Paradise (Morrison)

Paradise 
Toni Morrison, 1997
Penguin Group USA
318 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452280397


Summary
They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time.

Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature opens with a horrifying scene of mob violence then chronicles its genesis in a small all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by descendants of free slaves as intent on isolating themselves from the outside world as it once was on rejecting them, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear.

But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.

Paradise is a tour de force of storytelling power, richly imagined and elegantly composed. Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn on itself until it is forced to explode. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A.,  Cornell,
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle
   Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY


With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.

The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel.

In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.

Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.

In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.

Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published Love, her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy.

That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.

Extras
• Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.

• In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.

• Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews 
[The novel] addresses the same great themes [as Morrison's] 1987 masterpiece, Beloved: the loss of innocence, the paralyzing power of ancient memories and the difficulty of accepting loss and change and pain.... [Paradise is] a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past... [A] clunky, leaden novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

The strangest and most original book Morrison has written.
The New Yorker

In Paradise [Toni Morrison] has produced, unfortunately, her weakest book.... A theme can be pursued as relentlessly as an idea, and repeating a pattern twelve times doesn't make it twelve times more convincing.... Paradise has about it a belligerent singlemindedness—one that gives the author's plea for tolerance the uninflected purity of a religious tract.
Geoffrey Bent - Southern Review

For me there are two Toni Morrisons. The first Morrison is intimate and republican. Her theme, most brightly handled in The Bluest Eye, is family. The second Morrison is impersonal and imperial. Her theme, majestically handled, is history. The ironically titled Paradise, like Beloved, belongs to the work of the second Toni Morrison. Sentences roll on like breakers. The generations are born, till the earth and lie beneath. Sing, oh muse!

Paradise begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of 360, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town's precursor, Haven, after the Civil War. Haven was decimated not by whites (there are hardly any whites in Paradise) but by the Depression, leading the children of its founders to pick up and move 240 miles to the west and try again.

Nearly every townsperson gets a cameo in the course of this narrative of flawed nation-building. What I wouldn't give for a relationship chart. There are the town's macho leaders, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan. There are their wives, Soane and Dovey. Both know tragedy. One has had two sons die. The other has had multiple miscarriages, each punished according to the sins of the husband. There is an insurgent outside preacher named Reverend Misner, who is keeping court with an independent woman and store owner named Anna Flood. They are the closest thing to common sense in the town. And there is a no-good lothario named K.D., son of Deacon and Steward's deceased sister Ruby, eponym of the town. Imagine a family reunion when you're not quite catching the names.

The action, though, is simple. As the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town's alpha menfolk have driven over and shot her, and now they are hunting down the house's remaining inhabitants. Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. They have done nothing wrong. Their crime is otherness. Their practices are vaguely occult, vaguely Sapphic and vaguely threatening to law and order. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be slain without consequence.

And afterward Ruby is a little bit sorry. Morrison writes: "Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back.... How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?" It would not, I think, be a leap to say there is a metaphor here.

There's also a helluva trick, a real coup de theatre, in these last pages. Beloved is no longer Morrison's only ghost story. But you'll have to read from the opening scene, when the guns go off, to the final one, when the chickens come home to roost, to figure this out. This is an extraordinary novel from a Nobel Prize winner confident enough to try anything.
D.T. Max - Salon

So intense and evocative in its particulars, so wide-ranging in its arch, this is another, if imperfect, triumph for the Nobel Prize-winning author (Song of Solomon, Beloved, etc.). In 1950, a core group of nine old families leaves the increasingly corrupted African American community of Haven, Okla., to found in that same state a new, purer community they call Ruby. But in the early 1970s, the outside world begins to intrude on Ruby's isolation, forcing a tragic confrontation. It's about this time, too, that the first of five damaged women finds solace in a decrepit former convent near Ruby. Once the pleasure palace of an embezzler, the convent had been covered with lascivious fixtures that were packed away or painted over by the nuns. Time has left only "traces of the sisters' failed industry," however, making the building a crumbling, fertile amalgam of feminine piety and female sexuality. It's a woman's world that attracts the women of Ruby and that repels the men who see its occupants as the locus of all the town's ills. They are "not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven." Only when Morrison treats the convent women as an entity (rather than as individual characters) do they lose nuance, and that's when the book falters. Still, the individual stories of both the women and the townspeople reveal Morrison at her best. Tragic, ugly, beautiful, these lives are the result of personal dreams and misfortune; of a history that encompasses Reconstruction and Vietnam; and of mystical grandeur.
Publishers Weekly

Nobel laureate Morrison creates another richly told tale that grapples with her ongoing, central concerns: women's lives and the African-American experience. Morrison has created a long list of characters for this story that takes place in the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, population 360, which was founded by freed slaves. In what could be seen as an attempt to create some of the same mysticism that was present in many of her previous works, Morrison alludes to Ruby's founding citizens, now ghosts, and only minimally focuses on the present generations that have let the founding principles of Ruby's forebears deteriorate. Paradise is an examination of the title itself and deliberately builds into a plot that is unexpected and explosive. This is Morrison's first novel since her 1993 Jazz, and it is well worth the wait.— Emily J. Jones
Library Journal

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Discussion Questions 
1. Why has Toni Morrison chosen to use the poem "for many are the pleasant forms..." as an epigraph for this novel?

2. Why is the Oven such an important symbol for the people of Ruby? What is implied in the various phrases which different groups in Ruby want to inscribe upon it? Soane believes that the Oven has become too important a symbol: "A utility became a shrine (cautioned against not only in scary Deuteronomy but in lovely Corinthians II as well) and, like anything that offended Him, destroyed its own self" (103). Is she right? Does this indeed come to pass?

3. How has the history of Ruby (and Haven before it) shaped the nature of the town in the 1970s? What did "freedom" mean to the original settlers? What varying views of freedom do the modern inhabitants of Ruby hold?

4. Each of the young women living at the Convent is in some way lost. Why does each feel so entirely friendless? What caused Gigi's feeling of hopelessness? What about Pallas? Do you believe that Mavis's children were really trying to harm her, or did she imagine this?

5. "Almost always, these nights, when Dovey Morgan thought about her husband it was in terms of what he had lost" (82). She adds up some of Steward's losses: his taste buds, the election for church Secretary, the trees on his land, and his discovery that he and Dovey could not have children. What has Steward lost in a larger, more symbolic sense: which of the convictions of the earlier generation he so admires has he himself lost sight of? What do his feelings about his brother Elder's defense of a Liverpool whore (94-95) tell us about his character? Can you see, early in the novel, intimations of what we discover at the end: that Steward and Deacon are essentially different?

6. Who is Dovey's "Friend" and why is he so important to her?

7. The conservative elements in Ruby ultimately find it impossible to keep the impact of the Sixties from affecting their town. What "Sixties" ideas turn out to be the most powerful, the most resonant, for the people of Ruby? Do these ideas destroy the town's social cohesion or give it new strength?

8. What new ways of thinking does Richard Misner represent, and how is he received by the people of Ruby? When Patricia tells him that "Slavery is our past" (212), he insists that "We live in the world.... The whole world." Which of them is right? What does Misner mean when he says he thinks the people of Ruby love their children "to death" (212)?

9. "Who could have imagined, " think the men who attack the Convent, "that twenty-five years later in a brand-new town a Convent would beat out the snakes, the Depression, the tax man and the railroad for sheer destructive power?" (17). It is clear that the Convent, and the harmless women who have taken refuge there, are not destructive. What is the destructive element in Ruby, and what is it destroying?

10. "Minus the baptisms the Oven had no real value, " Soane reflects. (103). What did these baptisms at the Oven symbolize, and how does their removal to the church change Ruby? At the Convent, the women dance in rain and reconcile themselves, finally, to the tragedies in their lives (283). Why does Morrison use, here, the imagery of baptism? Does she imply that this dance is a true baptism; that the Convent has achieved a more genuine spirit of community than the town?

11. What are the circumstances of the death of Ruby, K. D.'s mother, and what effect does the manner of this death have upon on the character of the town that is named after her? What is the "bargain" or "prayer in the form of a deal" (114) that is struck after her death, and who strikes it?

12. Why does Sweetie make for the Convent when she finds herself at the breaking point? Why does she then try to get away from the Convent, and then tell the people of Ruby that the women there are evil?

13. In what ways does the wedding of Arnette and K. D. symbolize the current state of affairs in Ruby?

14. What does the school nativity play tell us about the way Ruby sees itself and mythologizes itself?

15. Is it fair to say that the people of Ruby have perpetuated racism in the town that was supposed to be a haven from it? If so, in what does the town's racism consist?

16. Why does Patricia burn all her research on the history of the Ruby and Haven families?

17. What does Consolata mean when she says "Dear Lord, I didn't want to eat him. I just wanted to go home" (240)? What sort of home does she long for, and why does she associate it with Deacon? Who is the Piedade to whose company Consolata returns after her death (321)? What is the meaning of Consolata's vision on p. 254?

18. How does the death of Sweetie and Jeff's daughter Save-Marie subtly change Ruby? What sort of a future do you envision for the town? Is it possible to see the murders at the Convent as ultimately helping Ruby to evolve and to survive?

19. What do you think lies behind the door or window that Anna and Misner notice as they leave the Convent? Why do they choose not to open it?

20. What is the meaning of the novel's title? What does "Paradise" mean within the context of the book? "How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it, " thinks Misner. Does Morrison imply that it is impossible to create a paradise on earth?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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