Jimoh,, A Yemisi, PhD

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University of Massachusetts AmherstScholarWorks@UMass AmherstAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series Afro-American Studies2003Toni Morrison: ParadiseA Yemisi Jimoh, PhDUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst, jimoh@afroam.umass.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubsPart of the African American Studies Commons, American Literature Commons, and the OtherAmerican Studies CommonsThis is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion inAfro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, pleasecontact scholarworks@library.umass.edu.Recommended CitationJimoh,, A Yemisi PhD, "Toni Morrison: Paradise" (2003). The Literary Encyclopedia. 90.Retrieved from https://scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubs/904/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format1/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925ParadiseSend to printerMorrison, Toni(1998)A Yemisi Jimoh (University of Massachusetts Amherst)Genre: Novel. Country: United States. When Toni Morrison’s seventhnovel, Paradise, was published in 1998, thiswriter was already among the most esteemednovelists in the United States, having by thenreceived the Nobel Prize for literature as well asmany other major literary awards. In Paradise,which some scholars posit is the third novel inMorrison’s series on love (her working title forthe novel was “War”), she presents animaginative recreation of historical eventsduring the late Reconstruction era and the turnof the century post-Reconstruction era in theUnited States. In this book, Morrison, as is the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format2/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925case with her earlier novels in this presumptiveseries (Jazz and Beloved), continues herarchaeological excavation and reconstruction,in literature, of African American history.From the mid-1870s, as Reconstruction wascoming to an end, and into the turn of thetwentieth century, formerly enslaved AfricanAmericans founded numerous all-black towns.At one time, the United States government hadconsidered making the western territory asettlement for emancipated black peoplebecause wealthy members of some of thedisplaced Indigenous nations had engaged inslavery, supported the Confederacy, and weresubject to land reapportionment. Additionally,the founders of the Afro-AmericanColonization Company in Guthrie, Oklahoma,had promoted the territory as a land ofopportunity for hard-working back people.African Americans established the largestnumber of these towns on land that had beenvariously referred to as Indian Territory or in1889 as Oklahoma Territory, and in 1907, thestate of Oklahoma. Morrison situates herfictional town Haven, settled and founded1889-1890, within this historical moment. Shealso constructs passages in her narrative thatcall to mind and revise actual historical events4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format3/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925—such as the destruction of the Greenwooddistrict in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921—thatoccurred in settlements of African Americanpeople who migrated from the South intoLogan and Okfuskee Counties as well as intoother locations in Oklahoma.Toni Morrison’s Haven was founded in thenineteenth century by 158 wayfarers comprisedof nine families, several individual members ofother families, and a variety of people whojoined them along the way. In 1949, economicdifficulties following the Depression, alongwith the effects of post-war modernity, inducethe founding families of Haven to relocate theirtown and its prized hand-constructedcommunal oven. The new town Ruby, settled byfifteen families, is the location of the events inJuly 1976, the narrative present of the noveland the bicentennial of the founding of theUnited States. Twenty-four years after Ruby’sresidents have relocated their town and theiroven, the words inscribed on it become thefocus of generational tensions. Part of theinscription is missing, and the residents are ina dispute over the meaning of the remainingwords on the oven and over the words that aremissing. This local struggle escalates into abattle that the men engage in out of fear of4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format4/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925change that they ultimately project on  thewomen at the Convent.Many of the men in Ruby are veterans of thewar in the 1940s, immediately preceding thefounding of the town, and of the Koreanconflict and the Vietnam War. The olderveterans in Ruby construct for themselves alocalized communal narrative that recalls thebiblical story of the Israelites and God’sPromised Land, a biblical narrative in whichsome of the early European settlers in theNorth American New World also locatedthemselves. And the streets in Ruby are namedafter the four gospels in the New Testament.For some of the residents of Ruby the fact thatthere have been no deaths in their townprovides further proof to them that they arecarrying out God’s plan. Still, the stridentlyinsular older veterans are in conflict not onlywith the younger generation war veteranswhose lives have been influenced by thepolitical events of the times—the ideas as wellas the assassinations of Matrin Luther Kingand Malcolm X; the assassination of John F.Kennedy; desegregation, especially theNAACP’s lawsuit in Norman, Oklahoma (thereare sentiments in Ruby against the suit); andthe racial unrest in major cities throughout the4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format5/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925United States in the 1960s—but also by thechanging mores of the youth in general. Hence,a crucial impetus behind events in Ruby is theimpending change in the town’s communalidentity, as the volatile social order outsideRuby influences the younger generation topress for shifts in the social order inside thetown.Although the social-political narrative of raceplays a part in Morrison’s Paradise, sheingeniously dispenses with racializedstereotypes throughout the novel as well ascomplicates the notion that racializeddifferences are crucial to the story she tellsin Paradise. Although Morrison opens thenovel with a reference to skin-color - “Theyshoot the white girl first” - she then goes on tofill Paradise with a number of complexcharacters whose speech, behaviour,perspectives, gestures, and lifestyles neitherconsistently belie nor affirm any particularethnic cultural designation. Morrison’sdelineation of these characters most oftenpoints to the intricate and multiple influencesthat intersect the lives of all of her characters.Morrison’s portrayal of the ethnically non-specific women at the convent, where skincolor does not matter, challenges the color-4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format6/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925consciousness of her readers and underminesthe insularity of the older residents of Ruby,whom Morrison describes as 8-rocks, using anAfrican American cultural reference to theeight-ball in billiards: “Blue-black people, talland graceful, whose clear, wide eyes gave nosign of what they felt about those who weren’t8-rock like them.” The residents of Ruby havemade color central to their personal as well astheir communal identity.Each chapter in Paradise is named for a femalecharacter in the book, including the town—Ruby. Five of the nine chapters are organizedaround the year that each one of the womenarrived at an old mansion in which the diningroom had previously been “converted into aschoolroom, where stilled Arapaho girls oncesat and learned to forget” at the Christ the KingSchool for Native Girls. The school eventuallyclosed, leaving the Reverend Mother and herassistant, Consolata, to live in the house, whichis located at the edge of Ruby. Everyone callsthis house the Convent. Morrison combines thenarratives of the five women’s traumatic livesand their arrival at the Convent with thecurrent events occurring in Ruby in the yeareach woman had begun living in the area.These events are interspersed with memories4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format7/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925of the history of Ruby. The five women,Consolata, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas, whowere living at the convent when it was attackedby nine men, become Morrison’s sacrificiallambs whose destruction is led by the twinsDeek and Steward Morgan, the New Fathers.These men are descendants of the nine OldFathers and their families that walked fromLouisiana and Mississippi into Oklahoma. Themen initially believe that the destruction of theConvent is necessary for the survival of theirtown and their values. For the men of Rubysuch values include patriarchal rule, strictmorality, and an unspoken racial code based inan event they refer to as the “Disallowing”. Thewomen in the convent violate all of theaforementioned rules and are seen as aninfectious agent wreaking havoc in the socialbody of their town, where no one has died inover twenty-five years. The four chapters in thenovel—“Ruby”, “Patricia”, “Lone”, “Save-Marie”— that do not present the arrival ofwomen to the Convent instead present theevents related to their deaths and to the firstdeath in Ruby.It is July 1976 and nine men from the Morgan,Smith, Fleetwood, Jury, Poole, and Personfamilies in Ruby make a pre-dawn attack on4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format8/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925the Convent. Over the last eight years, thewomen who have lived at the Convent hadsought refuge there after having experiencedfamilial loss, dislocation, abuse, and betrayal.Through a final spiritual revelation fromConsolata, the oldest resident, the women havehealed themselves and have come to termswith the emotional wreckage that had resultedfrom their responses to their own pain. Someof the women in Ruby also have found solace atthe Convent: Sweetie Fleetwood, ArnetteFleetwood Smith, Soan Morgan, and BillieDelia Cato, whose name, Delia, indicatesMorrison’s acknowledgement of Zora NealeHurston as her predecessor. While some of thewomen, and at least one man, from Ruby havesought temporary refuge at the Convent, noneof Ruby’s women has lived at the Conventamong the women that Morrison’s narratorrefers to as “Bodacious black Eves unredeemedby Mary”.Following the attack on the women at theConvent, the residents of Ruby recognize theerror that the New Fathers of the town havemade. The people in the town decide, after all,that the apparent lack of repercussions for theactions of the men is a sign that they have beengiven a second chance. The cost, however, is4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format9/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925death, as the last chapter of the novel bears thename of the first person to die in Ruby, Save-Marie.Toni Morrison’s Paradise was a much-anticipated contribution to her literary corpus,as it was the first novel that she publishedfollowing her receipt of the Nobel Prize forliterature. The novel was released on 15January, Martin Luther King Jr.’sbirthday. Paradise received good reviews andwas on the New York Times Best Sellers’ list.Some reviewers noted, however, thatMorrison’s seventh novel was not the tour deforce of her award winning book Beloved.While Morrison in Paradise provides herreaders with many of the themes (history, thesupernatural, womanist issues, community,love, family, reconstitution of the self) andstylistic elements (multiple perspectives,incremental revelation of details, beautifulturns of phrases) found in her previous novels,she also takes risks in Paradise as she defiesher readers’ expectations and questions thebasis for as well as the value in the concept ofrace or in color-consciousness and one’sinvestment in such mythologies. 4/14/12 Literary Encyclopedia: Printer Format10/10www.litencyc.com/php/printer_format_works.php?UID=2925A Yemisi Jimoh (University of MassachusettsAmherst)First published 11 September 2003, last revised2012-03-20Citation: Jimoh, A Yemisi. "Paradise". The LiteraryEncyclopedia. 11 September 2003.[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2925, accessed 14 April 2012.]This article is copyright to ©The Literary Encyclopedia.For information on making internet links to this page andelectronic or print reproduction, please read Linking andReproducing.All entries, data and software copyright © The LiteraryDictionary Company LimitedISSN 1747-678X

Toni Morrison: Paradise

Jimoh,, A Yęmisi, PhD

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Toni Morrison: Paradise

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