Reading and insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Spring, 2002 by Linda J. Krumholz

Twice in the 1990s Morrison has intervened in public political discourse; she edited essay collections on the Clarence Thomas hearings and the O.J. Simpson trial and thus brought progressive race and gender critiques to these media spectacles. In both cases, calls for truth and law invoked by political institutions and the dominant media were thoroughly obfuscated and frequently polarized by racial and gender representations. In Paradise Morrison completes her trilogy by confronting contemporary race and gender representations and challenging declarations of truth and law. In an essay titled "Home," Morrison discusses her approach in Paradise: "Unlike the successful advancement of an argument, narration requires the active complicity of a reader willing to step outside established boundaries of the racial imaginary" (8-9). In Paradise Morrison confronts the racial imaginary in its inseparable connection to gender, class, and sexual relations, and she engages with contemporary feminist, black, and postmodern t heories of representation in her literary choices. Morrison moves readers "outside established boundaries" of thought by posing a multiple or nomadic subjectivity against a fixed and unified subject position, by displacing whiteness and the power of the white gaze without reifying blackness, and by creating an artistic practice that brings about insight.

In Playing in the Dark, Morrison confronts both the ubiquitousness and the intransigence of racial representations in literary works, an awareness that informs her own attempts "to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains" (xi). In "Home," Morrison adds to these ideas, describing her work in Paradise as battling "the accretions of deceit, blindness, ignorance, paralysis, and sheer malevolence embedded in race language so that other kinds of perception were not only available but were inevitable" (7). To do this Morrison embarks on what seems to be a contradictory project, "to see whether or not race-specific, race-free language is both possible and meaningful in narration" (9; my emphasis). Through language that "emphasiz[es] racial specificity minus racist hierarchy in its figurative choices" (8), Morrison tries to create "a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent" (9). Morrison calls this imaginary place "home," and she sets it in contrast to the prison house of language, the "racial house" which, like the "master's house" in Audre Lorde's essay of that name, is a linguistic and discursive construct that "reproduce[s] the master's voice and its assumptions of the all-knowing law of the white father." Morrison's desire as an author is to create "an open house" or "transform this house completely" (4)

Morrison's figures of house and home refer to linguistic and imaginary constructs that reside in the space of the novel. In Paradise, Ruby and the Convent represent these conflicting ideas of house and home. (2) The all-black town of Ruby is the home of safety and freedom described in Morrison's essay, the place where a woman can walk alone at night "on out, beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey" (Paradise 9) (3); it is "a place where race both matters and is rendered impotent." The Convent, on the other hand, exhibits the imprint of the "master's voice" and the racist and violent history of the United States. An embezzler's house shaped like a bullet, the Convent's first incarnation represents the brutality and paranoia as well as the economic and sexual domination that characterized the European conquest of the Americas. The Convent's second life as a Catholic school for Arapaho girls describes a quieter but equally insidious colonizing tactic of religious domination, s exual repression, and cultural demolition through forced removals and education. But in Paradise Ruby comes to exemplify the dangers of home based on sameness, unity, and fixity, whereas the Convent becomes an "open house" where women of unidentified race convene, move through, and transform the layers of historical accretion.