Critical Evaluation
Paradise is one of Toni Morrison’s most controversial novels, criticized for appearing to bracket racial injustice to concentrate on gender oppression, particularly the systematic exploitation and sexual abuse of girls and women. However, Morrison does not privilege gender; rather, she draws parallels between gender, race, and class.
It is true that except for Mavis, the one former housewife in the group, all the women at the Convent had suffered sexual abuse of one kind or another during their teenage years. Many of the women have internalized their abuse—for example, Mavis and Gigi have brutal, physical fights—just as the black men of Ruby have internalized the racism and skin-color prejudice that initially drove them into the nethermost regions of Oklahoma.
At the same time, for all its wonderful characterizations and explorations of American history, the novel’s binary oppositions are contrived: not only is Ruby, a sanctuary for men, the polar opposite of the Convent, a sanctuary for women, Ruby’s massive communal Oven, which symbolizes self-sufficiency and a kind of cultural nationalism, is opposed to the giant kitchen in the Convent where the women have a kind of “last supper” before the slaughter. Deacon and Steward, twin brothers, are married to Dovey and Soane, twin sisters. Reverend Misner, the progressive outsider, is opposed by another reverend who is a conservative insider. That the novel succeeds in spite of these rather stock oppositions says a great deal about Morrison’s ability to bring her characters to life. She teases out the repressed anger and frustration felt by women like Soane and Dovey and uncovers the ambivalence and complicity in their own oppression; the same could be said about Morrison’s portrait of teacher and unofficial town historian Patricia Best Cato, who discovers the secret of the founders of Ruby—that skin-color prejudice trumps white racism. In the interest of protecting her precarious status in Ruby, Patricia burns all her notes and memos.
Morrison’s portraits of Deacon and Steward are sympathetic to the burden of history that each must bear. Not only are they haunted by the heroic stature of their grandfather in his struggle against racism and prejudice, a struggle they can never emulate or measure up to, they also are haunted by their older brother’s death in his tattered U.S. Army uniform. Elder Morgan, who had just returned from his tour of duty in World War I, had seen a black prostitute being jeered at by white sailors. Elder had joined in the heckling until the white men began to physically assault the woman. Elder had then rushed to her aid, tearing his uniform in the process. From that moment on, Elder had been haunted by his complicity with white men against a black woman, insisting to his wife that she bury him in his torn uniform as a form of punishment and atonement.
Significantly, when Deacon thinks of his brother’s story, he sympathizes more with the white sailors than with his own brother, much less the prostitute. Deacon’s adulterous relationship with Connie Sosa and his decision that he has to be the one to shoot her at the Convent add layers and layers of complexity to his character.
The multifaceted ironies underlying Paradise are perhaps best encapsulated in all the sick grandchildren of Arnold Fleetwood. Like the Morgan twins, Arnold, too, will not have a legacy beyond his troubled son, Jefferson. The first death recorded in Ruby had been the death of one of Arnold’s sick children.
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