Paradise

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary: “Consolata”

Consolata (Connie) wakes alone in the basement wine cellar, disappointed to still be alive. She grieves Mary Magna/Mother Superior. In 1925, Mother Superior took three abandoned children (including Connie, age nine) off the street in Brazil, where she and other American nuns worked in a hospital. She later brought Connie with her to the Convent “for Indian girls” (224) in the US. For 30 years, Connie was devoted to God and diligent in her duties. This is until she encountered Deek Morgan in 1954 on a trip with Mary Magna to the pharmacy in the newly founded Ruby. Two months later, they began a secret affair. Deek was 29, 10 years younger than Connie, and already married. Eventually, Deek stopped coming. One day Soane, pregnant, comes to the Convent to confront Connie. After the confrontation, Connie swears off Deek and repents in the chapel. From then, her eyesight worsens, failing in the light but best in the dark. Meanwhile, the Convent closes, leaving only Connie and Mother Superior.

Lone DuPres finds Connie, at 49 years old, fainting in the garden from a menopausal hot flash. Lone and Consolata are friends, despite Lone’s practice of magic and Consolata’s Catholic upbringing. One day, there is a car accident nearby. Lone and Connie find three people from Ruby, including Scout Morgan (Soane & Deek’s son), who is seemingly dead. With Lone’s encouragement, Connie sees the fading light inside of Scout and brightens it, resuscitating him. This gift—“stepping in” or “seeing in”—unsettles Connie, and she does not use it again except to prolong Mother’s life.

Pallas is pregnant, and it reminds Connie of when Arnette gave birth at the Convent. The baby died, premature because Arnette had been hurting herself to kill the baby. Gigi is in the bathtub thinking about her plan to run away with Seneca, who has been cutting herself. Meanwhile, Mavis is out shopping for her twin babies as though they were alive, and Connie is cooking.

Connie decides to embrace her role as a guide for the women. She instructs them to lie on the floor naked. She paints their silhouettes around them. Then, she teaches them how to do “loud dreaming,” where they verbally express and release their pain, hopes, and frustrations together. As the women take up this exercise, they paint expressively inside their silhouettes and work through their trauma. They, except for Connie, also cut their hair short.

Chapter 8 Summary: “Lone”

Chapter 8 begins late the July night before the incident in the Convent, where Chapter 1 began. Lone DuPres goes to the Convent to warn the women, but they don’t take her seriously. She drives back to Ruby to seek help. That night, she overheard the group of nine men meeting at the Oven. They discussed “how Ruby is changing in intolerable ways” (275) and blamed the Convent women’s evil influence for Ruby’s recent misfortunes.

The men harbor bitterness, which motivates them to join the invasion. Sargeant Person wants to acquire the Convent land; Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood are resentful of the “four damaged infants” in their family; Wisdom Poole dislikes the threesome in his family between brothers Apollo and Brood, and Billie Delia; Menus, an alcoholic, resents that he was forced to give up his light-skinned fiancée; K.D. resents Gigi for refusing his love; Deek is ashamed of his past affair with Connie; Steward is angry about Deek’s affair, and he hates the idea that Arnette’s baby (his grand-nephew) died at the Convent.

Searching for help that night, Lone looks for Reverend Misner, but he and Anna Poole are away. Lone goes to the DuPres, the family that adopted her. They are appropriately responsive to Lone’s concerns. Meanwhile, the women at the Convent are dancing joyfully in the rain.

Early the following morning, the nine men arrive at the Convent. Steward shoots the “white girl” (it is never specified which character she is). The men spread out and have various altercations with the women. Three women flee through the window, but the men allegedly shoot them down in the grass. When Connie emerges, Deek motions to the men to back off. Dovey and Soane arrive just as Steward shoots Connie in the head. Deek brings Connie to the kitchen, where she tries to tell him that Pallas’s baby, Divine, is asleep.

The people from Ruby gather at the Oven. The rain has softened the ground beneath the Oven, causing it to lean. When the men are asked for an explanation, Steward claims evil is in the house. For the first time, Deek disagrees, saying, “My brother is lying. This is our doing. Ours alone. And we bear the responsibility” (291). After much discussion, the frightened people head back home. When Roger returns to the Convent to collect the bodies, he finds that all the women’s dead bodies—and Mavis’s Cadillac—are missing.

Chapter 9 Summary: “Save-Marie”

It is November, and people are gathered for the funeral of Sweetie and Jeff’s youngest child, Save-Marie. After 23 years of no death in Ruby, the incident at the Convent has broken the town’s mysterious deal of immortality with God. There are many conflicting accounts of what happened at the Convent. In the aftermath, Jeff Fleetwood takes over the furniture store from his father, who was injured in the attack. Wilson Poole is shamed by his family. Sargeant Person now owns the Convent land. K.D. and Arnette—pregnant again—are building a new house. With a head wound, Harper jury remains unapologetic. Menus still drinks, and his shoulder injury prevents him from being a barber. Deek has pulled away from Steward and has befriended Reverend Misner. Deek talks to him about Zechariah “Big Papa” Morgan, originally named Coffee, and his twin brother, Tea. When a group of intimidating white men had demanded that Tea and Coffee dance, Coffee was repulsed to see his brother comply. When Coffee determined to leave and found Haven, he did so without his brother.

Skeptical about the women’s bodies disappearing, Anna and Misner go to the Convent weeks later. They find no signs of anyone having returned. Anna speculates that some women survived and escaped with the dead bodies, but Reverend Misner is not convinced. In his remarks at Save-Marie’s funeral, he considers how Ruby has succumbed to hate. He decides to stay to help the people. Among the attendees is Billie Delia. Miraculously, Brood and Apollo have reconciled, deciding to let Billie choose who she wants. Billie hopes for another miracle—that the Convent women will return to take revenge.

The last section is a series of vignettes where women from the Convent are encountered by someone from their past. Having been in prison since Gigi was 11 years old, her father, Manley Gibson, is surprised to see her outside one day in military garb. Dee Dee is speechless when her daughter Pallas comes by to get her things, carrying a baby and a sword. Sally “Sal” Albright is shocked to find her mother Mavis in a diner, where they catch up briefly. Jean, Seneca’s mother, sees her in a stadium parking lot, but Seneca does not remember who she is. Connie is “down here in paradise” with Piedade, a woman from Brazil “who sang but never said a word” (264).

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Chapters 7-9 represent a significant turning point for the women in the Convent and the rising action of the narrative. As Connie and the women grow in confidence and healing—putting themselves together after so much brokenness—the town of Ruby is falling apart. The people in Ruby make the Convent a scapegoat: “Drawing folks out there like flies to shit and everybody who goes near them is maimed somehow and the mess is seeping back into our homes, our families” (276). The italicized our emphasizes the characteristic us/them mentality of Ruby. As the people meet to condemn the corrupting influence of the Convent in Chapter 8, Morrison’s writing also shifts. Dialogue is not in quotes or attributed to a specific speaker; paragraphs become incredibly large, sprawling across one or two pages. Without identifying specific speakers, Morrison conveys that the speaker is the town while also communicating the chaos of the heated meeting. The long paragraphs and absence of quotation marks create uninterrupted momentum on the page as in the narrative. The physical page appears full, serving as a visual representation of Ruby’s overwhelming number of complaints and their feeling of being fed up. Morrison’s style and narrative convey the same thing: something is coming, and there’s no stopping it.

During the incident at the Convent, the narration shifts from past tense to present tense. As in the opening few pages of the novel, this produces immediacy and creates tension. The reader is not reading something that has happened already; it is happening now. The attack is a showdown between Ruby and the Convent, and while the men appear to succeed in shooting the women, the women also succeed in injuring the men. The two small groups—five women versus nine men—are completely isolated until Steward shoots Connie and Dovey and Soane arrive.

These final few chapters offer a commentary on rumor and the malleability of the truth. First, when the townspeople talk about what happened, the event is spun out into many conflicting stories with half-truths: “As for Lone, she became unhinged by the way the story was being retold; how people were changing it to make themselves look good” (297). As people are “enhancing, recasting, inventing misinformation” (297), Morrison critiques how society often eschews the truth in favor of a constructed narrative. Second, the disappearance of the Convent women’s bodies only further allows people to argue for the innocence of the men involved. Through this mysterious disappearance, Morrison again comments on the muddiness of the truth. The narrative tells us that the women were shot down, yet they also appear in the final scenes of “Save-Marie,” alive and well to people they once knew. The reader is made to question the story and even to question Morrison. In many ways, Paradise is about the power narrative. It asks readers to reflect on the great and small stories we tell ourselves about who we were and what we are, and who stands to gain from which narrative.