The Politics Of "Home": A Spatial Study Of Toni Morrison’s Paradise

The quest for home remains one of the persistent themes in African American literature. The experiences of enslavement, forced migration, and collective dispossession have bequeathed the blacks with a profound longing for home. Toni Morrison’s literary creation is also preoccupied with the issue of home. In Morrison’s works, the duality of "house" and "home" is the most recurrent. "House" serves as a metaphor for a dominant space that is discursively constructed, while "home" emerges as an open fluid space, unshackled from dichotomies and characterized by its capacity of independent self-representation. Morrison believes that the establishment of a "home" is political in essence, which depends on resistance and subversion of the oppressive dominant space.Interpreting Morrison’s metaphors of "house" and "home" in light of Henri Lefebvre’s conceptions of "representations of space" and "representational space," the present thesis intends to make a contrastive analysis of different spatial structures depicted in Morrison’s Paradise. The first part explores how the "house," which in this section mainly refers to gendered representations of space, represses and disciplines the female body, and in what way the Convent women resist the repression with such spatial practices as cookery, food consumption and body painting to create a self-representative "home" that integrates the body and soul. The second part focuses on how the founding fathers of the all-black towns unconsciously imitate white racism to have produced their own racial representations of space. Believing they are building "home," the residents in the black towns end up duplicating the white racial "house." On the contrary, the women in the Convent have made a multiracial "home" by nullifying racial categorization, which epitomizes what Morrison calls the "race-specific race-free"("Home" 5) home. The last part discusses the all-black towns as monolithic cultural space constructed jointly by patriarchal historiography and religious mythologizing, and how the this constructed space, as yet another example of "house," is challenged by the Covent women’s efforts in making a multicultural "home" through their communal storytelling and hybrid religious practices.Through the dismantling of "house" and the re-envisioning of "home," Morrison offers her critical thinking on how to build an African American home in the predominantly white American nation.