First of all, I have to say that I really like the way Toni Morrison writes but it is very difficult to enjoy the book because you have to concentrate on so many characters and their relationships. My second objection is about the vocabulary: It is not advisable to look up every word you do not understand in a longer book because the fun fades after a while. But the disadvantage for me was that I caught myself misunderstanding some important coherences. The last point that startled me was that it was impossible for me to say which character I like best. Finally I'd say Paradise is a book really worth reading, but you have to read it several times to comprehend what it is all about. What I sometimes missed was orientation in the narrative. Perhaps our website will help future readers!

Fun but Tough

   I like the book Paradise because it is full of riddles. There are many questions like "Who is the white girl?" and you never know for sure if you have the answer right after all, or if it is possible at all to get it correct. All the time shifts and family relations, however, do not only make it fun, but also hard. So it was a great help for me to discuss it in a seminar with guidance from a lecturer and new ideas added by other students.

Color or Character?

   I think this book is what you would call a challenge. It is definitely a book you could read over and over again, as new ideas and discoveries emerge every time. I particularly like Toni Morrison's idea on layering; thus the book imitates everyday life and thoughts. As much as one does not want to linger on the race issue, it is nonetheless something that pops into the reader's head throughout reading the novel. In the very first sentence Morrison tells us that they "shoot the white girl first," thus sending you on a mystery tour: Who is the white one? But nonetheless the novel is much more than merely a riddle. The reader also finds him/herself hungry for knowledge about each individual character as well as the network of relationships. The race question thus fades into the background, although it does return to haunt the reader at certain times. By the end of the book, though, one does seem to occupy oneself with the individual personalities and what happened to them more than with their color - and of course one becomes preoccupied with the notion of "paradise."

Eleanor McCormack

   Gigi's quest of finding a legendary rock formation could be a symbol for the impossibility of creating a paradise on earth. Gigi's boyfriend told her that this rock formation, always changing in the light, looks like a couple making love forever, day and night, regardless of weather or season: the impossible dream of eternal love and happiness.

   Rocks are solid, and - unless there are catastrophes like earthquakes - remain unchanged for thousands of years; at the same time they are stiff and dead. In contrast to that, a couple making love signifies life itself. Only living creatures can move by themselves. But wherever there is life, there are not only movement, flexibility, and development, but also change, decay and death.

   Mortal humans cannot have both the longevity of rock and the dynamism of life. Exactly this is the error of the founders of Ruby: With the help of tradition and excessively strict rules they have given their community the rigidity of rock, hoping to thus achieve everlasting welfare and happiness. For a while they even cling to the illusion that in Ruby nobody will die - the townspeople might meet death in Vietnam or elsewhere, but not at home. While the outside world keeps changing, they have renounced change.

   But this stance must necessarily lead to conflict and disaster since the people of Ruby can neither live up to their restrictive rules, nor are they able to keep out the rest of the world.

   The guilt of having murdered the women who served as their scapegoats makes (some of) the patriarchs of Ruby slowly realize their stubborn wrongness. Thus, in spite of their decades of hypocritical self-righteousness, there is hope for a more open, better-balanced community in the future.

   The town of Ruby was certainly founded by families full of ideals. They wanted to create for themselves a peaceful place to live, free of racism and oppression. As the novel shows, this did not work out. In Paradise Toni Morrison presents a kind of racism based more on difference of attitude than on difference of skin color.

   This kind of racism has a long history in America. The Pilgrim Fathers left Europe because they were oppressed for their religious beliefs. The descendants of those Pilgrims, however, initiated the witch hunts in the late 17th century. The era of McCarthyism was a modern version of the witch hunt. And even the Clinton affair has many parallels to these witch hunts, having been triggered by extreme moralistic beliefs on the one hand and political interests on the other.

   The women of the Convent are not being driven out or killed chiefly for religious reasons. Religion is used by the people in power to serve as the justification of their own goals. To Steward Morgan, the women of the Convent are dangerous as they represent the world beyond Ruby, different views and a life style which contrasts with his own. If Steward lets these influences in, this will diminish his power over the people of his town. Sargeant Person on the other hand is clearly motivated by economic reasons when he joins the attack on the women. If they leave, he will not have to lease his farming land from them and can easily acquire the rest of the land belonging to the Convent. We must add that many women in the town strengthen their position by looking down on the townspeople with lighter skin, and there are many examples showing whites doing the same with regard to the African-Americans.

   The desire for power and material wealth and false religious zeal as well as simply the fear of different beliefs and life styles form the foundation of racism and oppression. In Paradise Toni Morrison shows us that no race or gender is free of these tendencies.

   Paradise does not provide easy reading. One needs to pay constant attention to try to solve the mysteries of the book, particularly the question of "who is/was actually the white girl??" Numerous, conflicting answers to this question were offered in our seminar discussions. It seems that for each of the four Convent girls, Toni Morrison has very carefully given us concrete hints as well as counter-hints about her color, although some students in fact have made a definite decision about which one is "white."

   When one immerses oneself in the book, one realizes that color should not be such an oppressive issue, either in the novel or in life. What one should try to do is to create and maintain a "paradise on earth" in which all races and colors could fit in.Toni Morrison has repeatedly said in interviews that she "deliberately withheld racial markers" with regard to the four young Convent dwellers; wouldn't it be paradisal if she did not NEED to WITHHOLD them - in other words, if racial markers played no role in human interaction...?