In the End is the Beginning: Toni Morrison's Post-Modern, Post-Ethical Vision ofParadise

Toni Morrison's Paradise presents the reader with two communities—the male-dominated all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, and the nearby all-female former Convent—at war with one another and with themselves. The patriarchs' insistence that their community's rich past provides everything they need forecloses the possibility of growth, change, and renewal; the Convent women eventually reject the past for a future rife with uncertainty but rich in possibility. The rising tensions between the two communities and the eventual violence that erupts dramatize the desirability but also the potentially disastrous consequences of holding too tightly to past traditions and ways of being and living.