Paradise, Toni Morrison, 1998
(This is a critical paper, written for a Graduate class on Works by Toni Morrison, in which I analyze the themes of Morrison’s Paradise in terms of Morrison’s anecdotal point about the potential danger of generational ideas).
The way Morrison’s Paradise begins—a mass shooting of the women in the Convent by the inhabitants of Ruby—without the context of Morrison’s purpose for delivering this scene or the knowledge of who the men are and who the women are, is shocking. It’s a curious beginning, could possibly be misleading. A killing scene to start—it could be a horror, or a thriller novel, perhaps, of victims and villains. But then, as is Morrison’s specialty, we’re brought through a time vault which moves us out of the disturbed scene and backward to see exactly who are these victims, and who are these villains, and how did they become this way.
I’ll establish here my own take, which is that the women of the Convent are by no means “victims” in the general sense. They—and I believe this is Morrison’s point—are stronger, wiser, freer, and, as my argument goes, less of the story’s “victims” than are the men of Ruby. Their natural unboundness is what makes them a threat to these men, who are confined to their communal history and blind loyalty to their ancestors and God, and this is why the women are victimized (as opposed to being natural “victims”). It is the men of Ruby who are both victims and villains—victims of history, which has ostracized and othered their community, and in turn reared them into the villains of Paradise, where they were unable to remove themselves from the blight of systemic oppression and so they became both the oppressed and the oppressors.
We start with Mavis. Mavis’s chapter begins what seems to be a recurring theme in Ruby—the accidental massacre of children. Her two infant children Merle and Pearl are suffocated in a car while she visits a grocery store for what she claims is all of five minutes. The night before Mavis steals her husband’s Cadillac and finds her way from Maryland to the Convent in Oklahoma, she is raped by her husband. She notes that their 3 living children would be “behind the door, snickering,” her oldest daughter’s eyes “cold and unforgiving” (p.26). This image is important to the novel because although only a microscopic example of this one character’s domestic affairs rather than an issue regarding the entire town of Ruby, it conceptualizes the novel’s prevailing tension of the older generation’s (in our case, Frank, Mavis’s husband) mindlessness to the messages which they teach the younger generation. This is how easily harmful ideas are perpetuated from generation to generation; in this example it could be the way Mavis’s children grow to be normalized with sexual violence, but looking at the novel’s larger ideas, the concept shows through how careless an awareness the older generation has with how they respond and emulate oppression, seen through the eyes of their children (Steward and Deek, specifically) to be parroted by the societies of the new generation.
Another way Mavis illustrates how beliefs are passed down and perpetuated—brought to life, or made true, even, through persistence—through generations and families is on her drive Eastward, in a low moment when she’s feeling the magnitude of how destinationless she is, she reflects on how poorly decided her recent decisions have been: “A grown woman who could not…Could not…Had to be taught how to…Too rattle-minded to…She did not know…Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet” (p.37). All the “could not”’s and negative superlatives are coming from a place in her own tendency to self-doubt. Mavis believes, genuinely, in her stupidity. To her, it feels definite. Stupidity here is part of Mavis’s persona because—as ideas are made to stick—she’s been made to believe by Frank that it is.
This is an idea Morrison plays with a lot (i.e Pecola in The Bluest Eye and Sula in Sula) which is arguably the most important lesson in literature because an understanding of it can create caution around the messages one sends to children.
Grace (Gigi) is a woman lusted after by the younger generation of Ruby (who are seen by the older generation as lost and doomed). I take Gigi’s character to act as a symbol of temptation in the novel, especially when analyzing the division of space in her chapter, which is mostly given to the story of the younger generation in Ruby—K.D. and Arnette. Gigi is beautiful and gives off an energy of sexual comfort, and she causes a riff between K.D. and the woman he loves, impregnated, and hit, by creating in him a pining desire [for her] which she handles carelessly. Later, at K.D. and Arnette’s wedding, she becomes a symbol of anger for he who can not handle a woman’s rejection (this is a huge theme in the novel as well—a man needing to be in control of women). K.D. was looking forward to being married, not so he could bask in his love for Arnette, but so he could “flush that Gigi bitch out of his life completely. Like sugar turning from unreasonable delight to the body’s mortal enemy, his craving for her had poisoned him…” (p. 147).
Seneca, who’s chapter I say is most poignant, is again an exploration of how impressionable the younger generation is to ideas sent by the older one. The chapter is split, beginning with the story of Dovey and Steward Morgan, and then Sloan and Deek Morgan (twin founders of Ruby), and ending with Seneca’s childhood and how she was led to the Convent. Dovey and Sloan are preoccupied by their husband’s current turmoil over the town’s debate on whether or not to change the message carved onto the center of town’s “oven;” the older generation’s totem for the loyalty to their communal heritage; the younger generation’s object of new life. After one word has eroded off, the debate is on whether they should fix “the furrow of his brow,” to either “beware” the furrow of his brow, as the older generation believes it was (the Morgans, Reverend Pulliam), or “be” the furrow of his brow, as the younger generation believes (Reverend Misner, K.D.). This debate works directly to anecdote the disagreement between the two generations—whether God’s power is transcendent, and to be formidably felt and respected, or whether it is to be given and reproduced to the people of Ruby. Though Steward and Deek Morgan sit on the side of the argument that “you can’t be God, boy,” the novel builds to prove their sharp hypocrisy, as they idolize their father, Zechariah, who started the journey from Haven to Ruby, and in Ruby after Zechariah’s passing, have together assumed his position as a dominating, magnanimous force to be respected and feared by the rest of the townspeople (p. 87). Let it be noted that the women of Ruby are not part of this debate; in fact, they seem indifferent to it. Dovey believes that leaving the message as “furrow of his brow” was “alone enough for any age or generation,” and that adding a word, either “be” or “beware,” was “futile” (p. 93).
A close analysis of Seneca’s chapter then makes me consider that Morrison may be using her as a character to show us how Deek and Steward, who we’d just established as antagonists, are, too, victims of the generations above them. At 5 years old, Seneca was abandoned by her sister in their apartment for four nights and five days. While waiting for her sister to return, she “cleaned her teeth and washed her ears fully. She also flushed the toilet right away, as soon as she used it, and folded her socks inside her shoes,” because she knew as a five year old who—and this is Morrison’s point—only knows what she is told, that “if she did everything right without being told, Jean would walk in” (p. 127). Further, when she sees Sweetie, a depressed Ruby townswoman whose life has been overtaken by caring for her two dying babies laughing on a dissociative walk through town, she perceives, through her own projected memory of heartbreak, that she is crying. Seneca’s example, when placed directly with Deek and Morgan’s, proves to show that we only know what we are taught, and we are products of how we were raised. It would be difficult, then, for Deek and Morgan to not have reproduced the God complex that their father had, for it was all they knew a leader to act. This idea is illustrated once more after Seneca reaches the Convent; “she had slept on floors, on cardboard, on nightmare-producing water beds and, for weeks at a time, in the back seat of Eddie’s car. But she could not fall asleep on this clean, narrow childish bed” (p. 131). Reinstated, our upbringing is our defaulted comfort.
Pallas’s chapter, called Divine, explores love. Pallas, compared to the rest of the women at the Convent, is privileged; she has a lawyer father and an artist mother. When Pallas runs away with the janitor at her high school (from her father’s home to her mother’s) to elope, she finds her boyfriend and her mother amidst an affair and runs away from them, finding her way to the Convent. Pallas has a healthy love from her father and the women at the Convent, and an unhealthy love from her mother and her ex-boyfriend. This is all juxtaposed by the beginning of the chapter, in which K.D. and Arnette are married, and the two reverends—Pulliam (older generation) and Misner (younger generation)—find themselves in a silent but callous argument about their own differing ideas about love in regard to God. Pulliam’s take is that “love is divine only,” meaning that love is God, and that it is not deserved, but earned with the willful practice of God; Misner’s take, which is redolent of the earlier argument on whether or not we should “beware” or “be” the furrow of God’s brow, is that “[God] is you” (p.147). It is inconsequential, then, whether or not Pallas “deserves” the blasphemous encounter that has led her to the convent (or the rape that is implied after she’d left her mother’s), because she, at the Convent, where the “divinity” of women comes from not God, but a love of freedom and accepting one another, is love regardless.
Patricia’s chapter serves to progress the plot’s Ruby lore. Patricia is a light-skinned black woman in Ruby who is regarded with her father as “other,” because of the “impurity” of their race. She reflects on the “Disallowing,” an event in which members of Fairly, another black town, rejected the people who went on to found Haven because, in what is gathered by Patricia, their skin was too dark. This event solidified Zechariah’s obsession with purity, an obsession which then was passed through the generations to Deek and Morgan, making a new issue of Ruby not only “white against black,” but now “light-skinned against black” (p. 194). Here, we see how Ruby’s founders directly reproduced a politically Zionist and problematic idea of the older generation, again, lending toward Morrison’s point of the impressionist nature of children and the younger generation. Another, less subtle, way that she does this is in the, as I mentioned earlier, massacre of children. Patricia mentions Nathan DuPres—the town’s eldest member—and how he and his wife lost “all” of their babies to a tornado in 1922 (p. 204). Later, in a heated discussion between Patricia and Reverend Misner, Misner says “isolation kills generations,” and that “separating [Ruby], isolating [Ruby]” has always been their weapon (p. 210). This seems to directly address why it is that so many of the children of Ruby have perished—the town’s reproduction of oppression is literally killing them.
In contrast to what we’d thus far considered to be the Convent’s “paradise”—a freedom from organized, confined, religion, that is—we are given the story of Consolata, the
“mother” of the Convent, who is deeply religious after being saved and fostered by a nun in Portugal and raised amongst the original Native inhabitants at the Convent, which was then “Christ the King School for Native Girls.” Consolata idolizes the nun who saved her, Mary Magna, and then Deek, the man she has an affair with during his marriage with Soane, soon to become one of Connie’s greatest friends. The affair fizzles out when she bites his lip, which “in retrospect, was her big mistake” (p. 237). This incident—which to readers, could really seem of no immediate importance at all—she ruminates on. She had licked her lips of his blood, considering herself “a woman bent on eating him like a meal” (p. 239). After this incident, Connie becomes a threat to the Deek, who abandons her, not because she was going to harm him, but because to men like the Morgans, a woman is meant, as is God’s word in the bible, to be docile and subdued, and that, Connie is not. Connie loves Deek so much that before his final abandonment of her, she sets up a shrine for the two of them in a room in the Convent, where she is fully committed to idolizing him all his life.
Lone, a woman adopted into the Ruby clan, introduces Connie to practicing magic, which Connie uses to save Soane and Deek’s child after being killed in a car accident. Here is established not only Connie’s divinity, which is passed on to the rest of the girls in the Convent, but that female support and love is more “divine” than the precarious love from a man. Soane forgives Connie. And Lone, who acts in the novel as God’s messenger—notably a woman—oversees the men of Ruby planning their massacre at the Convent; she overhears Reverend Cary convince the men of the “heifers” at the Convent who ruined their “peaceable kingdom,” being “these sluts” who have “never [stepped] foot in church,” and who “don’t need men and don’t need God” (p. 276). I must say it is quite presumptuous to claim to need men and to need God is within the same subset.
Lone sets out to save them, and though she doesn’t arrive before the massacre—the massacre in which the men at one point notice the women “are not hiding. They are loose,” further showing their perception of women as animals, but really, as “other,” the well-understood fear of things men don’t understand—Morrison’s most powerful message of the strength of female love is upheld when Deek’s brother Steward shoots Connie in the head, and Soane’s response at Deek’s immediate change—which I understand as heartbreak—is not of jealousy or surprise at his revealed love—or past love, at least—for Connie, but to respect and understand him. To be proud of him, even.
I cried at the line, “[Deek] lifts his hand to halt his brother’s and discovers who, between them, is the stronger man” (p. 289), because we know, and Soane knows, it is Deek who is. I continued crying when Deek carries Consolata to the table and lays her “carefully” and “comfortably” on Soane’s raincoat—it is women who will always comfort women—with trembling hands (p. 290).
During Save-Marie’s chapter which entails the funeral of yet another child of the younger generation, we see how the death of the women at the Convent becomes a myth. Some people believe that the women “took other shapes and disappeared into thin air,” and some believe that the women escaped (pp.296-297). Lone—who I personally trust most—believes that God had “actually swept up and received His servants,” which lends nicely to the plotline of the women’s divinity. In the end, we are told where the women of the Convent have headed, most of whom did indeed survive, because divinity, as the story tells, will not be perturbed by the misguided means of men.
It is to my surprise that Morrison’s Paradise is not among her most well known such as The Bluest Eye and Beloved, because after closing the novel and taking a few days distance from being within the story, I think back on it as a tale, the same way I do tales within Greek Mythology and tales within Religion—that is, a parable which tells a lesson easier understood through anecdote than through lived experience. This lesson being that, as we see in all of the characters, we often fall into a pit of reproducing the oppression we’re given, because that’s all we know, unless we work to intentionally become aware—as Morrison makes us—of the necessity in breaking that dangerous cycle of reproduction and be rid of the blighted messages we’ve, since childhood, received.
Of the three Toni Morrison novels I’ve read (The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Paradise), Paradise so far takes the cake after having left me utterly changed through Morrison’s imagined world of synthesizing the dangers of patriarchy, control, and blind loyalty to Religion. I look forward to seeing where Song of Solomon ranks on my list next.
Quotes:
Outside, the mist is waist high. It will turn silver soon and make grass rainbows low enough for children’s play before the sun burns it off, exposing acres of bluestem and maybe witch tracks as well.
When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be.
By a divining she could not explain, she knew that once she asked him his name, he would never come again.
Saddles on Night, he rediscovered every time the fresh wonder of knowing that on one’s own land, you could never be lost.
She had slept on floors, on cardboard, on nightmare-producing water beds and, for weeks at a time, in the back seat of Eddie’ car. But she could not fall asleep on this clean, narrow childish bed.
Like sugar turning from unreasonable delight to the body’s mortal enemy, his craving for he had poisoned him, rendered him diabetic, stupid, helpless.
She believed she loved him absolutely because he was all she knew about her self—which was to say, everything she knew about her body was connected to him.
So there. She had opened her lips a tiny bit to say two words, and no black water had seeped in.
In the good clean darkness of the cellar, Consolata woke to the wrenching disappointment of not having died the night before.
One by one they would float down the stairs, carrying a kerosene lamp or a candle, like maidens entering a temple or a crypt, to sit on the floor and talk of love as if they knew anything about it at all. They spoke of men who came to caress them in their sleep; of men waiting for them in the desert or by cool water; of men who had once desperately loved them; or men who should have loved them, might have loved them, would have.
