The Oven represents Ruby’s deteriorating unity and sense of community. When the town’s forefathers build the Oven in Haven, it is significant as a place where the community gathers, but its primary purpose is practical: everyone in town uses the Oven to cook. The men who leave to found Ruby bring the Oven with them, which dismays their female traveling companions who wish they could use the extra space to pack functional goods. Even before Ruby is founded, the Oven has quietly divided its community. These divisions grow when the Oven is installed in Ruby, despite the town no longer using it to cook. The older and younger generations begin to argue about the meaning of the words engraved on the lip of the Oven, and the town leaders equate the youths’ perceived disrespect for the Oven with a disrespect for tradition. The intergenerational conflict escalates when the young people graffiti the Oven with a Black Power fist, indicating their desire to engage with the civil rights movement instead of keeping Ruby insulated, as tradition dictates. On the night that nine town leaders attack the Convent, rain undermines the foundation of the Oven, signifying once and for all that Ruby can never return to the unified community it once was.
The Oven Quotes in Paradise
As new fathers, who had fought the world, they could not (would not) be less than the Old Fathers who had outfoxed it; who had not let danger or natural evil keep them from cutting Haven out of mud and who knew enough to seal their triumph with that priority. An Oven. […] the Old Fathers did that first: put most of their strength into constructing the huge, flawlessly designed Oven that both nourished them and monumentalized what they had done.
“No ex-slave would tell us to be scared all the time. To ‘beware’ God. […] No ex-slave who had the guts to make his own way, build a town out of nothing, could think like that. No ex-slave––”
Deacon Morgan cut him off. “That’s my grandfather you’re talking about. Quit calling him an ex-slave like that’s all he was. He was also an ex-lieutenant governor, an ex-banker, an ex-deacon and a whole lot of other exes, and he wasn’t making his own way; he was part of a whole group making their way.”
Having caught Reverend Misner’s eyes, the boy was firm. “He was born in slavery times, sir; he was a slave, wasn’t he?”
“Everybody born in slavery time wasn’t a slave. Not the way you mean it.”
[Steward] wondered if that generation––Misner’s and K.D.’s––would have to be sacrificed to get to the next one. The grand- and great-grandchildren who could be trained, honed as his own father and grandfather had down for Steward’s generation. No breaks there; no slack cut then. Expectations were high and met. Nobody took more responsibility for their behavior than those good men.
The women nodded when the men took the Oven apart, packed, moved, and reassembled it. But privately they resented the truck space given over to it––rather than a few more sacks of seed, rather than shoats or even a child’s crib. Resented also the hours spent putting it back together […]. Oh, how the men loved putting it back together; how proud it had made them, how devoted. A good thing, [Soane] thought, as far as it went, but it went too far. A utility became a shrine […].
The Oven Symbol Timeline in Paradise
