Study On Paradise From The Perspective Of Feminist Theology

Toni Morrison(1931-) is the only black female writer who has won the Nobel Prize forLiterature. Paradise(1998) is the first novel after Morrison won the Nobel Prize. It depicts thestory of that the men of Ruby, an all-black town attacks a group of women who live in theConvent seventeen miles away. Americans fighting for the paradise is unstated. Morrisonfocuses on all the female characters both in Ruby and the Convent. Nearly all the characterssuffer from the patriarchy society. Their behaviors and voices accord with Feminist Theology.Feminist Theology was founded in1960s. It is a movement to re-interpret traditions,practices, scriptures, and theologies of those religions from a perspective of feminist, aims atincreasing the role of women among the clergy and religious authorities, re-considermale-dominated imagery and language about God, dominating women’s place in relation tocareer and motherhood and studying images of women in the religion’s sacred texts andmatriarchal religion. Feminist theologians’ eternal search aims at emancipating all humanbeings through the Bible. Feminist theology studies are closely connected with its origin anddevelopment, and its features, which combines two important parts: one is the Criticism onChristian Theology; the other is the Reconstruction of Christian belief. The present studyexplores the feminist theology of three searches in Paradise.The thesis falls into four chapters besides this introduction and a conclusion.Introduction gives a brief account of Toni Morrison, her working career andachievements. Literature review both at home and abroad is mentioned in this part. What’smore, reading Paradise as the religious text and the format of this thesis are included.Chapter One deals with the theory adopted in this thesis, feminist theology, its origins、 development and its main features: the Criticism on Christian Theology, the Reconstruction ofChristian belief, especially the three objects of this theory, search for justice, love and spiritualhabitat, which are inter-related and at the same time counter-act to each other and accordswith the eternal search-spiritual habitat in Paradise.Chapter Two is an analysis of the search for justice of the people from Ruby and theConvent. Especially, justice between male and female; justice between the black and white.People should care for each other in order to reach the equality and harmony. And the reasonfor gender and racial injustice is also discussed in this chapter in Paradise.Chapter Three discusses how the people from Ruby and the Convent search for love,which is another focus of feminist theologians. Love is the eternal theme in literature. Thischapter includes three kinds of love, namely maternal love, sexual love and God’s love. Theabsence of maternal love is one of Morrison’s focuses. Sexual love consists the love betweenRuby men and Convent women. Morrison’s love of God brings everyone to the eternalsearch-spiritual habitat.The focus of Chapter Four demonstrates the necessity of the eternal search-spiritualhabitat for Ruby people and the Convent women. That is, a paradise with fair, justice,harmony, independence, equality, and love. Through the development of the black town fromHaven to Ruby and the great changes take place in the Convent, Toni Morrison reveals thecorruption of a black Utopian dream, proving that the failure of their paradise is due to theirsense of inferiority and false understanding of it. In order to search for the real spiritualhabitat, the Convent women depicted by Morrison take a correct way.Conclusion sums up the whole and points out the way to explore the real paradise inMorrison’s mind.