Within Paradise, color is used as a symbol. For example, the color green frequently shows up within the novel. On one occasion, as Mavis is heading down the highway to escape her life, "a green cross in the field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow" (28). The cross symbolizes the covenant and the color green conjures up ideas of freedom, rebirth, growth, and harmony. Overview of the novels from The Bluest Eye to Paradise that emphasizes the texts’ insistence on an active, creative role for the reader in the collaborative construction of meaning.

Soane is the wife of Deek Steward and the sister of Dovey. Her sons, Easter and Scout, die while serving in the Vietnam War, a tragedy she continues to mourn; she believed they would be safer overseas than in the United States, outside of Ruby. She becomes aware of the affair that Deek conducts with Connie, and goes out to the Convent with the intention of intimidating Connie by asking for an abortion. Soane does not intend to have one, but she later loses the baby, and believes that it is because of the malice in her heart. When Connie saves her son Scout, the two women become close friends. Connie prepares “tonics” for Soane, and Soane invites the Convent women to the wedding. Soane becomes estranged from her sister because of their differing interpretations of what happened during the assault on the Convent. Steward Morgan What new ways of thinking does Richard Misner represent, and how is he received by the people of Ruby? When Patricia tells him that "Slavery is our past" (212), he insists that "We live in the world...The whole world." Which of them is right? What does Misner mean when he says he thinks the people of Ruby love their children "to death" (212)? In the next chapter, Seneca, we learn a bit more about Ruby and the residents of the town, the Oven, the scandal around the motto engraved on the Oven (a central piece of their community symbolizing their flight from Reconstruction to Oklahoma and freedom) - "Furrow of His Brow" - and how it came to be interpreted, re-interpreted in the community. What is striking is the many uses to which Morrison puts language. This passage beautifully uses color as a mixed metaphor: Longest, most detailed overview of Morrison’s novels, up to A Mercy, and the key nonfiction. Useful account of Morrison’s life interspersed with its historical context. Includes detailed close readings of key moments in the novels alongside comparison with other writers across the cultural spectrum. Discusses selected criticism thematically and from a range of theoretical perspectives, in relation to each novel. Useful bibliography.As for the convent women, they are a motley assortment of misfits and fugitives: Connie, a former ward of the nuns, who ran the convent when it was a boarding school for Indian girls; Mavis, a paranoid woman who has fled her domineering husband

Why did I read this book before reading Beloved and Jazz when it is supposed to complete the trilogy? I'm bummed by that. I couldn't help it, I found the book on my shelf and decided to read it along with The Bluest Eye. Then there I was, reading it and thinking, why was this book not titled, “Beware the Furrow of His Brow,” or “Furrow of His brow,” or, “The Oven?” I won’t spoil it, you will have to read it to see why I say that and you'll probably agree with me (I did hear though, that Toni Morrison wanted to call it, “War” but her editors disagreed).As a result, Ms. Morrison's efforts to endow the story with a symbolic subtext tend to feel hokey. There are gratuitous biblical allusions (like comparing the story of Ruby's founders to the story of the Holy Family, turned away A middle-aged woman named Connie lives in the Convent with an old woman she calls Mother, and they welcome Mavis to stay. Connie herself came to the Convent as a child, when Mother (a nun named Mary Magna) took Connie from the streets of Brazil and raised her in the Convent, which formerly served as a residential school for Native American girls. Connie has since been utterly devoted to Mary Magna.

Clear, detailed and highly readable overview of Morrison’s first six novels, with a postscript on Paradise. Chapters present a discussion of themes and technique without any overt summary of the plot. Chronology of Morrison’s life and the bibliography are rigorous and useful up to the year of the book’s publication.This sets the tone for how the religious community will respond to the Convent later in the story although Misner will be horrified by it. Whereas earlier Morrison novels like "Beloved,""Song of Solomon" and "Sula" fused the historical and the mythic, the mundane and the fantastic into a seamless piece of music, this novel remains an earthbound If you haven't watched the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, do yourself a favor and find it somewhere.] During this period, the families from Haven have settled into the area seventeen miles south of the Convent. There is not much interaction between the Convent and the town, though Mary Magna is glad to have a pharmacy close by. On one trip into Ruby, Consolata spots Deacon “Deek” Steward, with whom she has a two-month affair that ends when she repulses him with the carnal intensity of her desire. It is around this time that women begin to arrive at the Convent. They arrive by accident, in flight from fraught lives (abusive husbands and dead babies; parental betrayal or neglect; abandonment by lovers and violent pasts), but one by one they seem drawn into staying permanently. The first is Mavis; Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas then follow. They do not all get along - Mavis and Gigi in particular often clash. However, they seem to find in the Convent an escape from troubled circumstances (often related to men) where they are listened to and cared for without judgment. Though they may leave from time to time, the women always return.