Paradisiacal homeplace and the cult of
(un)motherhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise:
著者（英） Tetsuko Ishimoto
journal or
publication title
Doshisha literature
number 49
page range 1‑28
year 2006‑03‑15
権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University
URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014846
Paradisiacal Homeplace and the Cult of (Un)Motherhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise:
TETSUKO ISHIMOTO
Inspired by Adrienne Rich, some scholars have studied the novels of Toni Morrison and motherhood. One of them, Andrea O'Reilly insists that "Motherhood is a central theme in Morrison's fiction" and that Morrison "develops a view of black motherhood that is, in terms of mater- nal identity and role, radically different than the motherhood practised and prescribed in the dominant culture" (1). According to O'Reilly, Paradise the last novel of the intended trilogy starting with Beloved cen- ters upon "the recovery of displaced selfhood for those individuals who were denied nurturance and cultural bearing in childhood" and shows that "Healed, they may reclaim their identities of mothers and/or daugh- ters that their maternal failures caused them to deny" (45).1 Certainly it is noteworthy that O'Reilly pays attention to the various functions and forms of black motherhood, such as outmothering, preservation and cul- tural bearing. Yet the questions arise: what is "maternal identity" and what does "a strong and authentic identity as a black person" signify?
These words make us believe that there must be the stable, bounded and undeniable identity peculiar to black mothers and/or daughters. By expressing in that way, we necessarily assume the static and racially determined identity and take the risk of essentialism. Rather it seems that the novels of Morrison deconstruct the way of thinking that makes us imagine a consistently self-defined identity. The novels of Morrison, especially Paradise, convey that women expand the possibility of mother- ing and unmothering by courageously violating the taboo of Ruby or the
Cl]
black and racist self-sufficient community which demands "black mother- hood" coupled with black manhood.
The object of this paper is to examine how the mothers and/or daugh- ters of Ruby and the Convent come to resist against the essentialist trap of conceiving a fixed maternal self and an authentic type of mothering, and dream of retelling their histories and rebuilding their home. The def- inition of home here will be based upon the argument of Iris Marion Young. Young agrees to contemporary feminist rejection of home as "a nostalgic longing for an impossible security and comfort, a longing brought at the expense of women and of those constructed as Others, strangers, not-home, in order to secure this fantasy of a unified identity,"
and yet she also makes a suggestion that "the idea of home and the prac- tices of homemaking support personal and collective identity in a more fluid and material sense" (164). Referring to the act of remembrance of
"the Mrican American mothers and grandmothers" by bell hooks, Young confirms that "Colonized people can project an alternative future partly on the basis of a place beyond dominance that is preserved in everyday life" (160). Young asserts that as long as home carries a core meaning as
"the material anchor for a sense of agency and a shifting and fluid identi- ty" and "sources of resistance" (159), our proper response is to extend its positive values to everyone. It is likely that in this novel the Convent in opposition to Ruby embodies such a utopia and even helps Ruby depart from its limited idea and practices of homemaking.
In this novel, the Convent notably stands as a comfortable home that is open to visitors and provides food, dwelling, and other needs. The Convent, located seventeen miles outside of Ruby, was originally an embezzler's mansion, then changed into a missionary schoolhouse for Native American girls, which once failed and left the two nuns selling food and providing temporary refuge. Shaped like a bullet and decorated
with the erotic ornaments, the Convent accepts women who need a tem- porary distance from her children, want to have an abortion and try to run away from any other troubles. Far from being degraded to the status of a breeder or mammy, the biologically unconnected and loosely knit inhabitants do not commit themselves to only the practice of "African American" motherhood. Healing and empowering the women for a future battle, the Convent serves as the temple of the "cult" (11) of (un)mother- hood, where the identity of mothers and/or daughters are justifiably allowed to be in process, not fixed, and then each of them might not nec- essarily be called as such. The important practices at the Convent are not only mothering but also· simply leaving visitors alone and letting them do what they want. The Convent is ultimately inclusive beyond the bound- aries of gender and race and it possibly satisfies the realistic necessities of suffering women. It is evident from the first sentence of the novel that one of the victimized inhabitants of the Convent is "the white girl" (3), and even the destructive men of Ruby can be welcome whenever they wish to visit it. Paradise rewardingly enables us to visualize the host of the Convent or the possibly black maternal subject as "fluid, partial, shifting, and in relations of reciprocal support with others" (Young 141).
It is a potential form of "postethnic" paradisiacal community where its voluntary members would enjoy the advantages of homeplace and sus- pend the will and obligation to prioritize only their ethno-racial ancestry at the expense of others.
I The "paradise" of Women
The aim of this section is to examine the Convent as a utopian place for women in which they can be freed of established motherhoodldaughter- hood. Justine Tally points out that there are two kinds of utopian desire in the novel: "one black and one feminist" (19). As for the former, it will
be seen how "in order for the utopian experiment to succeed, the men of Ruby must be in control of everything, including history" (Tally 19); the latter is explicit in the setting up of the Convent, which practices laissez- faire and functions as a lurking place for women. There Connie, once an orphan adopted by Sister Mary Magna, reigns as a reliable and not infal- lible mother figure. Though she feels lost after the death of Sister Mary Magna and turns alcoholic, Connie may be considered as a leader of the
"cult" of (un)motherhood, "this ideal parent, friend, companion" or "this play mother" (262). For this is the place where any woman is embraced when she is physically and mentally hurt especially by the repression that mothers ancllor daughters have to suffer. In Ruby as well as the out- side world, the sacred myth of motherhood is still pervasive and it reminds us of what O'Reilly calls "the motherhood practiced and pre- scribed in the dominant culture" or "the institution," which Adrienne Rich distinguishes from "the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and to children" (13). According to Rich, such an institution "has been a keystone of the most diverse social and political systems" and "for most of what we know as the 'mainstream' of recorded history, motherhood as institution has ghettoized and degraded female potentialities" (13). In Paradise, Ruby as well as the outside world is no exception, whereas the Convent is its opposite.
Through this novel, the case histories of women are not officially docu- mented but narrated mostly as a form of internal monologue. They may be unique in terms of race and class and yet somehow collective, for the visitors at the Convent tell "the same tale: disorder, deception and ...
drift" (221-222). Some mothers have to take a heavy responsibility, endure the violence of their husbands and get accused of their unintend- ed accidents. Other mothers choose to abandon their children, commit adultery and punish their children in accordance with their own internal-
ized prejudice. Otherwise the women tend to be apparent victims of com- pulsory heterosexuality, and their sexuality is exploited under the name of marriage, engagement and even without any excuse. In those situa- tions other women including their mothers do not always support them but merely push them back to the predicaments. With or without their mothers, the women will suffer maternal losses through their absence, disappearance, and betrayal. Out of the mess, the mothers and/or daugh- ters escape and arrive at the Convent to be comforted, nurtured and saved by Connie or "a new and revised Reverend Mother" (265) who has never given birth to any child. Only with the eyesight and "magic" (244) of Connie, the Convent proposes to the women another way of being, another form of kinship and another place to occupy, instead of guaran- teeing them rebirth and inheritance. This is the autonomous utopia for (un)mothers because they are allowed to stay as long as they want, forget the suffering of being motherless and then behave (un)mother-like with- out any unjust blame.
Let us observe four cases of the Convent women damaged by the moth- er-daughter relationship. Mavis Albright is the first example of those vic- timized women, though she herself killed her twins by accident. Mavis has other three children and Frank an alcoholic husband. It happens that the twins of Mavis suffocate while she leaves her car to buy her hus- band's food. When children die, their mother is the only one to be con- demned for her irresponsibility, unreliability and probable cruelty. With her drunken husband in the bathtub, Mavis has an interview with a superficially amicable female journalist and explains about her acciden- tal murder only to be distrusted: "Her eyes were soft, but the shine was like that of the neighbors" (22). The journalist impresses Mavis as "a really nice person" when she cross-examines Mavis politely yet mali- ciously: "Didn't you know your husband was coming home for supper,
Mrs. Albright?" (24) It is apparent that the voice of Mavis is inaudible because of the already fabricated narrative that ought to be authorita- tively documented as the sample of lesson for devout believers in institu- tional motherhood.
Under the naIve myth of motherhood and childhood, the trust between women is sacrificed. Treated like "a life-size Raggedy Ann" (26), Mavis attempts to escape from Frank and her children, who intimidate her by clenching her flesh and toying with an old shaving razor. Mavis takes Frank's 1964 Cadillac and refuges to the house of Birdie Goodroe her own mother. Even when Mavis complains to her that her children plan to kill her, Birdie Goodroe, who works at a preschool, does not cast any doubt on the harmlessness of "little children" (32). Overhearing the tele- phone conversation of Birdie Goodroe with Frank, Mavis has to attempt another escape to California not to be caught. Giving a ride to young hitchhikers who share the world "like her own pre-California existence"
(33), Mavis gets nearly captured by Frank and stuck up in route 18 with Cadiallc running out of gas. Lost in the escapade, Mavis suffers self- abasement intensely:
Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack .... Too rattle-minded to open a car's window so babies could breathe. She did not know now why she had run from the gold links coming toward her. Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.
(37)
The mercilessness of others makes her lose self-respect and throws her into the depths of despair.
The door to utopia will be open to Mavis, when she decides not to starve and drops by the Convent for gasoline. At the Convent, the first
step to rehabilitate herself is "Make yourself useful" (41) by shelling the pecans with "Strong, curved like a bird's-perfect pecan hands" (42). The second one is to see Sister Mary Magna alias Mother, who is referred to as "my mother" and ''Your mother too" by Connie (48). Asked about her children by Connie, Mavis cannot speak of her dead twins but finds the Convent "a swept world" "Unjudgmental," "Tidy," "Ample," "Forever" (48) with the kitchen crowded with illusory "children-laughing? singing?"
(41) Mter enduring the betrayal and brutality of her husband, her chil- dren and her own mother, Connie with the eyes like "Two milky moons"
(48) appears, to Mavis, as the first magnetic rescuer who receives her any time, comforts her and allows her to return repeatedly.
Seneca is another victim of betrayal of her mother(s). Seneca was aban- doned by Jean her sister, who is truly her biological mother, at the age of five. After her disappearance, Seneca spent two days knocking on every door in her apartment building looking for her but in vain. Seneca after- wards left with the caseworker for the foster homes, feeling insecure:
"Well cared for, loved, perhaps, by the mothers in both of the foster homes, she knew it was not her self that the mothers had approved of but the fact that she took reprimand quietly, ate what given, shared what she had and never ever cried" (135). The victimization of Seneca or a motherless daughter ends up with her repetitive acts of wrist-cutting.
When nobody hurts her, Seneca mutilates herself and relieves her men- tal pain. In the case of Seneca, exposure to conditional love and low self- esteem give her an impulse to self-sacrifice and excessive devotion to oth- ers,
The relationship of Seneca with others as well as herself is unbalanced between pain and too much empathy, Seneca has a relationship with Eddie, a seemingly unrepentant man who is imprisoned for running over a child with his car, Risking her new job at a school cafeteria and visiting
him with The Living Bible, the extravagant running shoes and ham sandwiches, she is treated badly by him. Later Seneca visits Mrs. Turtle the mother of Eddie to ask for money for his sake only to be declined for the reason that "I've known him all his life" (133). Yet, instead of abhor- ring her for indifference or coldness, Seneca happens to hear "A flat-out helpless mothercry" (134) and sympathizes with Mrs. Turtle, who secret- ly suffers for her child: "Her hands had been in her hair; her mouth wide open in a drenched face" (134). Losing herself, Seneca yields to the invita- tion of Norma Keene Fox a complete stranger and works as a sexual laborer not necessarily for money but as an unconscious attempt at self- mutilation. Obviously Seneca, who "had not shed one [tear] even when she found Jean's letter next to the Lorna Doones" (135), shuttles between the extremity of compassion and that of restraint without being able to control her emotion. It hurts Seneca not to cry so that the sight of a cry- ing woman with no coat and nothing on her head becomes "an occasional heart-breaking dream" (128). Seneca travels by hitchhiking only to end up at the Convent whose inhabitants are somehow "waiting for you"
(138). The choice to visit the Convent is for Seneca "the first pointedly uninstructed thing she had ever done" (138) and also the initial stage of her recovery. Still, even at the Convent, employing smiles and agreeable- ness, Seneca essays to mediate between Mavis and Gigi as "Always the peacemaker" (131) and fitfully inclines to the ease of cutting herself. It will take time for Seneca to give voice to her agony and survive her over- exposure to pain.
Third, let us look at Grace, nicknamed Gigi, with her mother unlocat- able and her father imprisoned. Motherless, Gigi does not cry, like Seneca, nor have a forced smile, which makes her vulnerable. Gigi is dis- appointed in herself for her failure to maintain steadfast commitment to the cause of the Civil Rights Movement. Gigi used to be serious about her
and she still remembers, as a traumatic scene, the well-dressed little black boy bleeding on the streets of Oakland, California. Gigi has "not approved of herself in a long, long time" though her eyes are "desert-skull dry"; "No, you stupid, stupid bitch. Because you weren't tough enough ....
You thought we were hot lava and when they broke us down into sand, you ran" (257). After her distressful experience, Gigi visits Ruby just for her temporary trip with a full intention to return to Alcorn, Mississippi.
Gigi fails to meet Mikey her boyfriend and Civil Rights protester in his hometown with a rock formation just like a couple making love "bold as Gomorrah" (63). Instead Gigi, fascinated by the story of two trees that grow together and could give "ecstasy" (66) in Ruby, meets Connie at the Convent and decides to stay there to watch her sleep after the death of Mother. There Gigi suddenly feels "ravenous" "like a legitimate mourner"
(69), gobbles the food prepared for the funeral such as "baked beans and chocolate cake" (70), and gets disgusted at the picture of the engraved woman "with the I-give-up face" or Saint Catherine of Siena (74). It is certain that Gigi requires an opportunity of self-nurturance more desper- ately than that of self-abandonment.
Far from giving herself up, Gigi appears as the enemy of matrimony and motherhood because of her nymphomaniac and nonchalant behavior.
During the stay at the Convent, Gigi enjoys available relationship with KD. a promising inheritor of Ruby. Satisfied with her sexuality, Gigi acts flirtatious by being naked and wearing a miniskirt and a halter.
Without hesitation Gigi carries on an affair with KD., taking advantage of his obsessive passion and resulting devotion: "Like sugar turning from unreasonable delight to the body's mortal enemy, his craving for her had poisoned him, rendered him diabetic, stupid, helpless" (147). Yet KD.
cannot put up with Gigi's capriciousness or his own "aching, humiliating, self-loathing love that drifted from pining to stealth" (147). KD. finally
10
hits Gigi, which leads to the end of their relationship and his reluctant marriage with Arnette a woman whom he once made pregnant and aban- doned. After all, the seriousness of Gigi and her secret self-loathing are not understood by even her admirer. Only Connie asks Gigi to oversee the temporarily unpopulated Convent without knowing her well, and even when the relation with K.D. is over, she never leaves, wishing to
"Get back in the fray. Somehow. Somewhere" (256-257). The trust of Connie changes Gigi into a wayward and yet reliable supporter of the Convent.
Fourth, Pallas, haunted by "a dream of black water" (173), is another example of daughters suffering both motherlessness and her betrayal.
Pallas was raised by her father, a wealthy lawyer, and enjoyed her privi- leged childhood. At sixteen Pallas visited her mother in New Mexico, with her boyfriend, Carlos, her school's janitor and sculptor on Christmas. After several months Pallas witnessed Divine her mother and Carlos making love. That is not a matter of power relation, as in the situ- ation in which the patriarch sexes with his daughter by force, but must be a form of perversion. It is shockingly against the myth of motherhood that a mother takes her daughter's boyfriend. Probably it would be easier to accept another official version of story, conceived by her father, that Pallas was kidnapped by Carlos, who came to be a congenial friend to her mother, even though "the 'victim' of the 'abduction' had gone willingly"
(254). Or it could be possibly imagined that Divine is a monstrous "irre- sponsible, amoral" "slut" (254) who puts a spell on men and seduces them. Nevertheless, despite the immoral behavior, it seems that Divine's motherlove does not contradict her passion for her (their) young lover. It is to be seen that Divine, an artist, continues to draw pictures of Pallas with "the energy she could summon at will to freshen or begin the figure anew" (311). As well as Pall as, Divine must also suffer the agony of being
misunderstood and being reproached for her unmotherly conduct. As expected, Pal1as refuses to forgive Divine and runs away from such a nightmarish situation, even if she takes the risk of escaping the capture of men who might have raped her by hiding in a lake at night.
The only shelter to which Pa1las, humiliated beyond compare, is given access is the Convent or "a church kind of place," where the women with troubles are welcome (255). Pallas is invited by Billie Delia an employee at a clinic to the Convent as follows:
A little nuts, maybe, but loose, relaxed, kind of. Don't be surprised if they don't have on any clothes. I was, at first, but then it was, I don't know, nothing. My mother would have knocked me into next week if I walked around like that. Anyway you can conect yourself there, think things through, with nothing or nobody bothering you all the time. They'll take care of you or leave you alone-whichever way you want it. (175-176)
The Convent is the place which liberates women from the losses that they suffer as mothers and/or daughters. Staying there, Pallas recognizes the fact that she is pregnant, which makes matters complicated. How can Pallas bear the burden of not only surviving but also becoming a mother after her mother's unintended yet ruthless betrayal? It is possible only because the Convent or "the most peaceful place on earth" (182) works as a more effective cure to mother-phobia than a clinic and reminds Pallas of her own divinity. Later, with the Convent women, Palls will give vent to a mixture of love and hatred toward Divine by drawing, around her body's silhouette, her coming baby and "a woman's face with long eye- lashes and a crooked fluffy mouth" with "two long fangs" (265). Pallas, like all other Convent members, suffered the undesirable condition of both being motherless and having a cruel mother. Yet it is predictable
12
that she can enjoy a temporary rest from the myth of established mother- hood and bring to fruition the expansive potentiality of being a mother here at the Convent.
Finally let us observe Connie, who suffered motherlessness and now leads as a quasi-mother figure to free the women of the bondage. Mter the death of Mary Magna, Connie loses herself but resumes therapy owing to a mystical visit from a man with a cowboy hat, mirror type sun- glasses and "Fresh, tea-colored hair" whose eyes are "as round and green as new apples" (252). Connie, alias Consolata Sosa, cleans the place, pre- pares a feast, and gives a sermon: "If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for" (262). Referring to Mary Magna's rescue of her as a mother- less child and a short-term affair with Deacon Morgan, Connie instructs women never to let their souls separate from their bodies. With a strong conviction, Connie advocates the thorough equivalence of woman and man, flesh and spirit, and mother and daughter: "Never break them in two. Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary's mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve" (263). In correspondence, the women start "the loud dreaming" (264), help each other work toward a coherent narrative and paint the body outlines with physical details as well as reminders of their stories. In that way the women enter their comradeship with other mem- bers of the Convent and make their commitment to the construction of the paradise based on the materiality of their bodies and the language of their stories, irrelevant to the authorized one of inheritance or biological connections. "A sense of surfeit" (265) surrounding the Convent makes it evident that "unlike some people in Ruby, the Convent women were no longer haunted" (266).
Thus the Convent works as a homeplace for women who form a new family different from their involuntary and inherited one. At the end of
13 the novel, Consolata reclines on a beach, her head in Piedade's lap, which must be a vision of one possible paradise. According to Justine Tally,
"Piedade ... figures here as mother to all races, and calls to the ideological narrative which reinforces the idea of Mother Mrica and the black race as progenitors of mankind" (92).2 This view may have some validity but it seems that the latter part needs reconsideration. Does the figure of Piedade truly "reinforce the idea of Mother Mrica and the black race as progenitors of mankind"? Rather is it not that, in this novel, the non-bio- logical and non-racial "mother" of the "cult" of (un)motherhood is present- ed, and therefore the utopia (nowhere) is not decidedly Mother Africa?
The idea of "black race as progenitors of mankind" is also made dubious, because the incidental relation, not the origin or blood relation, is respected. In order to build a paradise, the Convent women tackle with the challenge of undoing the category of mothers and/or daughters and redefining their (un)motherhood. Remarkably, Adria Schwartz employs Judith Butler's attempt at a deconstruction of the category of women and suggests that "the category of mother is a constructed subject based on a questionable category of gender" (250).3 Schwartz contends that as Butler calls into question the very distinction between a supposedly biologically given sex and a cultur:ally constructed gender, "one could envisage a new parenting subject that would be less unitary and more conditional, free of constrictions of gender altogether" (251). Here we are allowed to think of the place of dream where the black woman stands as "a new parenting subject" or a quasi-mother figure not to breed but to make non-descen- dants of the different race connect in an inspiring way.
II The "paradise" of Men
If the world of women, which promises happiness and rest, is to be realized, it is destined to be hunted by the male inhabitants of Ruby. It is
because the Convent or the "paradise" of women practically appears as a caricature of what the authenticity, authority and legitimacy of Ruby demand of their women. With rancor, Steward Morgan a prominent inheritor of Ruby recognizes the women in the Convent as "a flaunting parody of the nineteen Negro ladies of his and his brother's youthful memory and perfect understanding" whom they happened to watch with pleasure during the journey to Okalahoma and "the degradation of that moment they'd shard of sunlit skin and verbena" (279).4 Likewise, with pride, Deacon his twin attributes his personal shame to his ex-lover or Connie, who "had made [the very name of woman] into a joke and a trav- esty of what a woman should be" (280). Ruby cannot afford to tolerate any kind of performance by "Bodacious black Eves unredeemed by Mary"
(18) that may possibly "enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire" (Butler 139). Because of an unfortunate past, the inhabitants of Ruby aim to be firm believers in "Disallowing" and its practitioners.
Haven, originally founded in 1889 in Oklahoma Territory by freedmen, was severely weakened by economic hardship, and, after World War II, the grandsons of its founders followed advertisements for western land to move to a new location. During the journey, they were repeatedly shunned by not only whites or Native Americans but blacks presumably owing to their dark complexions. Their rejections were to be remembered as "Disallowing" among the builders of New Haven, who reversed the racism by disvaluing lighter skin and excluding the elements of aberra- tion. After a year of work and negotiation, the settlers obtained the land from the State Indians, strengthened belief in God's guidance and renamed it Ruby in honor of the Morgan twins' dead sister. That is, they struggled to create their own kingdom after the westward expedition and accomplish their version of manifest destiny. In this section, we will
15 examine how the new Haven or an allegedly everlasting town comes to be like a dystopia, intimidating all outsiders and injuring insiders. Against the historical background of civil rights movement and its aftereffects, the internal schisms develop in Ruby because they have only two options:
"Disallowing" or amnesia.5 It will be seen that the settlers of Ruby choose to "disallow" the Convent women by massacring them, and paradoxically destroy their own "paradise."
To inhabit Ruby is to have a bounded identity and identify oneself with a member of a self-affirmative, exclusive community defined in terms of gender, class, and race. It seems relevant, in considering the dystopian effect of Ruby, to take into account the recapitulated elaboration of Young on the maleness of Heidegger's allegedly universal ontology Luce Irigaray makes explicit:
Man can build and dwell in the world in patriarchal culture, she sug- gests, only on the basis of the materiality and nurturance of women.
In the idea of "home," man projects onto woman the nostalgic longing for the lost wholeness ofthe original mother. To fix and keep hold of his identity man makes a house, puts things in it, and confines there his woman who reflects his identity to him. The price she pays for supporting his subjectivity, however, is dereliction, having no self of her own. (135)6
After suffering the discrimination, the men of Ruby build the world of their own patriarchal culture and dwell in it "only on the basis of the materiality and nurturance of women." In Ruby, where the internalized racism is reinforced by their elitism peculiar to the would-be elected, the women have to support "his subjectivity" and pay the price of "derelic- tion" or "having no self of her own." It is noticeable, behind the official history of honor and its nostalgic discourse, that there are the cases of
miserable Ruby women, such as Dovey and Soane the wives of Steward and Deacon Morgan or the twin inheritors of the founding fathers, and Arnette and Sweetie the Fleetwood sisters, and Pat Best the town school- teacher and Billy Delia her daughter.
First, let us note the damages that Dovey and Soane the wives of the Morgan twins undergo. The sisterhood between the sisters-in-law turns out fragile, for it depends upon the eventually irrevocably broken relation between their husbands. There will come "an obvious coolness" between Dovey and Soane since the latter repeats to anyone that Connie was shot by Steward, not Deacon, whose hand had moved to his "in a cautioning, preventing gesture" (300). Dovey perceives Soane's intention to "locate a sliver of soap to clean away any little taint she can" (292) so that they cannot share "small hopeful laughs" (288), nor pray together for the safe- ty of the Convent women. Yet it is clear to Dovey herself that Steward makes personal and spiritual "losses" (82), while achieving his financial gains. Just like Steward does not relish the taste of home cooking after the war, he cannot enjoy his possessions. Not only that, Steward and Dovey have to endure infertility despite his desire to transmit their her- itage. Burdened with Steward's losses, Dovey finds the only joy in receiv- ing visits from her mysterious "Friend" "at least twenty years younger than she" (92) at the house on St. Matthews Street. He attentively listens to Dovey and makes her feel free to discuss anything. Such a friendship probably allows Dovey to resist against Steward's view of the women in the Convent as "slime" and "strange" "Whores" (288), without waiting for the accusation of Soane.
Likewise it is obvious that the communication between Soane and Deacon does not work well. Before she witnesses to the murder of Connie by Steward, Soane knows that the raid would not happen "if Deek and Steward had not authorized and manipulated them" (288) and repents
"not having talked, just talked, to Deek" (287), for "she had forgiven Deek also" as well as COUllie the reviver of her son (288). Soane keeps many secrets intact from Deacon. For one thing, Soane has not told Deacon of her pregnancy and the following natural miscarriage though she discov- ered his adultery with Connie and attempted to abort her child with her assistance. For another thing, Soane does not confide her misgivings to Deacon about her son, who, once saved, was destined to die in Vietnam again. In spite of her reservation, Soane secretly reveals her irritation with the "Proud" (100) attitude of Deacon shown in his hunting and notices that "he wasn't worried enough by their friends' money problems"
(107). Just as Dovey has a mysterious visitor, Soane envisions a woman carrying an empty basket with two hands, possibly an embodiment of "an emptiness that would weight her down, an absence too heavy to carry"
(102). Mter all Soane also suffers the painful barrenness of her marriage uncompensated by the financial profits: " ... the fertility shriveled, even while the bounty multiplied. The more money, the fewer children; the fewer children, the more money to give the fewer children" (193).
Infertility and loneliness are the living conditions of the Ruby women, which is conspicuous in the case of the Fleetwood sisters-in-law.
Infertility here means that the Fleetwood babies are born with defects against the expectation of the family and they attribute it to Lone the midwife "as if she had made the babies" (271). Such an imputation not only stains the reputation of Lone but also damages the mental health of Sweetie herself. While blaming others, Sweetie devoutly practices the obligation of motherhood and continues the endless and solitary repeti- tion of her routine by keeping vigilant watch over her sick children. Mter six years' hardship Sweetie goes through temporary delirium with the fear that she will never be able to get up and care for her children again.
Sweetie somehow directs toward the Convent and yet thinks of the
women as not her defendants but "hawks" or "demons" (130) under the influence of the prejudice of the Ruby men. At the Convent Sweetie refus- es to be given any food or drink with her lips shut, her teeth clenched, and simply gets a short sleep. Later Sweetie has the women drive her out of the place only to explain to her husband that "They made me, snatched me" (130). At the end of the novel, when Save-Marie, the youngest of her children, dies, Sweetie insists that she would not be laid to rest on Steward Morgan's land like her brother, Luther, and casts doubt on
"Morgan righteousness" (296) to squeeze some favors from their pockets.
The behavior of Sweetie, probably caused by "grief plus blame," is judged as "more calculated" stubbornness by Pat Best (296). In Ruby, mothers are forced to pay the price by sacrificing herself pathetically and yet feel obliged to demand its return for the benefit of the man-made home.
The fetters of matrimony and motherhood torment Arnette the younger one of the Fleetwood sisters in the same way. On the wedding day Arnette feels "a tiny rent opened in exactly the place where her heart's hole had been" and comes to know "what was and would always be miss- ing" in the middle of the wedding that is supposed to "permanently heal it" (149). Arnette believes she absolutely loves K. D. her bridegroom because "he was all she knew about her self' and " ... no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself Not her mother; not her sis- ter-in-law" (148). The loneliness of Arnette makes her blind to the fact that K. D., dumped by Gigi, woos her without having any affection for her and readily joins "the married and propertied men of Ruby" (147).
Yet Arnette finally senses her emptiness caused by the loss of her unwanted child several years earlier and acts like a "psycho who's got nothing better to do on her wedding night but hunt down a dead baby"
(180) calling the Convent women names. At the Convent Arnette former- ly hurt herself relentlessly and succeeded in having an unsafe baby with
her "revulsion so severe it cut mind from body and saw its flesh-produc- ing flesh as foreign, rebellious, unnatural, diseased" (249). The separa- tion of body and soul was necessary for Arnette to overpass the humilia- tion of a daughter whose mind should be set by her patriarch concerning her marriage and pregnancy. Just like Sweetie, Arnette selfishly alleges that she is victimized by the Convent women but actually they have des- perate need for a rest from the pressure of the Ruby society. Mter their frenzy, Sweetie and Arnette soon get back to normal and do not ponder on what makes them commit a folly. In the end Arnette is pregnant again and expecting a new house built for K. D. and her. Still, the trou- bles of Sweetie and Arnette must not be so different from those of the Convent women, who have "foolish babygirl wishes" and "talk oflove as if they knew anything at all about it" (222).
If the matrimony and motherhood of Ruby abuse women, it follows that the mother-daughter relationship can be cruelly destructive to each other. Burdened with the town's racial prejudices, Patricia Best does not approve of her daughter. Working on the written history of Ruby, Patricia comes to realize that she internalizes the bias toward dark skin and the town's condemnation of her daughter as "a liability" (203). We have already seen that Ruby is founded on the experiences of discrimina- tion and exclusion. The minds et of elimination passes down to the descendants of Ruby as a reaction to "a new separation: light-skinned against black" or a rage against a view of "The sign of racial purity" as "a stain" (194). For Blue-black people, who have the feature of 8-R or "a deep deep level in the coal mines" (193), ought to be haughty and respectable. The New Fathers of Ruby consolidated the 8-rock blood in moving farther west so that the conundrum "More than a rule" was forged for the communal Oven as "a threat to those who had disallowed them"; "Beware the Furrow of His Brow" (195). The younger generation,
represented by Royal Beauchamp, who wish to connect their identity to Africa and "get rid of the slave mentality" (210), keep on changing the words written on the Oven, but Deacon as well as Steward spurns: "That Oven already has a history. It doesn't need you to fix it" (86).
Notwithstanding the history of racial resentment, Roger Best, the pur- portedly immortal town's mortician and the father of Patricia, was the first to violate the blood rule or "The one nobody admitted existed" (195), and his wife "of sunlight skin" and "of racial tampering" (197) died in childbirth without recourse to the inhabitants who "just despised your pale skin so much they thought of reasons why they could not go [to ask for help]" (198). Experiencing the death of her mother and her sister, Patricia or "the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name" (203) is ready to discriminate Billie Delia with the intense inverted hatred. The deep-seated reverse discrimination, which constitutes the dysfunctional "paradise" of Ruby, brings a more miserable plight, to mothers and/or daughters, than the oblivion of "Disallowing"
does.
The utmost victims of patriarchal policy peculiar to Ruby are probably women like Billie Delia, who has light skin and is reputed as a whore.
Patricia does not believe the innocence of Billie Delia who ruined her name by removing her underwear to ride the horse, at the age of three, without understanding its sexual implication. Later, seeing Billie Delia involved with the Poole brothers behind the Oven, Pat had a conviction that she was having a sexual affair with them. Pat, "the gentlest of souls"
(203) went far to pick up the pressing iron to slum against the head of Billie Delia, "the young girl that lived in the minds of the 8-rocks, not the girl her daughter was" (204). From an insider's viewpoint, Pat sacrificed Billie Delia, who appeared "Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like" (203) for not being
21 an 8-rock. For Billie Delia, Ruby looks like "A town that had tried to ruin her grandfather, succeeded in swallowing her mother and almost broken her own self' (308). It is undoubtedly "A backward noplace ruled by men whose power to control was out of control", where the racially authentic men and their supporters are allowed to strengthen racism and sexism at the expense of the lives of "lively, free, unarmed females" (308). Billie Delia remembers that after ill treatment she only recovers seeking refuge at the Convent, where women ''had just given her sunny kindness" and aN 0 one insisted on hearing what drove her there, but she could tell they would listen if she wanted them to" (308). The Convent stands as an ideal place, where women are providentially released from the shackles of internalized and almost institutional discrimination. Born in Ruby, Billie Delia values the sincerity and benevolence of the Convent women most.
With such a striking attraction of the Convent, it seems inevitable for the men of Ruby to regard it as their inveterate enemy and assail it in order to eliminate the danger of being subverted. Although the five women put up a fight with their household cutlery and attempt to escape, they are shot by the Morgan twins and their companions. According to Jill Matus, Morrison explores "the way women are pursued as the objects of projected male rage and insecurity" in Paradise as well as Jazz, and yet she allows the perpetrators "a second chance" (164). For the slaugh- tered women's bodies disappear and leave an opening in the air or a pas- sageway to somewhere else, which is a mystery to Reverend Richard Misner and Anna Flood a spiritually and politically reliable couple. After bickering over the mysterious event and the illegible command over the Oven, some of Ruby's citizens barely understand that God gave them another chance that they could change. Not puzzled, only Billie Delia waits for the return of the Convent women and hopes for a miracle, as
Brood and Apollo, both of whom she loves, consent to reconcile and wait for her decision. Such a phenomenon may be defined as a crystallization of the dream tha:t, even after losing the battle, the women of the Convent survive the slaughter by men and prepare a place where anybody is accepted. It may be said that the anticipated arrival of the Convent women will materialize a vision that David Hollinger calls "postethnic."
According to Hollinger, "Postethnicity prefers voluntary to prescribed affiliations, appreciates multiple identities, pushes for communities of wide scope, recognizes the constructed character of ethno-racial groups, and accepts the formation of new groups as a part of the normal life of a democratic society" (116).7 Given such a perspective, mothers and/or daughters will make a homeplace which serves anything but the male
"nostalgic longing for the lost wholeness of the original mother" and per- mits them to have some selves of their own. There the Convent women might reach the stature that the absolutism of Ruby's 8-rock cannot attain and practice a new form of society against the institutional combi- nation of patriarchy and motherhood.
In concordance with the "postethnic" stance, the temporary family reunion of the Convent women, described in the epilogue, shows that their genetic connections have no particular significance. According to O'Reilly, the unmothered children, in Paradise, "through othermother- ing, are healed when they embark on physic journey of rememory that reconnects them with their lost mother and enables them to reclaim an identity as a loved child" (170). However the reunion simply seems a transitory homecoming, for the women intend to organize a new unfixed family and build an innovative homeplace in some unknown space. Mavis happens to encounter Sal once a spiteful child at a diner, have a small talk and goes far to make fun of Frank's another marriage, with her, before she leaves. Gigi, dressed in fatigues, meets her father in prison
and just promises to write letters to him. Seneca also comes across her sister-mother and yet denies the possibility that she recognizes her.
Pall as with her infant son walks by near the house of her mother carry- ing a sword and she vanishes without visiting her. Pallas might have given birth to her child and it is expected that she will not experience the suffering like that of Mavis or Sweetie but rather find herself as one of multiple and various (un)mothers who could nurture their child alter- nately. The dream place which the women hurry to reach and prepare to battle for, must be distant from Ruby, where only a few citizens, especial- ly Deacon, strive to reform. It seems unfeasible that the fighters of Ruby arrive at such a utopian destination and rebuild their new Haven ahead of the vanquished women.
In Ruby, only Deacon Morgan can change, whereas Steward continues to be "insolent and unapologetic" (299) after he pulls a trigger on Consolata. Steward continues to make his family rich easing KD. into the bank, while Deacon forms a friendship with somebody other than Steward: "as though he had looked in his brother's face and did not like himself anymore" (300). Not only that, one morning after the raid Deacon confronts his own shame and walks barefoot to speak to Reverend Misner. Deacon ties to explain "his long remorse ... at having become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kin of man who set himself up to judge, rout, and even destroy the needy, the defenseless, the different" (302).
Unable to understand the topic of Deacon, Misner simply acknowledges that "the man's life was uninhabitable" (302). Deacon goes on to tell a story of his twin grandfathers, whose name were Coffee and Tea. Being harassed by whitemen and forced at gunpoint to dance, Coffee took a bul- let in the foot and walked many miles barefoot, defining his difference from Tea, who performed. Tea was not asked to join on their journey to Oklahoma, although Coffee alias Zechariah Morgan became one of the
24
Old Fathers of Haven. Now that Deacon recognizes his own shame in Steward, he comes to understand the significance of Coffee's choice to desert his brother: "Not because he was shamed of his twin, but because the shame was in himself' (303). Deacon has to share their own sins and losses with Steward as long as life is "inhabitable" in Ruby. Ruby more than ever needs tolerance and forgiveness for the different, not the infal- lible manhood of Coffee and his thorough exclusion. Confronting the real- ity of Ruby, Deacon tries to find his way alone. The efforts required of Deacon will be the same with what the Convent women have to bear in order to build a new homeplace. Staying in Ruby, Deacon envisions the habitable "paradise" and begins to make an effort to reconstruct it.
In the last scene of the novel, it can be seen that, far away from Ruby, the Convent people enjoy the blissful rest "before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise" (318). After loosing the battle, the women could still cherish the utopian hope of creating their own home somewhere. By hearing the song of Piedade, they will be given a vision of postethnic, inclusive and paradise-like world, where the motherhood and manhood of inhabitants are repeatedly subverted, recre- ated and negotiated.
There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade's song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had:
of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home-the ease of coming back to love begun. (318) Such an imagination may sound naIve but it does not overlook the dilem- mas that a "postethnic" or post-Ruby-like society, built by women, might assume.s It is presumably consonant with the deliberation of Seyla Benhabib on the alliance of postmodernist thinkers and contemporary
feminism. Benhabib calls attention to the merit of the utopian hope and criticizes how postmodernism undermines "the feminist commitment to women's agency and sense of selfhood, to the reappropriation of women's own history ... and to the exercise of radical social criticism which uncov- ers gender 'in all its endless variety and monotonous similarity'" (229).
Benhabib proposes as follows:
As a vision of feminist politics are we able to articulate a better model for the future than a radically democratic polity which also furthers the values of ecology, non-militarism, and solidarity of peo- ples? Postmodernism can teach us the theoretical and political traps of why utopias and foundational thinking can go wrong, but it should not lead to a retreat from utopia altogether. For we, as women, have much to lose by giving up the utopian hope in the wholly other. (230) Morrison's "paradise" conceivably bridges the gap between the proclama- tion of the "Death of the Subject" and the question that "the I although constituted by discourse is not determined by it," and encourages us never to abandon "the utopian hope in the wholly other.,,9 Even if it is to be destroyed by the men of Ruby, the Convent will never be lost as a utopia. Listening to the singing voice of Piedade, the readers will be given the comfort of healing and empowering toward another actual interpretation of history, memory and paradise and its realization.
Notes
1 O'Reilly presents a contrast between Morrison's first five novels and the later works including Paradise, by maintaining that motherwork, in the for- mer, is represented as "an act of prevention," while her concern is "how to heal these wounds once inflicted" with the latter (153).
2 Justine Tally studies the ways and means of storytelling in Paradise and its relation with all of Morrison's other novels: " ... whereas Beloved focuses on the
26
role of memory, and Jazz is centered around the development of story, Paradise is devoted to the cultural production of History/history and its unsta- ble relationship to both memory and story" (14). Moreover, Tally contends that "Whereas the first novel in the trilogy dealt with maternal love so fero- cious that it destroys the object of its affection, the last novel closes in this text with the reconciliation of mother and daughter ... " (92). It seems impor- tant to note what kind of "reconciliation" between mother and daughter is depicted in this novel.
3 The argument of Adria Schwartz is based on the following radical question of Judith Butler: "If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called 'sex' is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all" (7).
4 The word "parody" reminds us of the significance of drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylization of butch/femme identities emphasized by Butler:
"In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself-as well as its contingency" (137).
5 As to the historical and literary context of the 1960s and 1970s, see Gates 2011-2020. There were two major movements in the early 1970s that the civil rights movement and the antiwar effort helped to generate: multiculturalism and feminism. The novel links the reconstruction era to that period and makes us aware of the difficulties of outliving slavery and situating oneself.
6 The recapitulation of Young is about "Love of Same, Love of Other" a chap- ter of An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Offering the feminist readings of philo- sophical texts, Luce Irigaray points out that the love of self or same among women is hard to establish and asserts as follows: "A world for women.
Something that at the same time has never existed and which is already pre- sent, although repressed, latent, potential" (109).
7 David Hollinger places multiculturalism in historical context, gives us a dis- cussion of its pros and cons and provides another unbound perspective: "A postethnic perspective challenges the right of one's grandfather or grandmoth- er to determine primary identity. Individuals should be allowed to affiliate or disaffiliate with their own communities of descent to an extent that they
choose, while affiliating with whatever nondescent communities are available and appealing to them" (116).
8 Though Morrison's original working title for the manuscript was War, she changed it into Paradise "a good conceptual title": " ... then I realized that since the book was an interrogation about the very idea of Paradise, the title made sense. It has a sort of question mark behind it" (Marcus and Morrison). The
"paradise" of this novel is always exposed to any questions.
9 As Seyla Benhabib explains, the undermining of feminism by postmod- ernism occurs because in its strong version postmodernism is committed to three theses: "the death of man," "the death of history," and "the death of metaphysics." As to the first "death of man," Benhabib refers to Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and puts into ques- tion the view that gendered identity is constituted by "deeds without the doer," or by performances without a subject. It is clear to Benhabib that "the issues generated by the complex interaction between feminism and postmod- ernism around concepts of the self and subjectivity cannot be captured by bombastic proclamations of the 'Death of the Subject'" (218). The central ques- tion is, for Benhabib, "how we understand the phrase: 'the I although consti- tuted by discourse is not determined by it'" (218).
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