The Convent as Coven: Gothic Implications of Women-Centered Illness and Healing Narratives in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Abstract

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s literary oeuvre explores what she believes to be the oft-obscured engagement with black bodies from the perspective of a writer who wants to see herself in the literature. Morrison creates literature that speaks to the suppressed and silenced stories of black girls and women in a way that foregrounds desire as a longing for the fullness of life, love, and self-awareness. In this chapter, I argue that Morrison’s Paradise (1988) features a scene that reimagines the womb as a figurative interior space in order to facilitate individual and communal healing, and that Morrison employs and subverts Gothic tropes to explore the ways in which female bodies that seek this type of healing are Othered by threatened patriarchal structures.1 The reimagined space allows for the creation of illness narratives that signal the possibility for the rebirth of physically and/or emotionally traumatized women.2 These particular illness narratives depict some of the bleakest and most critical mental and physical illnesses the affected women endure throughout their lives, illnesses that cause them to become unmoored from their communities, families, and selves and force them to seek shelter at the Convent on the outskirts of an all-black town, Ruby. The Convent women’s blatant dismissal of Ruby’s patriarchal structure in favor of a woman-centered environment creates a space for the townsmen to become suspicious of their independent behavior/actions, accuse them of subversive actions, and galvanize a murderous mob to eliminate the women. The actions of Ruby’s men signify a classic Gothic trope of the witch-hunting townsmen who invade the witch’s home to protect their town from her threatening and sinful ways. The violent disruption of this healing process—the mob of men from Ruby breaking into the Convent and shooting/killing the women there—marks the illness-narrative creation process not as futile or worthless, but as a necessary, powerful, and urgent project for women to undertake. Maisha Wester notes that “Otherness in the American Gothic signifies racial difference as well as homosexuality and feminine threat, even as race marks these other transgressions” (20). This chapter argues that when read through a Gothic lens with an emphasis on landscape, the Other, and paranoia, Paradise demonstrates the ways in which self-directed, woman-centered healing in feminine spaces, without the authorization or validation of men, constitutes subversive activity that must be contained and terminated to re-establish patriarchal rule.