An Archetypal Reading Of Toni Morrison’s Paradise

In1997, Toni Morrison published her seventh novel Paradise which is also the first worksince she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in1993. Spatially, the novel focuses on apure-black town Ruby and a Catholic Convent. Temporally, all the stories in this novel spannearly two hundred years. Morrison uses the stream of consciousness and nonlinear narrativewriting style to combine the space and time skillfully, by which she sketches the contours ofall kinds of connections between Ruby and the Convent.Based on Jung’s archetypal theory, the paper analyzes main characters, plots, scenes,imageries and symbols in four chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the author, thenovel, archetypal theory and related research at home and abroad. The second chapteranalyzes biblical archetypes of main characters, plots, scenes and imageries, from which it isconcluded the Americanness of people in the novel when they are under self-isolation. Thethird chapter focuses on symbolic archetypes of three typical things, which are religioussymbolic archetype, spiritual symbolic archetype and spatial symbolic archetype, from whichit is concluded the ingrained blackness of people in Paradise, especially Ruby residents, intheir collective unconscious. The fourth chapter makes a conclusion of the biblical andsymbolic archetypes while reveals one commonness from people of this novel: Morrison’sintention to show the twoness of African Americans’ Americanness and blackness, thedilemma resulted from this twoness and the way to get rid of it.