"Paradise", Toni Morrisson (1999) - Ruby, an evil paradise: construction of community identity

Résumé du document

No white masters, no black oppressed slaves but a freed black people community. In Toni Morrison's Paradise, Blacks create a small town called Ruby far from white people and their fake society. Several miles away is a convent in which five women live. Ruby was to be a paradise but twenty years later, it generates fanatics. The distance from peace to war and from paradise to hell is very short. What is this community? On what principles is it based? How is it to be destroyed? The main purpose of these freed slaves was to build a society based on virtue, pure race and isolation. It is created with strong values and is, in this way, an utopia.

Extraits

[...] No one dies in Ruby but heir is produced. Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial troubles. Politics manage to enter the small city and its social life. Isolation leads men to tyranny. Social starts to be troubled. They choose to keep away from sin and immorality but their isolation brought them to be vulnerable. According to the leaders these problems need a scapegoat. facing the women The community finds it in the Convent and more precisely in the women who live in it. [...]

[...] "Paradise", Toni Morrisson (1999) - Ruby, an evil paradise: construction of community identity No white masters, no black oppressed slaves but a freed black people community. In Toni Morrison's Paradise, Blacks create a small town called Ruby far from white people and their fake society. Several miles away is a convent in which five women live. Ruby was to be a paradise and twenty years later, it generates fanatics able to kill five innocent women. The distance from peace to war and from paradise to hell is very short. [...]

[...] The author was very criticized because of the way she associated Black people and violence. Then she breaks up with the black versus white dichotomy. Ruby is the city of pain and the hearth of its members' suffering. Toni Morrison shows the way communities can generate their own faults and destruction. It is very universal in time and space. The author faces the reader to his or her own fears and aspirations and bewares him of the danger which can emanate from them. [...]

[...] For instance, the elimination of the Jews during World War II is considered to be one of the largest ethnical cleansing processes in history. This theme is analyzed in movies, books, music and all forms of arts. In 1967, teacher Ron Jones had an experiment showing how people can have extreme behaviors when such a community is created. During his history courses sophomore students had to respect principles such as rites. The teacher's aim was to have them understand how the extermination of the Jews could happen during World War II. [...]

[...] Then, being isolating they cannot be assimilated and think they will preserve their culture and way of life. Pure race They want to be isolated from white society, supremacy but also from the police and the Ku Klux Klan. Eight leaders rule the town. These men are very black skinned and consider white people but also “less colored” people as enemies. They use violence in order to have more and more power. They intend to create a perfect society that could be an example for other Blacks to emancipate. [...]