"Passing on" Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison's "Paradise"

Abstract

And it is upon these women in flight from and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.... (Barnes & Noble Paradise website; my emphasis) Many reviews and critical analyses of Paradise, Toni Morrison's seventh novel, note that it is the final novel of a trilogy, beginning with Beloved and continuing with Jazz. (1) And while many of these reviews contend that Morrison has written pivotal chapters in African-American migrations, the trilogy maintains a much deeper connection: that of the cycle of life itself. (2) With Paradise, Morrison demonstrates unequivocally that is a necessary condition of and for life; that is, the acceptance of mortality is a critical aspect of life's and death's journeys. The trilogy's first novel, Beloved, is replete with birth imagery, from Sethe's water-breaking following the carnival to Paul D's re-birth through mud in Georgia. And yet Morrison makes abundantly clear that birth is intricately interwoven with both life and death. Beloved, Seth, Paul D, and Denver flee or hide from life throughout most of Beloved, so each must be reborn by accepting and experiencing the painful conditions of life. Likewise, the second novel of the trilogy, Jazz, contains a multitude of metaphors for life. The music is alive, the photograph of Dorcas that Violet places the mantle becomes alive with its own personality, and even the narrator of Jazz takes life. Yet Joe and Violet merely go through the motions of life rather than truly live. When the dying Dorcas asks Felice to tell Joe that is only one apple, she reminds him that life does not exist without death; the fall of Adam and Eve, while condemning eaters to mortality, also endows them with the knowledge of life. To refuse that knowledge is to refuse life. Paradise completes the cycle with explorations of death. The citizens of Ruby have re-created Eden to their own specifications; and like the original death-less Eden, nobody dies in Ruby. Yet nobody in Ruby either, as the town exists within the isolated parameters of its citizens' powerfully executed will. By allowing no outside encroachment, Ruby remains dead to change, static. As Patricia Cato observes, there are no new stories in Ruby; only the founding narratives exist, told endlessly by the men. Richard Misner likewise wonders, But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on (161). Peter Widdowson notes, 'immortally' frozen in its own stasis, has no politics because the very conception of change is a contradiction in terms: the town is because it cannot change, and it cannot change because it is ideal (329). Seventeen miles away, another paradise has arisen. Inhabited by women who have fled from their lives (or deaths), the Convent--a building that Ruby's men see as dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth--represents another kind of sanctuary of (18). There the women, who have all experienced a death of love, (3) learn to accept self-love. Their supposed jangling and Jezebel life disturbs the males of Ruby, and thus these men plan to kill the Convent women, although in truth, Consolata's recognition of the women as broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying is a more appropriate description (222). Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are suspended in stasis, women in hiding, attempting a condition-less existence. Consolata believes, Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything (222). Unlike the sin of forgetting the past so prevalent in Beloved and Jazz, the inhabitants of Ruby--and its female double--refuse to let go of the past, to let time soften the edges of history's indignities; they deny the processes of and regeneration. After all, most of its residents are dead long before Ruby's men raid the Convent. …

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