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

Aguiar, Sarah Appleton

And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.... (Barnes & Noble Paradise website; my emphasis)

Many reviews and critical analyses of Paradise, Toni Morrison's seventh novel, note that it is the final novel of a trilogy, beginning with Beloved and continuing with Jazz. (1) And while many of these reviews contend that Morrison has written pivotal chapters in African-American migrations, the trilogy maintains a much deeper connection: that of the cycle of life itself. (2) With Paradise, Morrison demonstrates unequivocally that death is a necessary condition of and for life; that is, the acceptance of mortality is a critical aspect of life's and death's journeys.

The trilogy's first novel, Beloved, is replete with birth imagery, from Sethe's "water-breaking" following the carnival to Paul D's "re-birth" through mud in Georgia. And yet Morrison makes abundantly clear that birth is intricately interwoven with both life and death. Beloved, Seth, Paul D, and Denver flee or hide from life throughout most of Beloved, so each must be reborn by accepting and experiencing the painful conditions of life. Likewise, the second novel of the trilogy, Jazz, contains a multitude of metaphors for life. The music is alive, the photograph of Dorcas that Violet places on the mantle becomes alive with its own personality, and even the narrator of Jazz takes on life. Yet Joe and Violet merely go through the motions of life rather than truly live. When the dying Dorcas asks Felice to tell Joe that "There is only one apple," she reminds him that life does not exist without death; the "fall" of Adam and Eve, while condemning eaters to mortality, also endows them with the knowledge of life. To refuse that knowledge is to refuse life.

Paradise completes the cycle with explorations of death. The citizens of Ruby have re-created Eden to their own specifications; and like the original death-less Eden, nobody dies in Ruby. Yet nobody "lives" in Ruby either, as the town exists within the isolated parameters of its citizens' powerfully executed will. By allowing no outside encroachment, Ruby remains dead to change, static. As Patricia Cato observes, there are no "new" stories in Ruby; only the founding narratives exist, told endlessly by the men. Richard Misner likewise wonders, "But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on" (161). Peter Widdowson notes, "Ruby, 'immortally' frozen in its own stasis, has no politics because the very conception of change is a contradiction in terms: the town is ideal because it cannot change, and it cannot change because it is ideal" (329).

Seventeen miles away, another "paradise" has arisen. Inhabited by women who have fled from their lives (or deaths), the Convent--a building that Ruby's men see as "dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth"--represents another kind of sanctuary of death (18). There the women, who have all experienced a "death of love," (3) learn to accept self-love. Their supposed "jangling" and "Jezebel" life disturbs the males of Ruby, and thus these men plan to kill the Convent women, although in truth, Consolata's recognition of the women as "broken girls, frightened girls, weak and lying" is a more appropriate description (222). Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are suspended in stasis, women in hiding, attempting a condition-less existence. Consolata believes, "Not only did they do nothing except the absolutely necessary, they had no plans to do anything" (222). Unlike the sin of forgetting the past so prevalent in Beloved and Jazz, the inhabitants of Ruby--and its female double--refuse to let go of the past, to let time soften the edges of history's indignities; they deny the processes of death and regeneration. After all, most of its residents are dead long before Ruby's men raid the Convent.

As Morrison includes in Beloved dead characters cohabiting with the living, (4) the possibility that all or some of the women--Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas--are dead before they reach the Convent is a viable one. Each has suffered tragic and potentially fatal circumstances before her arrival. Pallas has been chased and raped; maybe she has drowned. Seneca has been "hired" by a sadistic woman to indulge her sexually violent fantasies; maybe she, too, has been murdered. Gigi participated in a riot that left at least one child dead. And maybe Mavis's husband suffocated her, or she has been murdered by the daughter who dreams apologies to her. (5) "Come Prepared or Not at All" can be applied to these women; if they are dead but have not "passed on," perhaps they are not yet prepared for death (13).

Justine Tally argues that in dream sequences following the massacre at the Convent, the dead women act as "revenants": "the spirit of someone who has been violently killed and returns to visit the living" (46). Yet, as Trudier Harris asserts about Beloved, Morrison "reverses/undermines our expectations of what ghost stories should be, as well as any conceptions we have about succubi, shapeshifters, and demons" (13). (6) Due to the circumstances of their possible deaths, arguably, these women are indeed revenants, even though for most of the novel, they are as static as their Ruby neighbors. Content to exist within self-created fantasy worlds, they have no quest and rarely interact with the living. Although Mavis and Pallas occasionally leave the Convent, neither returns with new knowledge or purpose. Contrasted with Ruby's residents, these women appear more vivacious, but in fact, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas are refugees from life.

The epigraph, the final stanza of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," establishes "death" as one of the central ideas of the novel. (7) Gigi arrives at the Convent in a hearse; Mavis in the Cadillac in which her infant twins died. Pallas cannot speak at first, and Seneca engages in ritual self-bloodletting racked with "a pain so wildly triumphant she would do anything to kill it" (261). Consolata willfully withholds death from Mary Magda. Even such minor details as the last name of Gigi's boyfriend connect life to death: Mikey's last name is "Rood," a word meaning cross and connoting "gallows."

Both the Convent and the town of Ruby are described as symbolic tombs, places rife with death. At the novel's start, the men of Ruby feel the Convent's chill (3). The Convent's "stinging hot peppers" may be equated with the fires of Hell, and the Convent itself is described as shaped like a "live cartridge and "deadly," (8) while it too decays into a crumbling building with failing plumbing and an overgrown garden (71). (9) Ruby is named for the town's first death, and its citizens attempt to stave off the death of their way of life by strictly maintaining racial purity. The original inscription of the Oven--Ruby's symbol--has been erased.

Several subtleties suggest that at least some of the women are dead long before the Ruby posse attacks. For example, the novel's second paragraph opens with the sentence: "They are nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill ..." (3). If the Convent residents number five (Consolata, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, Pallas), then the number of men is not "over twice the number," possibly indicating that some of the women are not alive. More tellingly, of course, when the people of Ruby return to the Convent after the massacre, they find no bodies, just as the title character disappears at the end of Beloved. In addition, the Convent women have taught themselves to deny the deaths of others. Mavis keeps her dead twins "alive" at the Convent, Gigi runs to the Convent to escape the death she witnessed, Seneca refuses to accept that she has been abandoned by her mother, and Pallas cannot accept the death of either her mother's or her lover's affection. And, again, Consolata has kept Mary Magda alive without her knowledge. All of the women have been expressly alone, and "being alone was being dead" (16).

As Ruby's women find themselves drawn to the Convent after the appearances of Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas, they are also drawn towards death. As Morrison doubles elsewhere, (10) she doubles the Convent women in the women of Ruby: ironic and paradoxical doubles supplant the one-to-one pairings of other novels. (11) Moreover, collectively, the women bear critical similarities with mothers, daughters, and sisters in other Morrison novels. (12)

Lone DuPres and Consolata Sosa are obvious doubles as abandoned girls rescued (or kidnapped) by women, and they share a similar gift. Each can extend life; Lone relates that she knows the "trick of life" and recognizes this ability in Consolata (272). Lone appreciates her gift, while Consolata feels "tricked into raising the dead" (242). In the end, though, Consolata's true gift is not prolonging life, but guiding death. Ironically, she sees her prolonging of Mary Magda's life as "evil," but feels redemptive in enabling the women's recognition of death (247). Earlier she had wanted to "kill them all" (223); paradoxically, she develops the strength to guide them to acceptance. (13) In the other women the trope of doubling gains added significance. The Convent women and the women of Ruby fulfill each other's needs. The Convent women seek the living, and the women of Ruby seek what they need from the dead. And what each seeks, the other unknowingly possesses: Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas seek life (or its illusions), and Soane, Arnette, Sweetie, and Billie Delia seek death (or its possibilities). Although the Convent women rarely actively seek out the other women, they do administer to the life affirmations of these women. For the Convent shelters Ruby's women, providing food and care and a "haven" for their anger and fears. The women of Ruby, it seems, need affirmations of mortality from the Convent women; they need the sure knowledge of death's release and redemption, a knowledge denied them until the massacre.

A subtler pair than Lone and Consolata, Soane and Mavis may also be read as doubles. Both have lost children, and neither can move past grief. Yet Soane accepts "potions" from Consolata to numb her pain while Mavis fixates on her illusion that the twins somehow live and grow within the Convent walls. Though strikingly dissimilar--Soane is elegant and proper, Mavis virtually illiterate and undignified--both fiercely love Consolata, onto whom each projects her own solace. They both need to deny death; that need Consolata will ultimately dispel.

Forming another pair, Arnette and Pallas denounce their pregnancies. Arnette forces an early delivery (250), resulting in the death of her premature baby, while Pallas eventually gives birth to "Divine," an act of forgiveness toward her betraying mother. Arnette's refuge at the Convent serves her need to find a place of death, to sacrifice the child she carries, even as the Convent women urge her to accept her condition, and they offer care for her and her baby. When she reappears at the Convent to reclaim the child on the night of her honeymoon, she is appalled to find the baby gone, and blames the Convent women, denying her part in the death. Likewise, Pallas, who has returned to her father, makes her way again to the Convent when she can no longer conceal her pregnancy, believing the Convent to be a place where she can hide from the consequences of life.

Sweetie Fleetwood, mother of four sick infants, journeys down the road to the Convent in desperate and wild despair, and Seneca joins her on her journey, drawn to the figure of the crying woman. The pairing is apt: Seneca is the abandoned child and Sweetie is the mother who longs to abandon her children (although she despises herself for that longing, refusing to acknowledge her forbidden wish). Sweetie finds strength in hating the Convent women, especially Seneca, whom she insists is "sin." In despising Seneca, Sweetie can then transfer her anger instead of recognizing her own horrible desire to desert her four unresponsive children.

Gigi and Billie Delia are charged with carnality. Ruby's males regard Billie Delia as "the fastest girl in town and speeding up by the second" (59). Likewise, when Gigi steps off of the bus, the males lounging at the Oven assess her "screaming tits," tight pants and high heels (55). Ironically, Billie Delia is a virgin, and Gigi has not seduced K. D.; in fact, she must "kick him out." In her purity and her understanding of the necessity of death, Billie Delia is the only citizen of Ruby to recognize the Convent women for who they are. She asks herself after their disappearance: "When will they return? When will they reappear, with blazing eyes, war paint and huge hands to rip up and stomp down this prison calling itself a town?" (308) Gigi's template of her body, painted with her arms and legs "flung apart," reinscribes a body unmarred by the carnality of which she has been accused.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the novel is, as Widdowson acknowledges, the question of "how could a group of nine upright, god-fearing black men in 1976 reach a position where they could gun down in cold blood a group of defenceless [sic] damaged women because they were women ... and not because they were, for example, white?" (316) Although these men are proud and committed to their cause, nothing in the novel suggests that they are, in fact, potential murderers. (14) Thus, if the men know somehow that the Convent women are not truly living individuals, their resolve to rid the community of the abomination of death becomes more palatable. In essence, as the constituents of Ruby to fear death, even to strike some kind of bargain to avoid death, the visible specters of death as embodied in the Convent women, particularly as they dare to "invade" the town during K. D. and Arnette's wedding, must instill within the men a sense of righteousness in their quest to eradicate the women. Although the men fear racial impurity and social change, they fear death most of all. Thus, more than misogyny and racial intolerance, what drives them to murder the Convent women is the desire to rid Ruby of the abomination of blatant death.

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).

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.

(9.) Nada Elia recognizes that "at first, the Convent is brewing with life brought in from the outside by the women.... Its productivity is symbolized by the constant activity in the kitchen," until the Convent grows "decrepit" (134).

(10.) In particular, see The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels, by Denise Heinze. Heinze argues that "Morrison takes on a number of dualisms: materialism and spiritualism, white and black, past and present, good and evil. Though she does not necessarily resolve these dualisms, she does succeed in expanding the limits of human consciousness beyond the either or mentality that sets people against each other in mutually destructive ways" (150). Cf. Kristin Hunt, "Paradise Lost: The Destructive forces of Double Consciousness and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Paradise."

(11.) I equate this strategy to that Morrison used in Sula, whereby neither Sula nor Nel could be classified as the positive or negative side of the other. Deborah McDowell argues that Sula "insistently blurs and confuses ... binary oppositions. It glories in paradox and ambiguity" (80).

(12.) In particular, see Doreatha Drummond Mbalia's "Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz."

(13.) Consolata has had practice in guiding death. As Consolata finally allows Mary Magda to die, she holds the woman "in her arms and between her legs," and "so the lady had entered death like a birthing, rocked and prayed for" (223).

(14.) Elizabeth Kella argues that the men of Ruby "see their action not as an attack but as a defense" (210).

(15.) This statement also suggests that the women are dead: having been blown back in after first being swept out.

(16.) Patricia Turner notes that within the novel, "we see a range of despair as it is manifest in the lives of five women who come together after they have been readily discarded by their families and community" (Turner).

(17.) in this pronouncement I disagree with Kella, who asserts, "In Paradise, Morrison presents the achievement of this kind of union [of body and spirit] as a deliberate--and difficult--act of personal agency, crucial to the creation of 'authentic' identity" (221).

Works Cited

Davis, Cynthia. "Self Society and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction." Toni Morrison. Ed. Linden Peach. New York: St. Martin's P., 1998. 27-42.

Elia, Nada. Trances, Dances, and Vociferations: Agency and Resistance in African Women's Narratives. New York: Garland, 2001.

Harris, Trudier. Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Heinze, Denise. The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1993.

Hunt, Kristin. "Paradise Lost: The Destructive forces of Double Consciousness and Boundaries in Toni Morrison's Paradise." Reading under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Eds. John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 2000. 117-27.

Kella, Elizabeth. Beloved Communities: Solidarity and Difference in Fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison, and Joy Kogawa. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2000.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. "Women Who Run with Wild: The Need for Sisterhoods in Jazz." Modern Fiction Studies 39.3-4 (Fall/Winter 1995): 623-46.

McDowell, Deborah E. "New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, And Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 186-99.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

--. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998.

Tally, Justine. Paradise Reconsidered: Toni Morrison's (Hi)stories and Truths. Piscataway, N J: Transaction P, 1999.

Turner, Patricia. "Paradise Lost: A Black Community Tears Itself Apart in Toni Morrison's Latest Novel." <http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/morrison.html#review>

Widdowson, Peter. "The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics and Gender in Toni Morrison's Paradise." Journal of American Studies 35 (2001): 313-35.

Sarah Appleton Aguiar is an Associate Professor at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. She is the author of The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature (SIU P, 2000) and co-editor of He Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text (Farleigh-Dickinson UP, 2000).