Paradise

by

Toni Morrison

Themes and Colors
Gender, Race, and Power Theme Icon
Community Theme Icon
Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma Theme Icon
Change vs. Tradition Theme Icon
God, Holiness, and Faith Theme Icon
Exclusion Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradise, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Community Theme Icon

Paradise centers around two communities at odds with each other: the conservative and patriarchal township of Ruby, and the free-thinking sisterhood of women at the Convent. The development of these communities at once reflects and influences the characters’ development. The community in the Convent is fractured for much of the story; Mavis and Gigi dislike each other upon their first meeting, and the other women are too preoccupied with their own troubles to ease that conflict. When Connie finally takes charge of the Convent, her leadership unites the women. The ritual of loud dreaming––which involves communally tracing their silhouettes in chalk and filling in the silhouettes with symbols of their pasts––requires the women to share their trauma with one another. By facing each woman’s problems as a unit, all the women collectively grow more stable.

Ruby’s community, on the other hand, is led by the controlling Morgan twins, Steward and Deek, along with other conservative men. These community leaders do not take into account the needs of the individual members of their community. Instead, they impose the rules that have governed the community for generations. Refusing to allow the community to grow as a whole in turn prevents the community members from developing as people. While the Convent women grow and evolve, the citizens of Ruby remain trapped in the same conflicts that have plagued them for years. The differences between these two communities emphasize that a community acting as a force of solidarity allows its members to flourish both as individuals and as a group, while a community that acts as a force of repression and conformity eventually undermines itself.

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Community ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Community appears in each chapter of Paradise. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Paradise PDF

Community Quotes in Paradise

Below you will find the important quotes in Paradise related to the theme of Community.
Ruby Quotes

As new fathers, who had fought the world, they could not (would not) be less than the Old Fathers who had outfoxed it; who had not let danger or natural evil keep them from cutting Haven out of mud and who knew enough to seal their triumph with that priority. An Oven. […] the Old Fathers did that first: put most of their strength into constructing the huge, flawlessly designed Oven that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done.

Related Symbols: The Oven, The Convent
Page Number: 6-7
Explanation and Analysis:

Unique and isolated, his was a town justifiably pleased with itself. It neither had nor needed a jail. No criminals had ever come from his town. And the one or two people who acted up, humiliated their families or threatened the town’s view of itself were taken good care of. Certainly there wasn’t a slack or sloven woman anywhere in town and the reasons, he thought, were clear. From the beginning its people were free and protected. A sleepless woman could always rise from her bed, wrap a shawl around her shoulders and sit on the steps in the moonlight. And if she felt like it she could walk out the yard and […] beyond the limits of town, because nothing at the edge thought she was prey.

Related Symbols: The Convent
Page Number: 8-9
Explanation and Analysis:
Mavis Quotes

Mavis frowned at the pecans. “No,” she said. “Think of something else I can do to help. Shelling that stuff would make me crazy.”

“No it wouldn’t. […] Look at your nails. Strong, curved like a bird’s––perfect pecan hands. Fingernails like that take the meat out whole every time. Beautiful hands, yet you say you can’t. Make you crazy. Makes me crazy to see good nails go to waste.”

Later, [Mavis watched] her suddenly beautiful hands moving at the task […].

Related Characters: Consolata (Connie) Sosa (speaker), Mavis Albright (speaker), Frank Albright
Related Symbols: The Convent
Page Number: 42
Explanation and Analysis:
Grace Quotes

However disgusted both were, K.D. knew they would not negotiate a solution that would endanger him or the future of Morgan money. His grandfather had named his twins Deacon and Steward for a reason. And their family had not built two towns, fought white law, Colored Creek, bandits and bad weather, to see ranches and houses and a bank with mortgages on a feed store, a drugstore and a furniture store to end up in Arnold Fleetwood’s pocket. Since the loose bones of his cousins had been buried two years ago, K.D., their hope and their despair, was the last male in [the] line […]. His behavior, as always, required scrutiny and serious correction.

Related Characters: Patricia (Pat) Best/Billie Delia’s Mother, Deacon (Deek) Morgan/Connie’s Lover, Steward Morgan, Reverend Richard Misner, Coffee (K.D.) Smith, Arnette Fleetwood, Arnold Fleetwood
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Seneca Quotes

“No ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. […] No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that. No ex-slave––”

Deacon Morgan cut him off. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about. Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex-lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their way.”

Having caught Reverend Misner’s eyes, the boy was firm. “He was born in slavery times, sir; he was a slave, wasn’t he?”

“Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”

Related Characters: Deacon (Deek) Morgan/Connie’s Lover (speaker), Reverend Richard Misner, Zechariah Morgan
Related Symbols: The Oven
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

[Steward] wondered if that generation––Misner’s and K.D.’s––would have to be sacrificed to get to the next one. The grand- and great-grandchildren who could be trained, honed as his own father and grandfather had down for Steward’s generation. No breaks there; no slack cut then. Expectations were high and met. Nobody took more responsibility for their behavior than those good men.

Related Characters: Steward Morgan, Reverend Richard Misner, Coffee (K.D.) Smith
Related Symbols: The Oven
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:

The women nodded when the men took the Oven apart, packed, moved, and reassembled it. But privately they resented the truck space given over to it––rather than a few more sacks of seed, rather than shoats or even a child’s crib. Resented also the hours spent putting it back together […]. Oh, how the men loved putting it back together; how proud it had made them, how devoted. A good thing, [Soane] thought, as far as it went, but it went too far. A utility became a shrine […].

Related Characters: Soane Morgan
Related Symbols: The Oven
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Divine Quotes

[…] Pulliam had just sprayed [poison] over everything[.] Over the heads of men finding it so hard to fight their instincts to control what they could and crunch what they could not; in the hearts of women tirelessly taming the predator; in the faces of children not yet recovered from the blow to their esteem upon learning that adults would not regard them as humans until they mated; of the bride and groom frozen there, desperate for this public bonding to dilute their private shame. Misner knew that Pulliam’s words were a widening of the war he had declared on Misner’s activities: tempting the youth to step outside the wall, outside the town limits, shepherding them, forcing them to transgress, to think of themselves as civil warriors.

Related Characters: Reverend Richard Misner, Coffee (K.D.) Smith, Arnette Fleetwood, Reverend Senior Pulliam
Related Symbols: The Convent
Page Number: 145
Explanation and Analysis:

Now, it seemed, the glacial wariness they once confined to strangers more and more was directed toward each other. Had he contributed to it? […] Even acknowledging his part in the town’s unraveling, Misner was dissatisfied. Why such stubbornness, such venom against asserting rights, claiming a wider role in the affairs of black people? They, of all people, […] understood the mechanisms of wresting power. Didn’t they?

Over and over and with the least provocation they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks […]. But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? […] As though past heroism was enough of a future to live by. As though, rather than children, they wanted duplicates.

Related Characters: Reverend Richard Misner
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Patricia Quotes

Who were these women who, like her mother, had only one name? Celeste, Olive, Sorrow, Ivlin, Pansy. Who were these women with generalized last names? Brown, Smith, Rivers, Stone, Jones. Women whose identity rested on the men they married––if marriage applied: a Morgan, a Flood, a Blackhorse, a Poole, a Fleetwood.

Related Characters: Patricia (Pat) Best/Billie Delia’s Mother, Delia Best
Page Number: 187-188
Explanation and Analysis:
Consolata Quotes

That is how the loud dreaming began. How the stories rose in that place. Half-tales and the never-dreamed escaped from their lips to soar high above guttering candles, shifting dusts from crates and bottles. And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer’s tale.

Related Characters: Consolata (Connie) Sosa, Mavis Albright, Grace (Gigi), Seneca, Pallas Truelove
Related Symbols: The Convent
Page Number: 264
Explanation and Analysis:
Save-Marie Quotes

Whether they be the first or the last, representing the oldest black families or the newest, the best of the tradition or the most pathetic, they had ended up betraying it all. They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him. They think they are protecting their wives and children, when in fact they are maiming them. And when the maimed children ask for help, they look elsewhere for the cause. […] How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it. Soon Ruby will be like any other country town: the young thinking of elsewhere; the old full of regret.

Related Characters: Reverend Richard Misner
Related Symbols: The Convent
Page Number: 306
Explanation and Analysis: