Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise

African American Review, Winter, 2002 by Magali Cornier Michael

The building that the town refers to as the "Convent" itself serves as a metaphor for the dynamism and possibilities that the novel attaches to the community of women who live there. Although originally built in "1922" (169) as "an embezzler's folly" (3), the building is later transformed by "Sisters Devoted to Indian and Colored People" into "an asylum/boarding school for Indian girls," "CHRIST THE KING SCHOOL FOR NATIVE GIRLS," run by "Mary Magna" (223-24). Once the order closes the school and all but Mary Magna and her protege Consolata are left, the building seems to be overlooked by the authorities and organically becomes a kind of safe, regenerative haven for women who find their way there. In all of its incarnations, the building stands geographically separate from the society and culture of its time, "a big stone house in the middle of nothing" (169). Even when in "1954" the town of Ruby is built "some seventeen miles south of Christ the King" (225), the house remains effectively alone in the Oklahoma countryside. Moreover, "against all reason, the students, the state officials and those they encountered in town called it the Convent" (224), which not only reinforces the house's geographical separation but also imbues it with an ideological separation in the sense that convents traditionally have functioned as places of overt retreat from the various cultural, economic, and historic structures at work in the social, secular world. Having internalized, at least in part, the entrenched Puritan heritage of white America, Ruby views the Convent skeptically at best, even though its official ties to Catholicism have long been severed. In addition, because Ruby's male leaders are unable to see the parallels that exist between the patriarchal structures of their town and of Catholicism, they view with suspicion the idea of convents and nuns and, in particular, the idea of women who have chosen deliberately to abstain from sexual relations with men and thus to forgo reproduction; they cannot make the connection be tween their own and Catholicism's maintenance of power precisely through the regulation of women's sexualities and reproductive capacities. In effect, the town of Ruby actively sets up the Convent as a dangerous separatist space in order to keep the convent women outside its own boundaries. However, the real dogmatic, separatist enclave is Ruby itself, whose leaders work hard to construct the Convent in binary opposition to itself.

Indeed, in its various guises the house has never truly engaged in any absolute or dogmatic form of separatism. The embezzler built the elaborate mansion as a direct consequence of his participation within a vital, thriving economic system, even if his mode of participation was illicit. Furthermore, his choosing to decorate his house with the most ornate artifacts of Western culture--such as "bisque and rose-tone marble floors," "ornate bathroom fixtures," "Flemish candelabra," and "nymphs" carved in "niches" (3-4)--marks the mansion as existing very much within rather than outside of the social context of his time. As a school for Indian girls, the building is very much engaged with an America that has steadily pushed aside the native inhabitants of the land it has usurped. Its mission and attempts to provide a Catholic education first to "Arapaho girls" (10) and later to "wards of the state" (227) are impossible to sever from the culture within which it is interceding. The later incarnation of the house, as a now-secular place of retreat and rejuvenation for women, is similarly difficult to denote as separatist given its inclination to accept openly women of all stripes who drift in and out of its doors. Moreover, the nuns, and later the women who live in the house, engage their neighbors within a shared economic sphere by advertising and selling "produce, barbecue sauce, good bread and the hottest peppers in the world" (11). Geographic separateness thus does not necessarily translate to absolute separatism; in all its guises, and particularly the latter two, the house continues to engage and participate in the world outside its borders.