Paradise Study Guide

Toni Morrison was an acclaimed American novelist best known for her works on Black women’s experiences in America. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Howard University and a master’s degree in English from Cornell University. She returned to Howard to teach, and there she met her husband Harold Morrison, with whom she had two children. After seven years of teaching, Morrison moved to New York to work in publishing. In 1970, she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, and published several novels afterward that garnered critical acclaim. In 1987, she published Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and in 1993, she won the Novel Prize in Literature. Morrison died in 2019 from complications of pneumonia, but she remains one of the most influential authors of the late-20th century.

Paradise takes place throughout the 20th century, and it centers around the history of the all-Black towns founded in the decades after the Civil War. These towns were prevalent in Oklahoma, where Paradise takes place, and they were often established in territory formerly owned by Native Americans. The primary action of the story occurs in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the formally acknowledged end of the Civil Rights Movement, a social movement to abolish racial segregation and discrimination in the United States. The Civil Rights Movement deeply affects the characters of Paradise. Gigi and Reverend Misner both participated in protests before coming to Ruby, characters debate the merits of Pan-Africanism (a movement to encourage solidarity among people of African descent around the world), and Ruby’s young citizens become interested in fighting white supremacy instead of avoiding it. 

Many of Toni Morrison’s other novels examine the intersection of race and gender. In fact, Paradise is considered the conclusion to Morrison’s trilogy on Black American history; preceding it are her earlier novels Beloved and Jazz. Like Paradise, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, also explores gender relations in an all-Black town in the American South. James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings are other seminal works in the African American literary tradition that examine the patriarchy’s relationship to white supremacy and racism. Morrison’s fragmented presentation of chronology and point of view also evokes the tradition of modernist authors like William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.