“Never Break Them in Two”: Corporeal Spirituality in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
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This paper explores the nature of spirituality endorsed in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, a spiritual work in a couple of aspects. Its utopian all-black town, Ruby, represents the spirit over, or without, the body. This spiritual, puritanical community proves to be based on the principles of separation and exclusion, according to its racial and gender standards. The second prominent community called the Convent consists of five socially and emotionally deprived women. This Catholicism-governed order seems to be congruent with Ruby in its fear of carnal love and desire. However, the Convent is built on its previous owner’s pursuit of physical pleasure and indelible obscenity, which is dramatically revealed by its maidservant Consolata’s love affair with Deacon, one of the recognized leaders of Ruby. After her encounters with Lone, a midwife and folk medicine practitioner, and a mysterious demi-god visitor, Consolata comes to the knowledge of a whole spirituality that neither separates spirit and body nor positions one over the other. As a new Mother filled with the “body-spirit,” she is empowered to heal herself and other women, who become no longer haunted by their traumatic pasts. By suggesting this corporeal spirituality, Morrison shows a possibility of Paradise, which is an earthly endeavor towards non-exclusive and undichotomizing ways of thinking and practices.
Abstract
This paper explores the nature of spirituality endorsed in Toni Morrison’s Paradise, a spiritual work in a couple of aspects. Its utopian all-black town, Ruby, represents the spirit over, or without, the body. This spiritual, puritanical community proves to be based on the principles of separation and exclusion, according to its racial and gender standards. The second prominent community called the Convent consists of five socially and emotionally deprived women. This Catholicism-governed order seems to be congruent with Ruby in its fear of carnal love and desire. However, the Convent is built on its previous owner’s pursuit of physical pleasure and indelible obscenity, which is dramatically revealed by its maidservant Consolata’s love affair with Deacon, one of the recognized leaders of Ruby. After her encounters with Lone, a midwife and folk medicine practitioner, and a mysterious demi-god visitor, Consolata comes to the knowledge of a whole spirituality that neither separates spirit and body nor positions one over the other. As a new Mother filled with the “body-spirit,” she is empowered to heal herself and other women, who become no longer haunted by their traumatic pasts. By suggesting this corporeal spirituality, Morrison shows a possibility of Paradise, which is an earthly endeavor towards non-exclusive and undichotomizing ways of thinking and practices.
참고문헌 (19)
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