Paradise

1. Paradise

2. Pick a pair and write for 5 minutes about how the novel lays these binaries side by side . . . Part history and part Dreamtime, part opera and part Matisse . . . Its rainbow parabola includes • Reconstruction and Trails of Tears, • Vietnam and civil rights, • patriarchy and ancestor worship, • abduction and sanctuary • Migration and abandonment • Sex and ghosts • John Leonard, Shooting Women

3. Paradise raises a ruckus and rewrites God.”John Leonard – Shooting Women • How, so far, is the novel challenging traditional ideas of paradise? • What are the Old Testament views of woman (Eve)? • What are the New Testament ideas of woman (Mary)? • How do these old and new ideas play out in Paradise? • Are there conflicting ideas of paradise here? What are they? • Deek and Steward? (Capitalist, Patriarchal) • Rev. Misner (Christian) • Young people (Racial Justice – not equality, but justice) • Soane and Dovey, Sweet (Maternal) • Connie & . . . Pat Best (Communal, Feminist) • Others? . . . • If Morrison is rewriting God, who/what is the new deity?

4. “Paradise” – Deidre Neilen • Morrison effortlessly weaves together all the fabrics of the US mosaic. What was done to slaves, to freedmen, to Native Americans, to dispossessed, to poor, to women here in the novel finds common ground and common cause. • Can you think of examples of how she connects these different groups in the novel? • What is that common ground and common cause?

5. Neilen, again • “Paradise is as close to divine writing as we will know this side of heaven.” • Mile after mile rolled by urged and eased by the gorgeous ache in Bennie’s voice (Mavis, 55) • Somewhere in the house the child continued to cry, filling Sweetie with rapture – she had never heard that sound from her own. Never heard that clear yearning call, sustained, rhythmic. It was like an anthem, a lullaby, or the bracing chords of the decalogue (Sweetie, 129-130) • The wind soughed as though trying to dislodge sequins from the black crepe sky. Lilac bushes swished the side of the house. (Patricia, 190) • September marched through smearing everything with oil paint: acres of caradamon Yellow, burnt orange, miles of sienna, blue ravines both cerulean and midnight, along with heartbreakingly violet skies. (Consolata, 232) • Share some examples of what you think of as divine writing.

6. Toni Morrison ExplainedRon Davis • Paradise is NOT for one page or one minute a realistic novel. Its characters are not real because Toni Morrison didn’t intend them to be real. The plot isn’t realistic because Morrison wanted it to be over the edge – like a myth! The novel “tries out” every kind of myth, from Biblical and Greek to witch hunts and cartoons and all combinations of the above. Mavis (a kind of bird) whose twins didn’t give her any trouble (merely died in her Cadillac while she was shopping in Higgledy Piggledy) escapes with “canary yellow feet” (her daughter’s boots) and drops by to see her mother Birdie Goodroe. • Find other examples of the not real or the unreal or the mythically real in the novel. • Why would Morrison be heading for the Not Real Novel or the Myth, as opposed to the Feminist Novel or the Racial Novel or the Historical Novel?

7. Review by Carolyn Denard But the novel creates neither a feminist, nor a black utopia. The deadly tension explodes when one illusive haven threatens the security of the other. In all Morrison novels, excess is the evil. Paradise is no exception: too much pride, too much freedom, too much love, or too much isolation – on the part of race men or feminist women – is destructive.

8. Review by Gay Wachman • Women – Consolata, Lone, Gigi, Mavis, Seneca, Pallas, and Billie Delia – join a long line of Morrison outsiders – from Sula through Pilate, from Beloved to Wild in Jazz. • In Paradise they are set in opposition to an established black, middleclass [male] community. With their wealth, their respectable homes and wives, their controlling story, their religion, they certainly constitute a patriarchy that women would do well to escape. It’s a pleasure that the women who do are ordinary, unheroic drifters rather than exceptionally wild or wise women.

9. “The Scripture of Utopia”Patricia Storace • Paradise constructs a black history that parallels the history of the U.S. • Like the Massachusetts pilgrims, the Ruby men and their wives are fleeing persecution, seeking an environment which they can shape with their own version of a good moral and material life. • Like the whites, they are proud of their uncorrupted 8-rock blood and they insist on racial purity. • Ruby is a racist town and this racism gives Morrison an opportunity to look at the multiple social consequences of exclusivism. • She makes a sort of “whiteness” move in that she shifts the perspectives of inquiry about race from the victim to explore what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination and behavior of masters.

10. Battling UtopiasPatricia Storace • Ruby and the Convent are rival utopias whose conception of perfected community undermines and flaws their own. • In what ways do Ruby and the Convent contradict one another? • Does Morrison privilege one over the other? Where do your sympathies lie?