Furrowing all the Brows: Interpretation and the transcendent in Toni Morrison's Paradise - Critical Essay

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Philip Page

That the town is given a second chance and that the five Convent women transcend death suggests the presence of divine love in this novel. God's love of human beings and human beings' love of God constitute additional complex layers of the novel. The latter is problematic, for the sense of divine mission both enabled the bands of African Americans to find their way westward to new homes in Haven and Ruby and eventually became part of the exclusionary rigidity of their community. (3) The movement is from the Old Fathers, who, like Old Testament patriarchs, are full of religious zeal and insist on God's justice, to the New Testament overtones of a merciful God, suggested by Mary Magnus, Consolata, and her evocations of Piedade. (4) Similarly, the sequence of mysterious men--the walking man who leads the pioneers to Haven, Dovey Morgan's Friend, and the cowboy figure who appears in Connie's kitchen--suggest a movement from Old Testament visionary guide to New Testament comforter. The walking man reinforces the O ld Fathers' sense of their divine mission, and, like their sense of God, he is aloof, mysterious, and powerful; in contrast, the other two male figures suggest the immanent presence of God on earth--that is, of Christ--as they speak, listen, and empathize on intimate terms with Dovey and Connie.

The presence of this series of semi-divine men is reinforced by similarly ambiguous presences of other figures who blur the usual boundary between human and divine. Soane Morgan has a vision of "a lady in the yard smiling" and holding an empty basket (102), which she interprets as a sign of her forthcoming miscarriage; Richard Misner feels that Jesus is literally walking with him as he struggles to understand Ruby (161); and Mavis is frequently consoled by an unnamed "night visitor" (260). Similar mysterious figures also blur the usual boundary between the living and the dead, as in the imagined presence of Mavis' dead daughters, Merle and Pearl (258); Patricia's communion with her dead mother (197-202); and Connie's evocations of her mother, Piedade (263-64, 284-85, 318). Together, the presences of these figures and the characters' beliefs in them suggest that the fictional reality in this novel extends beyond the material and the perceived. Ordinary methods of knowing and interpreting--exemplified by Patric ia's charts and notes--will not suffice, but instead deeper, more transcendent, more holistic kinds of knowing and interpreting, as modeled by Lone and Consolata, are required.

If human beings' love of God is shown to be problematic, God's love of human beings is unqualified. The nine men who raid the Convent are blamed but not condemned, and Ruby is given new life. The Convent girls are transported beyond the life-death dichotomy into a kind of living death reminiscent of African religions. Like Pilate in Song of Solomon, they are Christ figures, who must die so that others may soar. The human characters in Paradise move in the direction of appreciating such divine love. Both Ruby and the Convent originally are attempts to find and found a sanctuary, a refuge, and thus a true home, and nearly all the characters can be said to be in search of home. Like European migrants to America and like African Americans ever since their uprooting from Africa, the residents of Ruby and the Convent have been spatially and temporally dispossessed. Through their new prophets--Richard Misner and Consolata--they begin to imagine a spiritual home that transcends their efforts to establish material hom es.