The fictional world of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s novel Sula—the African-American section of Medallion, Ohio, a community called the Bottom—is a place where people and natural things are apt to go awry, to break from their pre- scribed boundaries, a place where bizarre and unnatural happenings and strange reversals of the ordinary are commonplace. The very naming of the setting of Sula is a turning upside-down of the expected; the Bottom is located high in the hills. The novel is filled with images of mutilation, both psychological and physical. A great part of the lives of the characters, therefore, is taken up with making sense of the world, setting boundaries, and devising methods to control what is essentially uncontrollable. One of the major devices used by the people of the Bottom is the seemingly univer- sal one of creating a ; in this case, the title character Sula—upon which to pro- ject both the evil they perceive outside themselves and the evil in their own hearts. Which of the following words would best fit into the blank in the final sentence of the passage?