Morrison and the Twenty-first Century: Love

If Morrison saw the title of Paradise as, in her words, “interrogative” or ironic, with the word possibly followed by a question mark, she surely would have moved those descriptors onto the title of her 2003 novel, Love. Love? Love? Critic Anne Mihan called a book with “a decidedly political impetus” (Mihan 24). For critic Missy Kubitschek, Paradise exemplifies such dominant African beliefs as that the common and the communal is the sacred; that distinguishing between the “living” and the “dead” is often (as here) arbitrary; and that the self and other selves are frequently inseparable (Kubitchek 22–3). In Paradise, the ramifications of Morrison’s African beliefs are less obtrusive. Instead, what comes across are the emphases on what Rebecca Ferguson calls “mother–daughter relationships” — it is this critic who comments “there is very little about relationships between mothers (or fathers) and living sons … much more about mothers and daughters: Connie and Mary Magna, Mavis and Sal, Delia and Patricia and Billie Delia, Pallas and Dee Dee, Seneca and Jean” (Ferguson 97, 240). Much evidence of this compatibility occurs after the women have been killed, and then are (presumably) resurrected.