Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Paradise, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender, Race, and Power
Community
Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma
Change vs. Tradition
God, Holiness, and Faith
Exclusion
Summary
Analysis
A patronizing journalist interviews Mavis Albright, a grieving mother, about the recent deaths of her twin daughters Merle and Pearl. She left the babies in her mint green Cadillac when she went to the store to buy wieners for her husband, Frank, who didn’t like the Spam she served the children. Mavis insists that she only left the girls in the car for five minutes, even though the interviewer expresses doubt that children could suffocate so quickly. Accompanying the interviewer is a photographer. The photographer takes some pictures of Mavis and her surviving children, but he takes many more pictures of the Cadillac. Mavis reflects that the place of her daughters’ death will be public and “flashy,” but her daughters won’t be, because she never took a picture of “their trusting faces.”
Mavis is introduced in the traditional roles expected of a woman: a wife and mother. However, she has failed the basic duty of a mother to protect her children. Her failure as a mother resulted from Mavis’s desire to succeed in her role as a wife––she neglected her children in order to buy food for her husband. The tension between Mavis’s two roles in her family mirrors the tension between constructed patriarchal systems, which demand women’s duty to their husbands and that women feel a natural love for their children.
Themes
After the reporter leaves, Mavis cleans up. She longs to be in the Cadillac, where she lost the only children who liked her and weren’t difficult. The car belongs to Frank, but she loves it and lied to Frank about losing her set of keys. Frank has forbidden Mavis from ever touching the Cadillac again, so Mavis herself will be surprised when she steals the car in the future.
Despite the traumatic loss of her infants, Mavis’s family still expects her to carry out the routine tasks of a wife and mother, such as cleaning up after guests. The fact that Frank has the authority to forbid Mavis to use the car, and the fact that she must lie to him to circumvent his command, hints that their marriage is not a healthy one. Mavis’s resentment of her children besides Merle and Pearl––as well as her belief that her other children do not like her––further expands the complex family dynamic that hides behind the Albrights’ fulfilment of traditional familial roles.
Themes
Later, Frank startles Mavis by getting into bed with her. His presence stirs a “familiar fright” in Mavis as she tries to assess his mood. Just when Mavis concludes she is temporarily safe, Frank pulls up her nightgown, throws it over her face, and forcibly has sex with her. Mavis knows her children will be listening and laughing at the bedroom door, and she is certain that they and Frank are conspiring against her. She waits until dawn to leave the bed. She walks through the house carefully, terrified that Frank and the children have laid a trap for her. However, she gets out safely and gets into the Cadillac.
Mavis navigates the world constantly prepared for the “familiar fright” of Frank’s abuse. This vigilance is implied to have warped her perception of reality, rendering her paranoid that her children have allied with Frank in a conspiracy against her. Mavis’s relationship with her husband continues to prevent her from being a nurturing mother, just as it did when she chose his food preferences over the safety of her infants. Her belief that the children are on Frank’s side allows Mavis to link wifehood and motherhood together as traps that she needs to escape.
Themes
Mavis has not planned where to flee to, so she drives to the house of an acquaintance who showed some sympathy at Merle and Pearl’s funeral. When the woman fails to answer the door, Mavis panics and returns to the car. She realizes that a photograph of the car and its connection to her will be printed in that day’s paper, so she needs to move quickly. She decides to make the five-hour drive to her mother’s house in New Jersey, stopping occasionally to eat at diners and fill the car with gas. When Mavis arrives, her mother Birdie serves her a meal and tells Mavis that anyone could have seen her circumstances coming. Birdie acknowledges that Mavis has suffered, but she believes Mavis must return to her children.
Mavis is desperate and potentially paranoid, but she is savvy and persistent. She realizes the danger of driving the Cadillac, which will soon be publicized in the article about Merle and Pearl, and quickly forms a plan to drive to safety. When she reaches her mother Birdie, Birdie is sympathetic to Mavis’s plight, but she does not believe that a mother’s suffering permits her to abandon her children. Birdie’s perspective prioritizes a woman’s role as a mother over the woman’s status as a human being deserving of safety.
Themes
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Mavis tells Birdie that her children intend to kill her on Frank’s orders. Birdie is shaken and asks if Mavis believed the twins wanted to kill her as well, to which Mavis emphatically answers no. Birdie allows Mavis to stay with her as long as Mavis stops claiming that her children will kill her. She stays for a week, until she hears Birdie tell Frank over the phone that he should come get Mavis. Mavis steals some necessities and money from her mother, repaints the Cadillac magenta, and drives off for California.
Despite Birdie’s claims that a mother should always be there for her children, she betrays her own daughter by calling Frank. Birdie is deeply troubled by Mavis’s fear of her children, since that fear subverts the expectations of a mother. Birdie’s decision to call Frank is implicitly informed by her belief that returning to her role as a wife and mother is what will be best for Mavis. Mavis disagrees and asserts her agency by fleeing once again.
Themes
During the long drive to California, Mavis picks up hitchhikers to help cover the costs of gas and food. These hitchhikers are mostly girls and woman, and they’ve had negative experiences with men that are similar to Mavis’s. Mavis bonds with her first and last hitchhikers, girls named Dusty and Bennie, who help her find moments of joy on the road. Bennie leaves without saying goodbye, and in her absence, Mavis thinks she sees Frank waiting for her at a gas station. She panics, drives recklessly away, and quickly gets lost. The Cadillac runs out of gas on the road, leaving Mavis stranded. She begins to fear that Frank “had been absolutely right” to call her “the dumbest bitch on the planet.” As she waits for another car to pass, though, Mavis realizes that Dusty and Bennie would not just sit and wait. She gets out of the car.
The hitchhikers show Mavis an alternate version of femininity to the one she lived as a wife and mother. These women sustain themselves, make their own joy, and support each other. Spending time with the hitchhikers helps Mavis grow independent, but she has not entirely overcome her trauma. Frank’s abuse still haunts her, and her fears that he was right about her demonstrate that his abuse damaged her self-esteem in addition to her mental health.
Themes
Mavis walks down roads for hours until she finds the Convent. She meets a woman sitting by the Convent’s impressive vegetable garden. The woman identifies herself as Connie and offers Mavis food and drink. As Connie serves Mavis a meal, she explains that she lives with one other woman (Mother) in the Convent, and she assures Mavis that someone will eventually come by who can procure gas for the Cadillac. Mavis feels comfortable in the Convent’s kitchen, as if it is crowded with children, including Merle and Pearl.
The Convent presents itself to Mavis as an oasis after her dangerous and exhausting journey. It has ample fresh produce in the garden, and Connie extends compassion and care to Mavis immediately upon meeting her. Mavis’s comfort in the Convent comes from her feeling that it is full of children. It is unclear whether this feeling is an element of the book’s magical realism or an effect of Mavis’s unstable mental health, but the fact that she feels comfortable surrounded by children highlights that although she has abandoned her children, Mavis is still a mother.
Themes
Connie gives Mavis some pecans to shell, and though Mavis insists she would make a mess of the work, Connie insists that Mavis is capable of it. Connie says that Mavis’s hands are beautiful, and Mavis finds herself believing this. When Mavis asks if they should put down newspapers to catch the shells, Connie explains that there are no radios or newspapers in the Convent. Connie and Mavis shell pecans together until Connie steps out to check on a woman she calls Mother. Left alone, Mavis considers the emptiness waiting for her back on the road.
Connie subtly sets to work rebuilding Mavis’s self-esteem. This is not simply a gesture of kindness––she genuinely believes that Mavis is a capable and beautiful woman, so Mavis starts to believe it as well. Connie’s explanation that the Convent lacks radios and newspapers further adds to the Convent’s appearance as a haven removed from the outside world.
Themes
A well-dressed, dark-skinned woman comes into the Convent looking for Connie, and she pauses to admire Mavis’s work with the pecans. Connie returns and introduces the woman as Mrs. Soane Morgan. Soane remarks that Mavis is the first stranger she’s ever seen inside the Convent. She offers to help Mavis with her car, and she asks if Connie still refuses to put Mother to a hospital. Connie insists that her mother needs to stay at home. Soane drives Mavis to a gas station, where they purchase five gallons of gas. Soane, who has grown formal and quiet outside the Convent, then drives Mavis through the town of Ruby, which is picturesque and unnaturally still. One of Soane’s sons drives Mavis back to the Convent, and he explains that no white people live in Ruby.
Inside the Convent, Soane is friendly and open with the other women. Back in Ruby, however, she grows distant and formal. This contrast highlights how the Convent’s isolation from men’s patriarchal systems grants women the freedom to interact more honestly than they can in the outside world.
Themes
Mavis decides to spend the night at the Convent, partly because it is dark and she forgot to ask Soane’s son for directions, but mostly because she meets Mother. Mother is a small, sickly old woman who radiates a blinding white light. She bickers with Connie, tells Mavis about the Convent’s former purpose as a residential school, and asks Connie to tell God to “let the girls in.” When Mavis asks why Connie speaks about Mother as if she is her own mother, Connie insists that Mother is her mother—and Mavis’s mother, too. Mavis decides to spend the night at the Convent, and her residence there becomes permanent. She leaves occasionally over the next few years, but she always returns, and she is there for the massacre in 1976.
Mother is the first concretely magical element of the story: she glows with a white light that Mavis doesn’t understand. Connie is devoted to Mother, suggesting a kind of motherhood based on love rather than blood. Mother also references the Convent’s past as a residential school. Her hope that God will let the girls from the residential school into heaven suggests that she holds some affection for these girls, which conflicts with her belief that they are not Christian enough to earn their own way to heaven.
Themes
