On Feminine Consciousness In Paradise

Paradise was Morrison's first novel after she received the Noble Prize for Literature and the third one of her trilogy. It caught intensive attention in the world and became an important cultural incident immediately when it came out in 1998. The novel is a story about two separatist communities:Ruby and the Convent. The novel portrays the survival conditions and different experiences of the people of Ruby and the Convent women. The author of the paper analyzes the novel by applying the theory of the feminist criticism. The novel expresses Morrison's wish of arousing the female consciousness of the oppressed women. This paper is an attempt to explore the female consciousness in the novel.Chapter one is a brief introduction of the novel and the author. This chapter also includes the literature review of this novel. Morrison is the only African-American woman writer who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. She makes the literature of African-American women arrive at another culmination. Paradise is a book with deep implications. The paper is an attempt to explore the novel from feminist perspective.Chapter two introduces feminism and main feminist critics. Paradise can be regarded as a feminist novel because it is a book about the destiny of women and women's fighting against the patriarchy. Feminism aims to expose the living conditions of women and to change the women's oppressed status. Feminism began in the late 1960s and had won many rights for women. It plays an important part in the fight of women's gaining the freedom and independence.Chapter three gives an implicit introduction about the history and formation of Ruby and the Convent. Ruby is a patriarchy paradise where men control everything in the town and women are oppressed by men and have no status or rights. The Convent is a female paradise where women can live happily and freely far away from the patriarchal oppression. The Convent is a place filled with forgiveness and love that accepts anybody that is in difficulties. There is an implicit difference between Ruby and the Convent.Chapter four describes the painful sufferings and experience of Ruby women and the Convent women respectively by applying feminist criticism. Through the introduction of their painful sufferings, the paper aims to expose the unfair treatment and the oppressed conditions that black women suffer from. As a matter of fact, Black women undergo the dual oppressions in the body and in the spirit. The Convent women gain the freedom and independence by their own endeavor and their female consciousness is aroused. Compared with the Convent women, the Ruby women also have certain arising consciousness gradually. They are unsatisfied with the real conditions and feel very painful under the oppression of patriarchy, but their arising consciousness is not very intense. At the same time, this chapter also expresses the wish of the black women's setting up an earthly paradise.From the above-mentioned parts, we can draw a conclusion that black men must give up the patriarchy and women should be treated fairly. They should own the same rights as men. The real paradise can be built only if racism and sexism are eliminated. In a word, Paradise is a typical novel to explore the feminine consciousness. Through the analysis of the novel, the aim of the paper is to arouse women's attention to struggle for equal rights. Morrison pays attention to the destiny of black women all the time and never stops her footsteps to pursue the female's freedom and independence in the male-dominated society.