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

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Sarah Appleton Aguiar

In their plotting, the men of Ruby feel elation: confronting death, instigating it, enhances their static "perfect" lives. That is, if death validates life, these men fully feel life, perhaps for the first time in many years. Believing that the women are "detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door," (15) they pretend to feel justified in their actions (4).

If silence is a form of death, the women have been silenced even before the men invade the Convent. If they are indeed dead, no one seems to be searching for them, no one misses them, no one is aware of their passing from life. In essence, Beloved's conclusion applies to each woman in Paradise: "Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.... Although she has claim, she is not claimed" (321). (16) In addition, like Beloved, who leaves footprints that disappear and change, these women apparently leave no footprints (5). But other evidence of earthly and bodily functions--"food-encrusted dishes, dirty cups.... A Modess box is on the toilet tank and a bucket of soiled things stands nearby" (8-9)--recalls Beloved's soiled bedclothes and voracious appetite.

In addition to their silence, the women have apparently led invisible lives. Cynthia Davis explains that "womanhood, like blackness, is Other in this society, and the dilemma of women in a patriarchal society is parallel to that of blacks in a racist society: they are made to feel most real when seen" (31). Davis asserts that these women "can never satisfy the gaze of society," as they are "doubly defined as failures and outsiders" (32). Thus, Mavis, Gigi, Pallas, and Seneca lack the gaze that defines the self, and in their static refuge within the Convent walls, this deficit of self-definition must, if they are to progress, be remedied. Finally gathering the women together to prepare them, Consolata states, "If you have a place that you should be in and somebody who loves you waiting there, then go. If not stay here and follow me. Someone could want to meet you" (262). The women stay.

Therefore, the scene that follows the women's disruption of K. D. and Arnette's wedding critically signals the women's readiness for the journey to death. While Ruby's men interpret Mavis and Gigi's fight as evil, and Seneca and Pallas's embrace in the back seat of the Cadillac as perverted, in actuality these women are enacting survival strategies they had previously been afraid to deploy. Both Mavis and Gigi had fled from confrontation; Mavis abandoned her family and Gigi ran from the political violence. Then, in physically attacking each other (with satisfaction), they, in essence, reverse their earlier failures. Likewise, Seneca and Pallas, abandoned and betrayed by their mothers, alleviate their fears of female abandonment by reaching for each other.

Ultimately Consolata becomes the conduit for women's journey into death, joining Morrison's other symbolic midwives, initially begrudging women who aid other women into birth, life, and death. While Baby Suggs in Beloved preaches body love and self-birth, and Alice Manfred sews together pieces of Violet's life through their conversations in Jazz, Consolata gives lessons in death. In fact, when Mavis initially arrives at the Convent, she asks Consolata if she could "show [her] the way out of here." Whereas Tally argues that "Consolata finally adopts a fusion of the spirit and the flesh in her search [with the women] for wholeness and integrity" (17), Consolata's rituals seem to me to engender a separation of the spirit and the flesh. Each unclaimed woman, at the end, leaves a testament; by inscribing their physical selves onto the floor and telling the stories of their existences, they all let go. They free their spirits into the realm of the dead, leaving the mark of the self before passing on. Unlike literary texts that emphasize the union of body and spirit, Paradise argues instead for an ultimate division of body and spirit. The basement paintings of the women then separate, let go of the body to "pass on" to the future. (17) In a set off passage, the narrator explains, "Gradually they lost the days" (262). And in these final days, Soane notices, "The Convent women were no longer haunted" (266).