Word: convention
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...from scratch, another Oklahoma town, which they name Ruby to honor the woman in their clan who died after the journey. Ruby is 90 miles from anywhere else, which is just what the new patriarchs want, except for a strange old house 17 miles away known locally as the Convent...
This building has a tangled history, but by the late 1960s, it is occupied only by an elderly dying nun and Consolata, her devoted servant and helper of 30 years. And the Convent becomes, with Consolata's diffident acquiescence, a refuge for broken young women, on the run from husbands or boyfriends, parents or the messes they have made of their lives elsewhere. If they show up and have nowhere else to go, Consolata lets them stay...
...more complex, nuanced and ambiguous than any summary can reproduce. It is a mistake common to both Morrison's admirers and critics to understand her fiction too quickly. The violent act that begins and ends Paradise--the assault of the men of Ruby on the women in the Convent--cannot be described simply as a feminist parable, as some early reviewers have already dubbed...
...they come to pin the blame for this disruption on the strange women in the Convent is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power. Morrison once wrote a Cornell master's thesis on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, and the Mississippian's incantatory prose rhythms still crop up in her writing. Here is Deacon musing on the past as he drives around in Ruby: "He [Deacon's grandfather] would have been embarrassed by grandsons who worked twelve hours five days a week instead of the eighteen-to-twenty-hour days Haven people once needed just to keep alive, and who could...
...there is the subject of race. It is not mentioned a great deal in Paradise, perhaps because nearly all the characters are black. It is almost impossible to identify the white woman whose shooting is announced in the novel's opening sentence. As the women drift, singly, into the Convent, the reader--knowing what lies in store for the white one--must wonder: Is it Mavis? Grace? Seneca? Pallas...