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

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Philip Page

The potentially positive changes in the town are figured in the effects of the raid on Deacon Morgan. Before the tragedy he was the kind of man who would rather open his bank on time than help Sweetie Fleetwood as she wanders down the street barefoot and undressed, and he and his twin Steward epitomized the rigidly controlling ideology of the town. But after the raid he is the barefoot one, trying for the first time in his life to have an intimate conversation with a man, as he vaguely confesses to Richard Misner about his affair with Connie. More profoundly, Deacon can no longer live with his former self (he "did not like himself anymore" [300] and his "life was uninhabitable" [302]) because, as Fairy DuPres' curse implies, he has become what his value system is built to defend against: "His long remorse was at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different" (302). Since the raid's effect on Steward is th e opposite of its effect on Deacon--Steward is "insolent and unapologetic" (299)--Deacon is now for the first time on his own, fully separate from his twin. As he tells Richard about his grandfather Zechariah's separation from his twin, he indirectly expresses his own confusion and anxiety about his and Deacon's splitting up. This unsettling, however, is positive. The near-oneness of Deacon and Steward, like the tight harmony of the town, had once been useful but had become too binding. Deacon's need to grow on his own beyond his bond with Steward symbolizes the town's need to grow beyond its confining bond with its own legend. Deacon alludes to this need when he tells Misner, "I got a long way to go, Reverend" (303), with the emphasis on I and with the implication that his life's journey is far from complete, far from being confined in the past or in one ideological position. Like the town, Deacon moves from a restrictive fusion to a liberating fragmentation.

The story of the Convent is in some ways the reverse--from chaotic fragmentation to a liberating fusion. Its history indicates its extreme diversity--first an embezzler's pornographic mansion, then a Catholic school for Indian girls, last an anarchic commune for wandering young women. Each young woman is a case study in familial and psychological disorientation, and together they are radically heterogeneous and cacophonic. Consolata is also internally fragmented, unsure after the death of Mary Magnus why she is alive. But the five women move gradually and then rapidly toward individual and communal harmony. Then Connie's therapy miraculously centers each woman, brings their community together, and revitalizes Connie herself, who comes to think of herself in terms of her beloved Mary Magnus and who narrates Edenic visions of her childhood with her mother, Piedade. This individual and collective movement toward harmony by the five women is then transmuted into their mystical transcendence beyond life and death, as Connie seems to blend into her idyllic visions and each of the four Convent women is spiritually reunited with her family.