"Passing on" death: stealing life in Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Sarah Appleton Aguiar

A subtler pair than Lone and Consolata, Soane and Mavis may also be read as doubles. Both have lost children, and neither can move past grief. Yet Soane accepts "potions" from Consolata to numb her pain while Mavis fixates on her illusion that the twins somehow live and grow within the Convent walls. Though strikingly dissimilar--Soane is elegant and proper, Mavis virtually illiterate and undignified--both fiercely love Consolata, onto whom each projects her own solace. They both need to deny death; that need Consolata will ultimately dispel.

Forming another pair, Arnette and Pallas denounce their pregnancies. Arnette forces an early delivery (250), resulting in the death of her premature baby, while Pallas eventually gives birth to "Divine," an act of forgiveness toward her betraying mother. Arnette's refuge at the Convent serves her need to find a place of death, to sacrifice the child she carries, even as the Convent women urge her to accept her condition, and they offer care for her and her baby. When she reappears at the Convent to reclaim the child on the night of her honeymoon, she is appalled to find the baby gone, and blames the Convent women, denying her part in the death. Likewise, Pallas, who has returned to her father, makes her way again to the Convent when she can no longer conceal her pregnancy, believing the Convent to be a place where she can hide from the consequences of life.

Sweetie Fleetwood, mother of four sick infants, journeys down the road to the Convent in desperate and wild despair, and Seneca joins her on her journey, drawn to the figure of the crying woman. The pairing is apt: Seneca is the abandoned child and Sweetie is the mother who longs to abandon her children (although she despises herself for that longing, refusing to acknowledge her forbidden wish). Sweetie finds strength in hating the Convent women, especially Seneca, whom she insists is "sin." In despising Seneca, Sweetie can then transfer her anger instead of recognizing her own horrible desire to desert her four unresponsive children.

Gigi and Billie Delia are charged with carnality. Ruby's males regard Billie Delia as "the fastest girl in town and speeding up by the second" (59). Likewise, when Gigi steps off of the bus, the males lounging at the Oven assess her "screaming tits," tight pants and high heels (55). Ironically, Billie Delia is a virgin, and Gigi has not seduced K. D.; in fact, she must "kick him out." In her purity and her understanding of the necessity of death, Billie Delia is the only citizen of Ruby to recognize the Convent women for who they are. She asks herself after their disappearance: "When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?" (308) Gigi's template of her body, painted with her arms and legs "flung apart," reinscribes a body unmarred by the carnality of which she has been accused.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the novel is, as Widdowson acknowledges, the question of "how could a group of nine upright, god-fearing black men in 1976 reach a position where they could gun down in cold blood a group of defenceless [sic] damaged women because they were women ... and not because they were, for example, white?" (316) Although these men are proud and committed to their cause, nothing in the novel suggests that they are, in fact, potential murderers. (14) Thus, if the men know somehow that the Convent women are not truly living individuals, their resolve to rid the community of the abomination of death becomes more palatable. In essence, as the constituents of Ruby to fear death, even to strike some kind of bargain to avoid death, the visible specters of death as embodied in the Convent women, particularly as they dare to "invade" the town during K. D. and Arnette's wedding, must instill within the men a sense of righteousness in their quest to eradicate the women. Although the men fear racial impurity and social change, they fear death most of all. Thus, more than misogyny and racial intolerance, what drives them to murder the Convent women is the desire to rid Ruby of the abomination of blatant death.