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

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.