Miltonic Contradictions in Toni Morrison's Paradise

Jacqueline Di Salvo

Toni Morrison's novel depicts the culture war between two contrasting visions of paradise. Since their late 19th century Exodus from the segregated South, the families of the black town of Ruby, Oklahoma has founded its independence on the petit bourgeois values of self-employment and property ownership and the virtues of Protestant piety, discipline, and industriousness. With its millenarian myth, separatism and self-reliance Ruby's self-governing township evokes the Milton legacy of American Puritanism. Central to it is the patriarchal family and a gendered division of public and private spheres. Thus, the limits of this Miltonic legacy despite all its historic strengths may be seen in its demonizing of libertine female collectives which threaten to invade that public space, as Milton's "the wild rout "  "of Bacchus and his revellers." Similarly, Ruby finds its nemesis in the Convent, a1960s haven for female vagabonds and for feminine energies uncontained by marital domesticity. The contrary virtues of the Convent prioritize nurturance, bodily pleasure, psychic healing, exploration of the unconscious and female autonomy in community. In reading Milton's 17th Century bourgeois revolutionary vision through Morrison's 20th Century perspective, we can understand both his logic of liberation, as appropriated by black nationalism, and its limitations, as challenged by a feminist communalism.