Paradise is a story about women and their relationships, and many characters specifically struggle with motherhood. The mothers in the book are deeply flawed, grappling with a desperate love for their children that they do not know how to act upon—and in most cases, the mothers’ inability to act upon their love for their children is due to unresolved trauma in their own lives. Mavis is a mother who chooses to leave her children. She is so afraid of her abusive husband Frank that she convinces herself her children have allied with him against her. The only children Mavis trusts are her infant twins, Merle and Pearl, who die before the story begins when Mavis accidentally leaves them in her car. Frank’s abuse constructs a psychological division between Mavis and her children, and to become an independent person, she must abandon her children along with Frank. Seneca, on the other hand, was abandoned by her own mother, Jean, who is so young when she has Seneca that Seneca believes Jean to be her sister. This abandonment renders Seneca desperate to please everyone in her life so they will not leave her. Like Mavis, Jean loves her daughter, and she later tries to reunite with Seneca, but Seneca has moved on to Paradise (a mysterious afterlife) and has forgotten the woman who first traumatized her.
The idea that mothers reinforce their own traumas onto their daughters also appears in the relationship between Pat Best and her daughter Billie Delia. Ruby has ostracized Pat because her mother was a light-skinned outsider, and it shuns Billie Delia because the townspeople deem her wild and sinful. Instead of extending empathy to her daughter and breaking the cycle of rejection and exclusion, Pat punishes Billie Delia for her perceived sins––even as Pat herself wonders “whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.” The mothers of Paradise are not lacking in maternal love, but their efforts to nurture their children are thwarted by systemic conditions of oppression, and Paradise shows how this chain of harm manifests as a form of intergenerational trauma that alienates mothers and daughters from each other.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma ThemeTracker
Motherhood and Intergenerational Trauma Quotes in Paradise
When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be. She had misjudged. Again. He was going to do this first and then the rest. The other children would be behind the door, snickering […]. The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank’s sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it.
Mavis felt her stupidity close in on her head like a dry sack. A grown woman who could not cross the country. Could not make a plan that accommodated more than twenty minutes. […] Too rattle-minded to open a car’s window so babies could breathe. […] Frank was right. From the very beginning he had been absolutely right about her: she was the dumbest bitch on the planet.
The third day, [Seneca] began to understand why Jean was gone and how to get her back. She cleaned her teeth and washed her ears carefully. She also flushed the toilet right away, as soon as she used it, and folded her socks inside her shoes. […] Those were her prayers: if she did everything right without being told, either Jean would walk in or when she knocked on one of the apartment doors, there’d she be! Smiling and holding out her arms.
Meanwhile the nights were terrible.
[Arnette] believed she loved [K.D] absolutely because he was all she knew about her self––which was to say, everything she knew of her body was connected to him. Except for Billie Delia, no one had told her there was any other way to think of herself. Not her mother; not her sister-in-law.
She, the gentlest of souls, missed killing her own daughter by inches. […] Educated but self-taught also to make sure that everybody knew that the bastard-born daughter of the woman with sunlight skin and no last name was not only lovely but of great worth and inestimable value. Trying to understand how she could have picked up that pressing iron, Pat realized that ever since Billie Delia was an infant, she thought of her as a liability somehow. Vulnerable to the possibility of not being quite as much of a lady as Patricia Cato would like. […] But the question for her now in the silence of this here night was whether she had defended Billie Delia or sacrificed her.
