Paradise

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Magical Realism & the Convent

Toni Morrison has a penchant for incorporating elements akin to magical realism in her fiction. Magical realism is a “chiefly Latin-American narrative strategy that is characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of fantastic or mythical elements into seemingly realistic fiction” (Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopedia. “Magic Realism.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed 19 March 2022). Morrison employs a similar technique in Paradise, most apparent at, or in characters related to, the Convent. By incorporating these elements, she creates a counterbalance with the traditional Christianity of Ruby, emphasizing the conflict between the town and the Convent. Ultimately, Morrison portrays the mansion as a paradise on earth, imbuing it with an otherworldly energy.

Connie possesses the mystical gift of “seeing in” or “stepping in.” She learns that she has this skill when she brings Scout Morgan back to life after a car accident: “Inside the boy she saw a pinpoint of light receding. Pulling up energy that felt like fear, she stared at it until it widened. Then more, more, so air could come seeping, at first, then rushing rushing in” (245). It is this same talent that she uses to keep Mother Superior alive, causing the woman to glow. Never questioning the reality of this ability, Morrison allows Connie to transcend the boundaries of reality. It is this transcendence, however, that further instigates the final attack on the Convent. The people of Ruby see the Convent women as “witches” who “don’t need God” (276). Connie’s spiritual gift stands in contrast to the traditional Christian beliefs of the townspeople. By employing magical realism here, Morrison highlights the fundamental difference between Ruby and the Convent.

The close of the novel offers the most poignant moment of magical realism. During the attack on the Convent, we are told that the women are gunned down. However, the bodies mysteriously disappear, leaving little trace of the incident. In the last few pages of “Save-Marie,” we get vignettes of each woman alive in the aftermath, encountering somebody from their past. While the encounters appear real—their heads are still shaven, Mavis has an injury, Pallas has her baby—there is something slightly unusual about them. Sally Albright, for instance, senses her mother, Mavis, “sliding away” (313) during their conversation. Indeed, there is something distant and uninterested in the demeanor of all the women in their encounters. Seneca does not recognize Jean, Pallas does not acknowledge her mother, Gigi seems indifferent toward her father, and Connie is on a beach, seemingly set apart from the world. Like the resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Christian faith, where he appears to his disciples, bearing the same wounds from his death yet still notably different, the Convent women are resurrected but different, having encounters that allow them to find closure with their pasts.

In the world of Paradise, the Convent has undergone several transformations. First, it was an embezzler’s extravagant mansion, then a Catholic school for Indigenous girls, then a home for a motley crew of independent women. In its final iteration, it sheds its Catholic affiliation and takes on an undefined spirituality. When Reverend Misner and Anna Flood go to the abandoned Convent, they sense it too: “It was when he returned […] that they saw it. Or sensed it, rather, for there was nothing to see. A door, she said later. ‘No, a window,’ he said, laughing” (305). This unexplained aperture is perhaps a key to all the magical happenings at the Convent. Like a portal to another world, that visibly invisible door or window is entry into a place where the laws of reality do not apply. Perhaps the mystical atmosphere at the Convent is how the murdered women transcend death.

Ultimately, Morrison uses a technique like magical realism to imbue the Convent and its inhabitants with an otherworldliness that stands in contrast to the grounded, self-interested, and traditional town of Ruby. The mystical happenings encourage a reading of the mansion as a paradise, something akin to heaven but free of the Christian values Ruby holds so dear. There, the impossible is possible, death and life are not quite opposites, and—most importantly—the outcasts of society find peace and healing.

Paradise as a Tool for Unsettling Racial Discourses

Paradise explores what happens when a town is founded on a racial resentment that boils over into hate. This exploration is unique in that, rather than focusing on anti-Black racism from white people, it examines the intra-racial conflicts within the all-Black town of Ruby. Morrison uses Paradise to demonstrate the insidious danger of racial prejudice and unsettle the readers’ understanding of traditional formulations of race.

Ruby is comprised of dark-skinned families whose history of rejection from light-skinned towns has evolved into an extreme isolationist mentality. Morrison describes them as “[b]lue-black people, tall and graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave no sign of what they really felt about those who weren’t 8-rock like them” (193). These “8-rock” people feel a sense of superiority. This superiority leads them to refuse outsiders, even telling Menus Jury that the “pretty redbone girl” he wanted to marry was “not good enough for him” (278). Morrison uses the 8-rock mentality to illustrate an inversion of the familiar narrative of racism directed at Black people by white people, as well as colorism and its privileging of light skin. While both those forms of discrimination are far more common and historically dangerous, their prevalence in the discourse around racism perpetuates an excessively victimized, weak, and downtrodden perception of the African American community. Morrison asks the reader to see African Americans as strong and proud, as well as flawed and complicated. By turning the lens inward on the Black community, she simultaneously provides a more complex narrative of the Black subject as more than victim and calls Black people to question their own prejudices. Paradise suggests that there is always a risk of weaponizing one’s own victimhood in ways that ultimately harm oneself.

As Morrison adds nuance to discourses around racism, she also unsettles the reader’s perception of race. Paradise begins with this iconic sentence—“They shoot the white girl first” (3). While this girl is identified as white both at the beginning and end of the novel—“Lone is desperate for Doublemint as she stanches the white woman’s wound” (289)—Morrison never specifies which of the five Convent women is white. Instead, the reader is left to wonder who. It is a tactic that Morrison also employs in her 1983 short story “Recitatif.” The short story follows two main characters as they age, explicitly stating that one is Black and one is white, but never clarifying which is which. In both this story and Paradise, Morrison forces the reader to reckon with their own internalized racism as they try to guess a character’s race based on qualities and stereotypes. Again, Morrison calls for self-examination and introspection.

In the Foreword to the Vintage International edition of the novel, Morrison writes, “a major excitement for me in writing paradise was an effort to disrupt the assumption of racial discourse” (xv). She continues, “I was eager to manipulate, mutate, and control imagistic, metaphoric language in order to produce something that could be called race-specific/race-free prose, language that deactivated the power of racially instructive strategies—transform them from the straight jacket a race-conscious society can, and frequently does, buckle us into—a refusal to ‘know’ characters or people by the color of their skin” (xv). In short, Morrison uses intra-racial conflict, racial ambiguity, and even language in Paradise to interrogate society’s limiting presuppositions about race and what it says about others.

Gender Roles, Control, and Women’s Liberation

Morrison stages an ongoing conflict between the men and women in Paradise. The men are continuously pushing to obtain and maintain their control. They are partnered with women, especially wives, who are subservient, loyal, and domestic. However, the Convent women do not subscribe to traditional women’s roles and therefore disrupt the relationship between the men and women of Ruby. Through the men, the women of Ruby, and the Convent women, Morrison explores the shifting balance of power in this tense, gendered struggle.

All the town’s lore is from a masculinist perspective. We learn of Zechariah “Coffee” Morgan, who led the first 15 families to what would be Haven. Known affectionately as “Big Papa,” Zechariah functions as an analogue to the biblical Moses, who famously led the Israelites to Canaan, the Promised Land. Years later, when nine families from Haven settled Ruby, they were led by Deek and Steward Morgan. It is primarily the men who hold meetings at the Oven, lead the churches as ministers, and finally decide to attack the Convent. Meanwhile, the women of Ruby are portrayed as subservient to male authority. We see this in Sweetie, who diligently cares for her babies day and night; in Soane, who stays with Deek despite his affair with Connie; and in Dovey, who holds the responsibility of cooking meals for her husband Steward. The women fill traditional domestic roles. Reverend Misner observes the workings of the gender binary in town as “men finding it so hard to fight their instincts to control what they could and crunch what they could not” and “women tirelessly taming the predator” (145).

However, the Convent poses a threat to the careful gendered balance in Ruby. The women there are quite the opposite of the women in town. First, they flout the propriety of Ruby, behaving raucously at K.D. and Arnette’s wedding. Between K.D.’s affair with Gigi and Deek’s affair with Connie, the women at the Convent disrupt Ruby’s values of faithfulness and purity. However, it is not only the men who are affected. The Convent women appear to have a corrupting influence on the women in town as well, having attracted Soane Morgan, Billie Delia Cato, Lone DuPres, Sweetie Fleetwood, and Arnette Fleetwood. Drawn to the Convent, Sweetie momentarily leaves her babies, Billie finds refuge after a fight with her mother, Soane and Lone find unusual female friendship with Connie, and Arnette abandons her infant. At the Convent, the women can behave in different, sometimes unsightly, but always freeing ways. Unlike the men, who drive the road to the Convent if they travel it at all, these women are so compelled and desperate that they walk: “It was women who walked his road. Only women. Never men” (270). Rather than coming with a sense of superiority and power in a vehicle, the women walk, arriving on level ground, seeking to surrender their burdens.

The men cannot abide the influence of the Convent and how it destabilizes their control over their women, their values, and their town. In other words, Ruby is

[a] backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control and who had the nerve to say who could live and who not and where; who had seen in lively, free, unarmed females the mutiny of the mares and so got rid of them (308).

With the men as protectors of Ruby, we see the town being feminized, itself a kind of woman. Indeed, Ruby not only bears a woman’s name but was also named by the women—“They named the town after one of their own and the men did not gainsay them” (17). When the men attack the Convent, it is, in part, to protect Ruby’s sexual, racial, and moral purity.

Ultimately, the attack on the Convent is a battle between the genders, where the men have recognized the Convent women as a threat and must destroy them. When the conflict unravels the town, it demonstrates that control and anxiety over its safety precipitated its end as they knew it.