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

African American Review, Fall, 2004 by Sarah Appleton Aguiar

It is fitting that the last glimpse of Ruby in Paradise is the funeral of Save-Marie, an ironic symbol of redemption and hope. Presiding over the ceremony, Richard Misner attests, "And God, being intelligence itself, generosity itself, has given us Mind to know His subtlety. To know His elegance. His purity. To know that 'what is sown is not alive until it dies'" (306-07). He insists that "life in life is terminal and life after life is everlasting, He is with us always, in life, after it and especially in between, lying in wait for us to know the splendor" (307). The novel concludes with visions of redeemable Ruby, the Convent women completing unfinished tasks, and Consolata and Piedade united at the future's gateway. Richard Misner's recognition that life and death cannot exist without each other validates not only the healthy re-beginning for Ruby but validates as well the Convent women's lives and their deaths.

Notes

(1.) See, for example, "The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics and Gender in Toni Morrison's Paradise" by Peter Widdowson.

(2.) Justine Tally contends that "readers and critics will be hard pressed to make snap judgments on the text and just how it comprises the third novel of the trilogy" (12). Tally argues that it is the theme of love that binds Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise together: maternal love in Beloved, romantic and illicit love in Jazz, and love of ideology in Paradise (17). Likewise, Peter Widdowson argues that the novels comprise a "loose trilogy charting the history of African-Americans" (313).

(3.) Mavis's twins are dead, she fears her other children, and her husband is brutal. Gigi has been abandoned by her lover, Seneca was abandoned by her mother, and Pallas has been betrayed by her mother and her lover.

(4.) Denise Heinze renders Beloved's character as "part ghost, zombie, devil, and memory. Morrison reveals Beloved in tantalizing degrees until she is manifested as a full-blooded person" (175). She continues, "the fact that [Beloved] can be seen at all is testimony to her power as a supernatural force, a semiotic haint" (179).

(5.) Frank treats Mavis's body as if it has no life while he masturbates against her, and Sal is playing with a razor on the night before Mavis leaves. The actual events that may have constituted the deaths of these women are at best only tenuously represented, perhaps underscoring the idea that none of the women has understood or accepted her death.

(6.) Harris also notes that African-American folk tradition includes the belief that a ghost might occasionally appear among the living "to indicate that all is well, to teach a lesson, or to guide the living to some good fortune" (156).

(7.) That Morrison finds the gnostic test of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" so critical to her work is evidenced by the fact that she used another portion of the text as the epigraph to Jazz.

(8.) Another interesting connotation associated with the shape of the Convent is its likeness to the shape of a ship. Following this line of thought, then, the Convent may be equated with the ships arriving and departing at the novel's end. In addition, the Convent as death-ship is another link to Beloved, as Beloved compares her experience of death to being in a slave ship.