Womanhood in Paradise

Womanhood in Paradise

     Paradise is one of the masterworks of American female author Toni Morrison. Paradise reflects quite a complex theme by demonstrating how the town named Ruby to build up, its foundation, and the process of being destroyed and its relationship with a Convent. Ruby was a town where all the inhabitants are black who live there for a long time while Convent was a place where all the dwellers are women. Like many of Toni Morrison’s other works, Paradise demonstrates that women, especially black women, were still under oppression in patrilineal societies. The story also talked about tensions between men and women of Ruby Town. It looked like Ruby town was like paradise in the world, but its prosperity and stability was built upon the tolerance of women. In the following part, I would demonstrate the womanhood in Paradise based on the following questions.

        The book started with the well-known sentence ‘they shoot the white girls’, but it never revealed what character is. And we never know which white girl had been killed and whether she had died or not. As it is mentioned above, the Ruby town was a patrilineal society where men dominate everything. In their eyes, women were strange and indecent. Instead of taking women as human beings who were endowed with the equal rights with them, they took women as something different from them. Although it seemed that in Ruby town, women were safe and did not need to worry about anything such as worrying about the basic necessities of life, they were unhappy. Usually, men in Ruby thought that women were less independent and were attached to women. Hence, to those black men in Ruby town, women in the Convent who lived self-sufficient life were also quite strange and behave completely different from women in Ruby town. For example, they lived in a big house and have big wardrobes full of ‘abnormal’ clothes. Those black men in Ruby town defined women in Convent as unconventional with horrible behaviors. Those conservatives of the Ruby town thought that the weird and deviant behaviors would exert a harmful influence on children and women in the Ruby town. Hence, they made the conclusion that all the disastrous things were in the Convent. That is why they took the rope and other arms to kill women in the Convent with the excuse of cleaning up witchcraft.

     Gender identity refers to a person’s conception of oneself as male or female, which is strong with the role of gender, which is strongly related to the concept of gender role (Burge 2007). Usually, personality is the outward manifestations of the gender identity.  As it is mentioned above, the personalities of black women in Ruby town were usually manifested as being obedient, attached to men. Hence, these attributes are related to gender identities.

In the neighborhood of Ruby town, there was a Convent where the homeless black women could go there to stay and later the Convent became the asylum for black women. Those black women came to the Convent for various reasons. For example, some women fled to the Convent because they suffered sexually abuse by their husbands. But to be sure, most women came to the Convent with sorrow and pains.  The first lady who came to the Convent was Mavis Albright who has suffered the sexual abuse by her husband for a long time. That was why she decided to run away from her husband as well as her twins though she really missed her twins. Later the author also described other women who came to the Convent such as Gigi. Gigi was a shameful woman in the eyes of men in Ruby Town because she could sleep with any men for money. However, Gigi was also a woman who was abandoned by the society because all of her parents and her boyfriend were in jail. In other words, nobody ever taught Gigi what shame was. The racial movement in America gave her a big strike. That was why she chose to flee to the Convent. Another woman who shared a similar story with Gigi was Seneca who had a rather tragic life. Seneca was abandoned by her mother and suffered sexual abuse by her foster brother. Later she became a sex toy for a rich woman, and when she sought help from her boyfriend, he refused. Hence, it could be seen that Seneca was almost the most miserable woman in the Convent. Hence, it could be seen that those women who fled to stay in the Convent had all kinds of sorrowful stories. The reason why they wanted to stay in the Convent even though they were not nuns was because the Convent offered them a place to forget about the past sad stories and moved forward. Besides, the other reason why those women chose to stay in the Convent was because hostesses of the Convent provided them generosity and tolerance that the outside world such as Ruby town could not offer. In other words, the Convent was kind of spiritual sustenance for those who fled to the Convert. Compared to the torture they had suffered, those women felt a kind of security when they stayed in the Convent. Toni Morrison described their security as follows:

The whole house felt permeated with a blessing malelessness, like a protected domain, free of hunters but exciting too (Paradise P177).

From above description, it can be seen that the Convent was like a matrilineal society, which was totally in contrast with the Ruby town. The tolerant atmosphere of the Convent not only allowed women to forget about the past pains but also allowed them to reconstruct their new identities (Liang 2009). Those women helped each other and respected each other, who built up a paradise world for themselves. Since it made such contrast with women in the Ruby town, the Convent made men in Ruby Town hostile to it. That was why they wanted to kill women in the Convent. Interestingly, through the whole article, the woman who was murdered was not found.

There are dramatically different perspectives towards women and the Convert. In the eyes of men from the Ruby town, they think woman as totally attached to men and they should not consider many things, just as what Toni Morrison wrote as follows:

What, he wonders,could do this to women? How can their plain brains think up such things: revolting sex, deceit and the sly torture of children?   (Paradise P17).

Besides, they also defined women as ‘whores’ and racially impure ‘slime’ (Paradise P288). They hated these women because women in the Convent did not follow the schedules they regulated. Thus, they thought women in the Convent: ‘Slack, they think. August just around the corner and these women have not even sorted, let alone washed, the jars’ (paradise P5). In their eyes, the woman from Convent represented ominousness, and they brought lots of disasters. However, in the eyes of women who fled to the Convent, Convent was a place full of love and hope. Now the following description was the memories of one woman who came to the Convent to seek for healing:

     ‘They had treated her well, not embarrassed her with sympathy, had just given her sunny kindness. Looking at her bruised face and swollen eye, they sliced cucumber for her lids after making her drink a glass of wine. No one insisted on hearing what drove her there, but she could tell they would listen if she wanted them to (Paradise P308).

     From the above words, it could be seen that the Convent offered the woman caring, love and a good environment where she could deal with her physical treatment. Therefore, the impressions on the Convent are totally different from the eyes of women who came to the Convent and the men in Ruby town. Besides, the men in Ruby town thought that the discipline they had built formed a proper womanhood. When they thought that women in the Convent did not follow their rules, they regarded women in the Convent as a danger:

     ‘They operate outside the history and outside of the dominate history. They live on a different time schedule, without a schedule, without clocks, eating and sleeping according to whim or nature rather than sanctioned customs, thus collapsing conventional temporal coherence (Paradise 75).

     In conclusion, Morrison continued her theme of her topic: exploring racialism and feminism. In her famous novel Paradise which demonstrated a rich and complicated theme, Morrison continued to explore feminism by comparing the life Ruby town where men dominated and the Convent where it was a matrilineal society. Men in Ruby town regarded women as persons affiliated with them. Hence, they thought women in the Convent as unconventional, and they thought women in the Convent exerted a bad influence on Children and women in Ruby town. Hence, they attributed all the fault on the Convent and intended to kill a woman in the Convent. The novel to some extent criticized the empery of patrilineal society that exerted great harm on women, which arouse the audience’s interest to explore the theme.