personality. Nel's final self-realization is a necessary prerequisite for female selfhood through the metaphorical rebirth of Sula. While Sula defies black values for forging her own individual self, Nel attempts to posit a self through tradition rooted in the black culture. Sula's Search culminates in her premature death at the age of thirty in 1940