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Paradise | Introduction

The Life and Work of Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, to George and Ramah Willis Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. Although life in a post-depression steel-mill town would have been difficult for most children, Chloe, the second of four children, had loving and strong-willed parents. They taught her much about how to heal the wounds caused by racism.

Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953. It was during her college years that she adopted what had been her nickname, Toni, which she’d taken from her middle name. In 1955, she received her M.A. in English from Cornell, and for the next two years, she taught English at Texas Southern University, then returned to teach at Howard. She married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect; their first son, Harold Ford, was born in 1962. A second son, Slade Kevin, was born in 1966. After divorcing Morrison, Toni left teaching to work at Random House, a publishing company in Syracuse, New York. She worked there for the next 20 years, and during the same time period, she taught and lectured at several colleges, wrote and published novels, and raised her two sons.

Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), was very well received in both popular and critical circles. Since then she has published six more novels: Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). She has also published a play, Dreaming Emmett (1986), and a collection of essays, Playing in the Dark (1991).

Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1989; she was the first African-American woman to receive a chaired position at an Ivy League university. In addition to the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1977.

Paradise Summary

Paradise is about the relationship between two communities—the town of Ruby, Oklahoma, and a very small but largely self-sufficient group of women who live in what has come to be known as the Convent, located on the outskirts of Ruby.

The people of Ruby were once filled with a common purpose—they trusted, needed, and relied upon each other. But in more recent times, with which this novel is concerned, Ruby has been experiencing a whole range of difficulties. The town’s shared existence is threatened, and in their desperation to find some kind of solution, the townspeople blame and attack the women in the Convent. The women become convenient scapegoats for all the unresolved emotions pent up in the prominent men of Ruby, who have felt powerless to halt the unraveling of their homes.

Paradise is a novel of interwoven portraits. They are not exactly portraits of people, places, or of periods of time; they are portraits of striving and conflict. The portraits center on all of the things that are done to protect what has been worked for and sacrificed for, to keep the town safe from the forces of destruction that lie in wait all around.

The events of the first chapter actually occur near the end of the chronological story. The year is 1976, and a few men from Ruby attack the women who live in a single building, which is referred to as “the Convent,” not very far from their town. The men believe (or at least they tell themselves) that they are committing this act in order to protect their way of life. The specific threat that the women represent is not fully explained at first, but that doesn’t matter for the moment—what matters is action. After the smoke of the violence clears, the reader is taken on a tour of the lives that made up both the town of Ruby and the Convent, a place where a few women have come together to try to help one another.

The rest of the novel jumps back and forth in time, partially because of the... » Complete Paradise Summary