"What would be on the other side?": spectrality and spirit work in Toni Morrison's Paradise.

In a 1983 interview, Toni Morrison told Nellie McKay: "I am very happy to hear that my books haunt. That is what I work very hard for, and for me it is an achievement when they haunt readers, as you say" (146). In her seventh novel, Paradise, Morrison returns to this thematic thread of haunting as she depicts supernatural events occurring in and around an all-black town in Oklahoma and a neighboring former convent school for Native American girls. The rigid town of Ruby and the amorphous Convent are opposed until a group of men decide to empty the Convent of its five female inhabitants. After the massacre of the five women, their bodies disappear, and the town must make sense of the attack and the subsequent strange disappearances. All of the characters in the novel are haunted by past events, from the Disallowings that result in Ruby's stagnant existence to the violent episodes each of the Convent women endures before their separate arrivals. Jacques Derrida has commented on the importance of spirits and haunting experiences: "If it--learning to live--remains to be done, it can happen only between life and death. Neither in life nor in death alone. What happens between two, and between all the 'two's' one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost.... So it would be necessary to learn spirits" (xviii; original italics). In order for the characters of Morrison's novel to "learn to live," they must negotiate borders not only between life and death and past and present but between all binaries. Throughout the novel, Morrison privileges liminality, as the Convent women, erased and negatively "ghosted" by the larger society, find empowerment through their communal spiritual experiences in the Convent, carving out spaces of negotiation that ultimately begin to heal not only the women but also many citizens of Ruby.

Paradise (1997) is the final book in Morrison's trilogy including Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992). When Paradise appeared, there was some critical confusion: "Although Toni Morrison herself projected her fifth, sixth and seventh novels as a trilogy, the publication of the latest work ... left reviewers and critics in somewhat of a disarray, either ignoring its relationship with Beloved and Jazz altogether or openly acknowledging that such a relationship was not at all clear" (Tally, "Reality" 35). The connections between Beloved and Jazz seemed clear, and upon publication of Jazz some critics searched for the "Beloved" character within the novel. In particular, Peter Nicholls and Sarah Appleton Aguiar both posited that Wild was a manifestation of Beloved, showing readers where she migrated after the events of the novel, and Nicholls read Joe Trace as the child of Paul D and Beloved, physically continuing that saga in a new generation. Once Paradise was published, however, the desire to find "Beloved" as a character in all three novels seemed difficult and the connections became more thematic and historical. Critics focused generally on Morrison's concern with representing all of America's history (from slavery through the civil rights era) and in particular on the transformation of the traditional Founding Fathers into the Old Fathers of Ruby expanding westward and attempting to create an ideal community) As Tammy Clewell notes, "While Morrison uses her fiction to recover black histories ignored by dominant Western traditions, she also manages to emphasize what has been irretrievably lost--those personal memories, communal traditions, and unrealized possibilities that have disappeared without benefit of permanent documentation" (130). Morrison's endeavor to provide a space for the African American voice and experience within American history dovetails neatly with one of Kathleen Brogans tenets of twentieth-century ethnic women's ghost stories: "In contemporary haunted literature, ghost stories are offered as an alternative--or challenge--to 'official,' dominant history" (17).

In analyzing Paradise as a "ghost story," I do not mean to suggest that it is preoccupied with conventional fireside stories of haunted houses or apparitions; rather, I rely on Derrida's definition of the spectral and Kathleen Brogan's use of the term "ghost" as a metaphor and "double-sided figuration of powerlessness and power" (Brogan 25). While Tommy Clewell does address the issue of haunting in Paradise, she focuses on rituals of mourning and possession in the novel's "therapeutic narration" (Clewell 130). My analysis centers more on the spectrality of Consolata and the Convent and the experiences of the "throwaway," or ghosted, women who live there (Paradise 4).

Using the term "ghost" as a metaphor for silenced characters, Brogan writes, "As an absence made present, the ghost can give expression to the ways in which women are rendered invisible in the public sphere.... [Women] are ghostly both because they are socially unrecognized and because they have acquired an illegitimate strength" (25). Abused and outcast women are silent, social ghosts haunting the margins of society, but within their marginality these characters can discover a power that is healing but not socially accepted. In her scathing 1998 review in the New York Times reducing Paradise to a battle between the sexes, Michiko Kakutani misses this transitional quality of Morrison's female characters, dismissing the Convent women as "two-dimensional cliche[s], thin and papery and disposable" (8). By contrast, rather than seeing these characters as cliches, I believe that these women are the focus of the novel and illustrate the power of women to work through a ghosted and powerless social position into a more balanced, liminal state. Illustrating the double identity of the ghosted Convent women, the men call their targets "detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door" (Paradise 4); the women are outside of the purview and acceptance of society, but they also have achieved a power that threatens the town. The rituals the women use to transcend their silenced identities appear to be witchcraft to the judgmental townspeople. The men justify the killing at first by reasoning that the women are witches, since they "don't need men and they don't need God" (276). The women are blamed for the gradual decline of the town and its people. The women achieve, however, a position of peace and integration that the rigid town of Ruby cannot understand. Additionally, it is only by working through their traumatic pasts within the confines of the spectral Convent that the women can regain a sense of personal identity and transcend the boundaries between "all the 'two's' one likes" (Derrida xviii).

If one looks at Paradise as a haunted novel, connections within the trilogy and Morrison's work as a whole become clearer. What if the specter of Beloved is a "type" of character readers should notice throughout the novels, not just as "the beloved," but rather as a figure of spectrality mediating personal and cultural history? (2) I believe that Morrison connects the novels in her trilogy not only through cultural history, but also through a preoccupation with spectrality and the haunting, disjointed natures of both personal and cultural history. If this is the case, then Paradise becomes the ultimate expression of healing through and in spite of haunting, continuing the work of Beloved as specter through to the end of the trilogy. Instead of creating confusion that "can only send ripples of reappraisal back over the rest of her oeuvre" (Bent 145), Paradise becomes a key to a continuing pattern of haunting and healing throughout Morrison's work from Song of Solomon (1977) through Paradise and on into Love (2003).

As a frame for analyzing the spectrality of Paradise, I read Beloved as a time-shifting, border-crossing character who embodies Derrida's "Spectrality Effect," or the "undoing [of] this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other" (Derrida 40). She is an intense spectral appearance of traumatic history in a physical form, a "becoming-body" (6), and through her very "spectrality" she merges and undoes rigid barriers between life and death and past and present. Beloved, through her use of 124 Bluestone Road as a venue for apparition, creates a spectral moment, which is "a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: 'now,' future present)" (xx). In this sense, Beloved is a timeless and subversive figure, able to cross and re-cross borders between binaries and to defy compartmentalization. As a specter, she serves as a translation point, a medium, between Sethe and Denver, processing the traumatic memories of slavery and Sethe's personal response to it.

If Beloved is interpreted as a child spirit attempting to deal with the trauma of slavery, then Consolata, (3) a character in Paradise, becomes a more mature spirit-guide with one foot in the real and another in the beyond, memorializing and healing the scars of slavery, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement through her interaction with the four women in the Convent and the townspeople of Ruby. Consolata's liminal identity becomes clear through her hybridity, her second sight and supernatural powers, and her close communication with spirits. Her living space, the Convent, is a spectral space where the resident women can turn their ghosted and powerless social positions into positions of healing and growth, dealing with their personal hauntings individually and as a group, and finally transitioning into a liminal space of transcendence between life and death, the real and the unreal. This transition, much like Beloved's questionable disappearance, does not end, but rather more powerfully continues the "spirit work" begun in the Convent.

Consolata's initial appearance, as she welcomes Mavis to the Convent, seems straightforward: she tells Mavis that there is no telephone and offers her coffee and food (Paradise 38). Soane, a visitor from Ruby, comes bearing a gift of sunglasses as a trade for the "you-know-what" mixture Connie keeps on hand for her (44). The typical scene of a traveler receiving help ends there, however. Mavis and the reader have no idea what Soane's pouch holds or who the mysterious "Mother" is under Connie's care (42-44). Moreover, while the reason is not explained at this point, Mavis feels trepidation when she sees Connie's eyes for the first time. When Connie takes off her sunglasses in the kitchen and Mavis looks, she is shocked: "It was the first time she saw the woman's face without the sunglasses. Quickly she looked back at the food and poked her fork into the bowl.... Mavis felt, but could not face, the woman's smile. Had she washed her hands before warming up the potatoes? Her smell was walnuts not pecans" (39). The sight of Connie's eyes startles Mavis enough that she suddenly becomes distrustful of Connie, her food, and her hospitality.

This initial meeting with Mavis opens the question of Connie's racial identity. Mavis seems unable to place her except to note that she has "[t]wo Hiawatha braids trail[ing] down her shoulders" (38). Consolata's very presence at the Convent results from a chance meeting with Mary Magna, an American nun of the "Sisters Devoted to Indian and Colored People." The location of this meeting is never specifically disclosed, although it seems to be somewhere in South America, perhaps Brazil. Sister Mary Magna cannot bear to put Connie in an orphanage because the two have formed a close connection, so Connie accompanies the Order to Oklahoma, where there is a convent school for Indian girls. Critics disagree on Connie's identity and origin, but her characteristics identify her as racially hybrid: "green eyes," "tea-colored hair," "smoky, sundown skin" (223). (4) She definitely feels a connection to the people of Ruby when she sees the horse race in town. She faintly hears a "Sha sha sha" and notes: "These men here were not dancing, however; they were laughing, running, calling to each other and to women doubled over in glee. And, although they were living here in a hamlet, not in a loud city full of glittering black people, Consolata knew she knew them" (226). This initial tenuous connection she feels as an observer becomes more concrete when she begins an affair with Deacon Morgan, Soane's husband.

In addition to her racially ambiguous identity, Connie seems otherworldly. Her movements are surreptitious; neither Soane nor Mavis actually notice Connie's return to the kitchen: "Neither one of them heard the bare feet plopping, and since the swinging doors had no sound, Connie's entrance was like an apparition" (43; italics added). Her actual physical presence at the Convent is called into question at the beginning of the novel by a slip in the thoughts of one of the invading men: "like the old Mother Superior and the servant who used to, still sold produce" (11; italics added). Moreover, once Connie loses the Mother Superior, she feels a hopeless lack of identity: "She had no identification, no insurance, no family, no work. Facing extinction, waiting to be evicted, wary of God, she felt like a curl of paper--nothing written on it lying in the corner of an empty closet" (247-48). At this moment, Connie is silenced like Brogan's metaphor of the ghost: she pictures herself as a blank piece of paper. She lacks connection to her past, and according to society, she does not exist, since she has no insurance or identification number.

Connie's eyes and her inability to bear sunlight further mark her as a ghostly character. Connie blames her age for her empty-looking eyes with just a "faint circle where the edge of the iris used to be," claiming her eyes are "old-lady wash-out color" (70, 47). Secretly, Connie blames the loss of her vision on her indiscretion with Deek Morgan, thinking of the affliction as a punishment from God (241). Even when the town's midwife, Lone, teaches Connie how to use her power of second sight to heal the dead, she views her "in sight" as evil and opposed to her Catholic faith. Not until Connie has accepted that "in sight" is "something God made free to anyone who wanted to develop it" can she mentor the castaway women living with her in the Convent (247). Connie's subject position becomes even more complicated when she realizes that "her colorless eyes saw nothing clearly except what took place in the minds of others" (248). Similar to Beloved, she can cross borders between individuals and actually know the thoughts of others. Because of her mind-reading ability, Connie can identify the specific trauma of another individual, but it is hard for her to know where her mind ends and the other's begins.

Once Connie has lost the Mother Superior, Deek, and her eyesight, she becomes deeply depressed and angry. As she whiles away her time, drinking in the cellar, she enters a "void" and a period of "ghostedness" that she must pass through in order to heal herself and the others constructively. Paula Gunn Allen identifies this space of erasure of identity as "the void," or "the shadow" (167). (5) For Allen, the void can be a place of female renewal and power: "Women return from the spirit lands to the crossroads over and over.... We who are the nobody are the alive and no one knows we're here. We are the invisible--and no one cares" (166-67). Women can find empowerment regardless of whether society takes notice of their presence. When Connie emerges from "the good clean darkness of the cellar," she receives a visit from a mysterious man with features similar to her own: "tea-colored hair," sunglasses, and eyes "round and green as new apples" (Paradise 221, 252). After this visit from a possible apparition, she changes, becoming more connected to the spirit world: "The way Connie nodded as though listening to someone near; how she said Uh huh or If you say so, answering questions no one had asked. Also she not only had stopped using sunglasses, but was dressed up, sort of, every day" (259). Connie no longer needs her sunglasses because she does not need to shade her eyes from the sun of the material world; she is fully immersed in the Convent's borderlessness. She tells the women at dinner, "I call myself Consolata Sosa. If you want to be here you do what I say. Eat how I say. Sleep when I say. And I will teach you what you are hungry for" (262). Connie has emerged from an erasure of identity to an awareness of purpose. No longer is she that "curl of paper--nothing written on it--lying in the corner of an empty closet" (247-48). She commands that her original name, Consolata Sosa, be used rather than the shortened version, Connie. She begins instructing the women in spirit work, since she inhabits a literal "in-between" space: "a melding of opposites--that is, of young/old and male/female--into a single identity" (Bouson 209). She has passed through the void, changing her silenced and rejected identity into one of power, and she has reclaimed her original persona. She has transformed from a ghosted woman into a spectral guide. Consolata and her place of residence are situated within the border between life and death and past and present.

The building in which the five women cross and re-cross the boundaries between life and death and past and present is a perfect space for this process. The Convent is indeed similar to 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved in that it is a way station, a crossroads, and a meeting place. In Beloved, although 124 is on a rural road outside Cincinnati, it is not separate from the surrounding community. Once Sethe arrives at 124, she feels not only what it is like "claiming ownership of [her] freed self," but she also experiences "days of company" (Beloved 95). Before Sethe's isolation, 124 is a communal place: "days of having women friends, a mother-in-law, and all her children together; of being part of a neighborhood" (173). The house is a meeting place where neighbors can freely discuss historical, political, and religious matters (173). After Sethe becomes an outcast, her house transforms into a spectral nexus between two worlds, the real and the spirit-worlds, and 124 becomes the focus of Beloved's spirit work. The house is a place where physical space and time are intermixed into what Sethe terms a "no-time" space, and Stamp Paid believes that he can hear the "mumbling of the black and angry dead" putting voice to "unspeakable thoughts" from outside the small house (191, 199).

Similar to 124, even though it is "seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other," the Convent is not completely secluded (Paradise 3). Townspeople come and passing truck drivers stop to buy produce, peppers, rhubarb pie, and barbecue sauce (242). Connie has friendships with Lone and Soane, and the Convent girls interact with other inhabitants of Ruby. For instance, K. D. and Gigi have an affair, and Menus arrives at the Convent drunk and recovers there under the care of the women. Arnette, worried about her pregnancy, which she has been trying to abort, makes a nocturnal visit to the Convent and Sweetie leaves her sick children and walks to the Convent for a respite from being a caretaker. Most important, the building becomes a spiritual haven for four young women, each of whom has been damaged, leaving them unable to cope with life outside the Convent. Even though they can leave, they eventually return to stay.

The building itself has a mottled and confused past superficially exhibited in the nuns' attempts to demolish all traces of its spotty and racy former owner. The embezzler who built the house and lost it when he was arrested by Northern lawmen had created a gentlemen's club complete with "female torso candleholders," "nursing cherubim," suggestive doorknobs and water spigots, and "nude statuary" (72). Gigi finds that the remains of this decor and these traces represent items the nuns did not remove or simply coated with thick paint. Connie notes that her first tasks upon entering the Convent were to "smash offending marble figures and tend bonfires of books, crossing herself when naked lovers blew out of the fare and had to be chased back into the flame" (225). On top of the embezzler's remaining touches are the improvements the nuns made to make the house habitable and functional as a convent school for native girls. Upon entering the Convent, Gigi "immediately [recognizes] the conversion of the dining room into a schoolroom; the living room into a chapel; and the game room alteration to an office" (72). The house's past and present are actually layered upon each other on its walls and in its rooms: "The Convent itself represents history as a densely layered palimpsest, a history simultaneously hidden and revealed" (Krumholz 29).

Besides its physical properties as way station, shelter, and building of vice, virtue, and education, the Convent is also situated between the human and spiritual realms: a spectral place that "no longer belongs to time" (Derrida xx). When the nine men from Ruby first arrive to ambush the women, they see the Convent in the fog and "how [it] floated, dark and malevolently disconnected from God's earth" (Paradise 18). This image is negative and dangerous from the hunters' perspective, but it places the Convent in an otherworldly space that, at the same time, is still earthly and visible to the men.

Although the building is home to various supernatural occurrences, these instances are not charged either with fear or malevolence. From Mavis's arrival, she can hear children's voices: "In fact she had an outer-rim sensation that the kitchen was crowded with children--laughing? singing?--two of whom were Merle and Pearl" (41). She tracks her twins' growth as the years pass and leaves "ice cream sticks" and Christmas presents out for them (258). Additionally, as she continues her life at the Convent, Mavis experiences night visits from a male figure. At first, she describes the visits as a nightmarish lion cub attacking her throat, but these feelings are not very removed from her abusive sexual experiences with her husband and her fear of him and of her own children. As she becomes more independent, the visits change from frightening to welcome: "Perhaps she ought to admit, confess, to Connie that adding the night visits to laughing children and a 'mother' who loved her shaped up like a happy family" (171). Mavis feels comfortable in the Convent because she has found a loving family, and she does not mind that this family consists of two ghost children, a male apparition, and a spirit guide.

While many critics discuss the Convent as a liminal location, particularly in its visibly layered past, Linda J. Krumholz uses the paradigm of the "nomad" to describe the Convent women "as associated with movement, multiple meanings, and shared labor and goods" (25). (6) This fluid existence is in opposition to the more static atmosphere of Ruby, which Krumholz associates "with fixed authority, unitary meaning, and individual acquisition and control" (25). Contrasting the two locations, she points to the scene when the men discover a cross in the Convent with the figure of Christ removed: "Morrison opens up this space to reimagine ideas of sacrifice and redemption, but also to reexamine the ideas embodied by the cross itself as a symbol of doubleness, of human and divine love, of multiplicity and movement rather than purity and singularity" (26). The presence of this slightly altered cross in the Convent identifies the building as a liminal, transformative space, a space antithetical to the town.

The cross also is connected to a previous scene in Ruby. At K. D. and Arnette's wedding, a disagreement over the meaning of God's love and the cross occurs. The Reverend Pulliam tells the congregation that "Love is divine only and difficult always," while Richard Misner silently holds up the cross at the front of the church, hoping the people will see that "not only is God interested in you; He is you" (Paradise 141, 147; original italics). To Krumholz, this scene indicates that Morrison is tweaking the religious symbol: "Morrison uses multiple interpretations to counter the ideal of purity, to reconstruct the cross as a symbol of the embrace of difference" (27). Since all of the participants have divergent ideas as to what the cross symbolizes, Krumholz's observation would appear to hold. The congregation's acceptance of "difference" is, however, unclear. Steward Morgan thinks that "a cross was no better than the bearer," condemning the object for the sins of the wearer, and it is clear that his twin brother is ready to stop Misner's show, ending all interpretation (Paradise 154). The desire to halt the demonstration is characteristic of the twins, Steward and Deacon, since they have financial and ideological control over Ruby.

Unlike the Convent, the town is physically built on literal "cross" roads, but the transitional quality of the Convent is absent. As Ruby grows, the town continues existing roads, giving the extensions new names: "So St. John Street on the east became Cross John on the west. St. Luke became Cross Luke. The sanity of this pleased most everybody" (114). Krumholz notes this ingenuity, and she reads it as the creation of both a literal and a figurative crossroads: "Morrison reconfigures the cross as a crossroads, a place that signifies movement, change, conjunction, meetings, and choices" (27). Conversely, I see this use of the cross as grid-like and stationary. The streets named after the cross are only physically crossing, and the town is rigid and unyielding. The conventionality of the naming is illustrated by the equation of sanity with acceptance of the procedure: "The sanity of this pleased most everybody" (114). There is no connection, meeting, or change in Ruby; for that, citizens must visit the Convent.

Indeed, the town is extremely rigid in its ideologies and the protection of the "official history" of its founding. While compiling her genealogical project, Pat Best realizes that the history of the town is based upon isolation and exclusion resulting from two Disallowings. The first Disallowing took place during the trek from Louisiana and Mississippi to Oklahoma in the late nineteenth century. The pilgrims who would later found Haven were turned away by lighter-skinned African Americans at a town called Fairly: "This time the clarity was clear: for ten generations they had believed the division they fought to close was free against slave and rich against poor. Usually, but not always, white against black. Now they saw a new separation: light-skinned against black" (194). The second Disallowing, the violence visited upon returning black soldiers from World War II, initiated the move from the dying Haven to a more isolated site: Ruby. Pat notes, "And just as the original wayfarers never sought another colored townsite after being cold-shouldered at the first, this generation joined no organization, fought no civil battle" (194). To keep outsiders away, the town adopts an unspoken rule of blood purity, and Pat believes that this rule caused her mother's death. According to Pat, none of the men would go for a doctor when complications from childbirth arose because "they looked down on you, Mama, I know it, and despised Daddy for marrying a wife with no last name, a wife without people, a wife of sunlight skin, a wife of racial tampering" (197).

This strict control over the citizens of Ruby is enforced silently yet dangerously by the ruling eight-rock elite. Pat uses the term "eight-rock" to denote skin color of a "blue-black" and the "deep deep level in the coal mines" (193). Through legal marriages and secret "takeovers" of young girls, widows, and widowers, the bloodlines have been kept as pure as possible. Outsiders and their children are shunned, and townspeople whose spouses are not of the "eight-rock" line are disciplined through silence and isolation. The town Christmas play even conflates the biblical Christmas story with the first Disallowing, and one by one as the bloodlines of certain families are tainted, those representatives are removed from the play (216). Richard Mimer notes the preoccupation with past offenses and its connection to present stagnation: "Over and over and with the least provocation, they pulled from their stock of stories tales about the old folks, their grands and great-grands; their fathers and mothers.... But why were there no stories to tell of themselves? About their own lives they shut up. Had nothing to say, pass on" (161).

In a move similar to the insistence on controlling the meaning of the cross, blood purity, and history, the conflict over the meaning of the fading words on the communal Oven illustrates the rigidity of Ruby. From the original settlers of Haven through the next generation in Ruby, the families have shared a communal Oven, and Steward and Deacon's grandfather welded a statement on the front of it that has since faded. While the older generation believes that the sentence was a warning: "Beware the Furrow of His Brow," the younger generation, with Misner's support, wants to change it to "Be the Furrow of His Brow" (86-87). The older generation believes that the statement is a sacred command, while the younger generation, aware of the civil rights movement outside of Ruby's limits, wishes to change it to reflect a more cooperative stance with God. Just like their control over the bloodlines and Ruby's "official" history, Deacon and Steward publicly swear to protect, with violence if necessary, the Oven's command. Reminiscent of Misner's observation that the people have no stories of their own and have only the town's history, Deacon tells the young people: "So understand me when I tell you nobody is going to come along some eighty years later claiming to know better what men who went through hell to learn knew" (86). Steward gives a more edged response: "If you, any one of you, ignore, change, take away, or add to the words in the mouth of that Oven, I will blow your head off just like you was a hood-eye snake" (87).

Consolata's ritual work with the women in the Convent stands in direct opposition to the harsh control of Ruby. The four women who have joined her in the Convent are each damaged by society. Mavis loses her twins when they suffocate in the hot car while she picks up hot dogs from the store. Her neighbors and the journalist who comes to interview her seem sympathetic, but they are titillated by the shock of the tragedy, for "the shine of excitement in their eyes was clear" (21). In addition to the loss of her twins, Mavis suffers under a domineering, abusive husband and believes that her remaining children have sided with him in order to kill her. When she runs away, stealing the Cadillac, her mother is unsupportive, so Mavis heads west and ends up at the Convent, where she feels a connection to Connie and decides to stay. Gigi is also wandering the country, afraid to return home to her grandfather with nothing and haunted by her memory of a boy shot at a march in which she participated. She recalls "the boy spitting blood into his hands" (64). Seneca is a quiet girl who, as a child, was abandoned by her mother, a woman she had thought was her sister. As she struggles through foster homes, she marks her pain onto her skin with a razor, making intricate maps of scars across her body. Once her boyfriend is jailed, she wanders aimlessly and consents to spend three weeks in "abject humiliation," catering to the needs of an older socialite, Norma Keene Fox, for five hundred dollars. At one point, she is described as a "shadow" (126). Finally, Pallas, or Divine as the women call her, is the daughter of a wealthy father and an artist mother. When she visits her mother with her older boyfriend, the two older adults begin an open affair. During Pallas's escape from her mother's home, she is chased and possibly raped by a gang of young men. Each of the women is running from a traumatic memory of violence or betrayal, or both. When they attempt to communicate with the outside world, they are ignored or told to leave, which is what occurs when the four attend Arnette's wedding reception. They remain at the Convent because they have nowhere to go and no one to return to, and they haunt the building, each wrapped in her own painful memories.

In her essay "'Passing On' Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison's Paradise," Sarah Appleton Aguiar posits that most of the women may already be dead when they arrive at the Convent. For instance, Sal might have killed Mavis with the razor, and that is why Mavis had no trouble leaving the home, or Pallas might have drowned when she was hiding underwater from the rape gang (514). I do not agree that these women could be dead before arriving, since Mavis finds out that there is a warrant for her arrest, and Pallas does contact her father and briefly leaves the Convent. I read the women as physically alive upon arrival, but lacking agency and social power. They have been weakened and silenced by the trauma they have experienced and are social ghosts. When they arrive at the Convent, their lives are viewed as worthless by the inhabitants of Ruby and by most of the people they have encountered.

Although the women are silenced as a result of confrontation with and betrayal by societal institutions, Consolata helps them work through their ghosted states, moving from "powerlessness" to "power" (Brogan 25). They move from a negative form of erased identity to a state that allows them control over the past and direction of the present. As Consolata helps the women to "unghost" themselves, through engagement and connection with each other, their own pasts, and the afterlife, boundaries begin to dissolve. By privileging liminality and having the women make templates of their bodies on the cellar floor, she blurs the line between the representational and the actual. After Consolata shares her vision of her homeland and of a singing woman named Piedade, the women engage in loud dreaming as they lie within the sketched outlines of their bodies: "And it was never important to know who said the dream or whether it had meaning. In spite of or because their bodies ache, they step easily into the dreamer's tale" (Paradise 264). (7) Shrieks and murmurs, accusations and love all mingle in the space of the Convent cellar. The loud dreaming allows each woman to transcend normal boundaries between self and other and transcend time as each individual steps into the others' lives. For example, all of the women experience exactly what it was like for Mavis when her twins died in the hot Cadillac. Each one feels as if she were actually there in Mavis's place. The women begin to mark not only their painful pasts, but also personal, identifying markers on the templates in the cellar. Seneca begins to draw cuts on her image's skin rather than slicing her own, and "they spoke to each other about what had been dreamed and what had been drawn" (265). Each woman reclaims her past and faces it without feeling threatened or paralyzed.

Like Consolata's previous descent into the cellar/void, the women find strength to overcome their painful pasts in the cellar through loud dreaming episodes. When Soane sees the women after the sessions, she notes: "the Convent women were no longer haunted" (266). Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar write, "In their ghost stories, women writers seem more likely to portray natural and supernatural experience along a continuum. Boundaries between the two are not absolute but fluid, so that the supernatural can be accepted, connected with, reclaimed, and can often possess a quality of familiarity" (12). Although the rituals that Morrison's female characters complete are supernatural in nature, the women do not view them as out of the ordinary once the healing begins. Power emanates from the interstitial spaces, and the Convent cellar is no exception. According to Allen, "In the void reside the keepers of wisdom.... Only the disappeared can enter the Void and ... emerge with a small but vital pot, a design that signifies the power of meaning and of life, and a glowing ember that gives great light" (167). The Convent women enter the void of the cellar ghosted, social outcasts and leave as well adjusted individuals. Not only are they not haunted by painful pasts, but "life, real and intense," shifted down to the cellar (Paradise 264). These female characters have entered Allen's void and returned with knowledge and meaning, having learned how to integrate within a community while simultaneously facing and accepting the past.

This meaning makes them a danger to the men of Ruby, who despise the women as witches and blame them for all of the town's problems. During their meeting before going to the Convent to massacre the women, they list grievances:

   Listen, nothing ever happened around here like what's going on now.
   Before those heifers came to town this was a peaceable kingdom. The
   others before them at least had some religion. These here sluts out
   there by themselves never step foot in church and I bet you a
   dollar to a fat nickel they ain't thinking about one either. They
   don't need men and they don't need God. (276)

Because the women have no use for Ruby's rigid controls, the men view them as threats, and then proceed to blame the Convent women for all of the town's problems, even though the issues result from the harsh controls the men themselves have created and enforced. (8)

The men are so set on interpreting the women as evil that they blatantly misinterpret "evidence" in the Convent while they are stalking the women. They see the lipsticked message from Seneca's mother as "a letter written in blood so smeary its satanic message cannot be deciphered," and they are "alarmed" by a "series of infant booties and shoes ribboned to a cord hanging from a crib in the last bedroom they enter" (7). Far from proof of satanic ceremonies, these objects are evidence of Pallas's child. The women's abilities to cross borders and function in spaces of healing identify them to the men as having "acquired an illegitimate strength" (Brogan 25). For the men, the women are still ghosted, "throwaway people," or at the worst witches, who need to be exterminated (Paradise 4).

Although the men do shoot and kill the five Convent women, as witnesses attest, the disappearance of the Convent women's bodies and their subsequent reappearances as revenants to loved ones imply that death cannot stop their work. As Krumholz notes, "the women have moved beyond the boundaries of representation into new possibilities of knowledge and imagination" (30). In a scene reminiscent of Beloved's questionable disappearance, Billie Delia wonders, "When will they return?" She does not believe that the Convent women are truly dead, but "out there, darkly burnished, biding their time, brass-metaling their nails, filing their incisors--but out there" (Paradise 308). She hopes for a "miracle" and the possibility that the town will learn a lesson about rigidity and power.

Though she does not know it, Billie Delia's wish for a miracle comes true for the women's families. The women have not been destroyed. Unhampered by time or physical space, they are simply biding time until they are needed again. Each one appears to a loved one: Mavis has breakfast with her oldest daughter, who she thought had been trying to kill her; Gigi sees her father after the commutation of his death sentence; Pallas and her child visit her mother; and Seneca sees her mother in a parking lot. While Seneca and Pallas do not achieve the same peace of mind that Mavis and Gigi do, their work is continuing beyond the grave. Readers are reminded of the coda to Beloved: "Sometimes the photograph of a close friend or relative--looked at too long--shifts, and something more familiar than the dear face moves there. They can touch it if they like, but don't, because they know things will never be the same if they do" (Beloved 275). Beloved may have disappeared from 124, but she is not completely gone. She can reappear any time her cultural work is needed for anyone who may be disconnected from the past or the surrounding community. The Convent women have achieved a similar state of being in that they are free to move wherever they are needed for healing, and this open connection to another world touches a few people besides Billie Delia and the women's loved ones, including Deek Morgan, Richard Misner, and Anna Flood.

The inability of the townspeople to pin down exactly what occurred at the Convent marks a change from rigidity to a more liminal state. Misner notes, "The future panted at the gate. Roger Best will get his gas station and the connecting roads will be laid. Outsiders will come and go" (Paradise 306). Isolation will give way to connection and movement. Even the stories circulating about the incident at the Convent are manifold. Unlike the single, town-approved message concerning the Disallowing and the communal Oven, no one has the correct tale. Lone is frustrated "by the way the story was being retold; how people were changing it to make themselves look good" (297). Misner cannot understand the stories the other two ministers tell because "neither had decided on the meaning of the ending" (297). Instead of silence, "the difficulties churned and entangled everybody" (298). There are rumblings of both disapproval and agreement as "all the participants' brows are furrowed in hermeneutic concentration" (Page 638).

This openness to mediation and interpretation affects Deacon Morgan the most intensely. He begins the work of making Ruby's roads into an actual crossroads of transformation by walking the "cross" streets barefoot to Misner's home for a confessional discussion. In contrast to the single-minded resolve he and his twin brother felt before the Convent attack, Deek is now unwilling to share Steward's interpretation of the killings. He sees that he has "become what the Old Fathers cursed: the kind of man who set himself up to judge, rout and even destroy, the needy, the defenseless, the different" (Paradise 302). His part in the attack on the Convent women preys on his mind, showing him his dangerous single-mindedness. Indeed, his transformation begins when he encounters Consolata right before Steward kills her.

Just as Consolata serves as a spectral bridge to another realm between life and death for the four women under her care, she also gives Deacon a glimpse of this other plane of existence, and it is this peek at the unknown that initiates his remorse. When Consolata attempts to stop the men from firing on the three women who are running away from the building, Deacon is startled. Consolata says, "You're back" to something "above the heads of the men," probably her spirit guide. After she does this, Deacon "needs the sunglasses, but they are nestled in his shirt pocket," and "he looks at Consolata and sees in her eyes what has been drained from them and from himself as well" (289). Like Consolata before her "conversion," Deacon needs sunglasses, but he needs them to shield his eyes from this other spiritual, liminal plane. Her ability to move among states of existence, time, and identity affects him, but only for a moment before she is shot and killed by Steward. Her death, though, does not end this effect.

Between Consolata's death and his visit to Misner, Deacon feels isolated and incomplete since he is no longer close to his identical twin Steward and cannot communicate to his wife what has happened to him. At one point, he realizes that he can never speak of his feelings surrounding Consolata's death because he would have to tell Soane:

   that green springtime had been sapped away; that outside of that
   loss, she was grand, more beautiful than he believed a woman could
   be; that her untamable hair framed a face of planes so sharp he
   wanted to touch; that after she spoke, the smile that followed made
   the sun look like a fool. He might tell his wife that he thought at
   first that she was speaking to him--'You're back'--but knew now it
   wasn't so. And that instantly he longed to know what she saw, but
   Steward, who saw nothing or everything, stopped them dead lest they
   know another realm. (301)

Justine Tally reads this passage as a return of Connie as a revenant to Soane ("Reality" 40), but it is actually Deacon's remembering the moments before Connie's death and his confused emotions. At first, Deacon is troubled by his surviving inmate feelings for Connie, and he wishes to hide from Soane his desire for Connie's exclamation to be a response to his return. By the end of the passage, however, he is contrasting Steward's binary thinking--he sees "nothing or everything"--with Connie's liminal transcendence of boundaries. He receives a glimpse of "another realm," a place between "nothing or everything" that neither Steward nor the old Deacon could understand. Now Deacon wants illumination, and he will try to understand his transformation in his talks with Misner and his new independence from his brother.

In addition to Deacon Morgan, both Richard Misner and Anna Flood are affected by the fleeting view of another realm when they visit the Convent, hoping to discover some clue as to what went on and what happened to the bodies. While standing near Consolata's garden chair, they concurrently experience a vision: Misner sees a window and Anna sees a door (305). Although Philip Page interprets this scene as Misner and Anna's "leap beyond the ordinary senses, beyond the usual binary oppositions between the real and the magical and between life and death" (642), the two do not come to that conclusion on their own. The experience becomes a debate over whether it is a window or a door, not over the meaning or where it could lead: "They expanded on the subject: What did a door mean? what a window? focusing on the sign rather than the event; excited by the invitation rather than the party. They knew it was there. Knew it so well they were transfixed for a long moment before they backed away and ran to the car" (Paradise 305). The two run back to their reality and then proceed to banter lightheartedly over the sign rather than the meaning, which is similar to the town's arguments over the sentence on the Oven. Instead of making a leap, they wish to "avoid reliving the shiver or saying out loud what they were wondering. Whether through a door needing to be opened or a beckoning window already raised, what would happen if you entered? What would be on the other side? What on earth would it be? What on earth?" (305).

Later, during his funeral sermon for Save-Marie, Misner begins to move through the opening, but it is with confusion. He sees the window again in the little coffin: "he saw the window in the garden, felt it beckon toward another place--neither life nor death--but there, just yonder, shaping thoughts he did not know he had" (307). At that moment he is overcome with emotion, speaking of Save-Marie's short but loved existence on earth: "He [God] is with us always, in life, after it and especially in between, lying in wait for us to know the splendor" (307). Misner is "disturbed by what he had said," most likely because as a minister, he has been trained to see God in life's journey and afterward, but never between the two (307). After seeing the window in the garden and glimpsing where Connie, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas exist, he can say that God is present always, but "especially in between" the two levels.

Unlike Deacon, Misner, and Anna, who receive glimpses of what Page identifies as the "transcendent realm where Milkman leaps in Song of Solomon, Son runs in Tar Baby, Beloved disappears in Beloved, and Wild and Golden Grey reside in Jazz" the reader actually sees this transcendent realm, or paradise, in Paradise (642). Geoffrey Bent views the end of the novel as supernatural overkill: "Current fashion has deemed magic de rigueur for visionary novels ... [and] [t]he plethora of ghosts and spectral figures here more than fill the paranormal quota" (147). Bent misses, however, the importance of the spectral presences, Instead of being a supernatural overload or a "surreal set-piece [that] feels like a hasty after-thought" (Kakutani 8), the view of paradise at the end is the key to the novel. There is an image of a young woman with "tea brown hair" and "emerald eyes" sitting on a beach with a singing woman named Piedade. (9) This young woman appears to be Consolata reconnecting with the singing woman she described earlier to her four proteges (Paradise 264). The final image of the two women on the beach is not of a perfect place: "Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf" (318). Similar to the Convent women's reclamation of their haunted pasts, these are images of detritus redeemed in that a broken radio can still "play" and "trash" can "gleam." Also, the relationship pictured is one of healing and love: "There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade's song is all about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had: of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home--the ease of coming back to love begun" (318). This space seems to be simultaneously earthly, spiritual, and timeless as the two women remember events that might not ever have happened and share each other's memories in a close connection.

While the women sit, a ship sails into port: "Another ship perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise" (318). These dosing words in the novel regarding this space echo the work that Consolata and her charges began in the Convent, only now they have been freed to continue the work unfettered by questions of reality, life, or death. This space is a true crossroads of physical and temporal space: a space of spirits.

Regarding the importance of living with spirits, Derrida notes: "learning to live ... can happen only between life and death, [and] ... can only maintain itself with some ghost" (xviii). This "learning to live" is the process Consolata used to lead the Convent women into a more connected and balanced existence, and it is the process Piedade and others in the pictured paradise are working to continue. Openness to specters or alternate modes of existence and thought, and a movement beyond binary structures is mediated through this space that Deacon, Misner, and Anna could see but not enter. This space is not only transcendent, as it functions between the actual and the magical, life and afterlife, and past and present, but its work is "especially in between," as Mimer observed. Souls like Piedade, Connie, the Convent women, and also Beloved, can enter and leave at will. They move among humanity and help individuals first to memorialize and reconnect to their traumatic pasts, and then to reintegrate into their community.

Derrida posits that "being-with specters would also be ... a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations" (xix; original italics). This concern with the spectral and the flexibility of time and reality recurs in Morrison's fiction, where it often connects with "memory," "inheritance," and "generations." Spectral figures, or characters open to spiritual realms, include Pilate, Son, Beloved, Wild and Dorcas, the Convent women, and even the narrator of Morrison's Love. Each of these figures can cross borders and serve as a guide for other characters: Pilate guides Milkman; Son attempts to help Jadine and finally returns to the supernatural, liminal side of the island; Beloved interacts with Sethe, Denver, and Paul D; and Wild and Dorcas both affect Joe, Violet, and Felice. In Love, Morrison has a spectral narrator reminiscent of the disembodied narrator of Jazz so that the novels can be read as spectral spaces. Without these boundary-busting characters, who disregard physical and temporal limits, these novels would lack the individual and communal healing that takes place.

In her essay "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation," Morrison defines ancestors as "not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom" (343). She asserts that the absence of an ancestor is "frightening" and that "when you kill the ancestor you kill yourself" (343-44). She writes, "I want to point out the dangers, to show that nice things don't always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no historical connection" (344). Building on this description, I read the guides of her novels not just as shamans or as members of an older generation, but rather as specters actively haunting characters and repairing mental damage and separation. Each specter serves as a bridge for the people she haunts, connecting individuals to cultural and personal history and generations to one another. The "endless work" the souls "were created to do down here in paradise" is to create historical and personal connection (Paradise 318). Paradise is a glimpse for readers of this space that allows the Convent women to keep working after death. Consolata serves as a spectral bridge for the women so that they can work through their traumatic memories and connect with each other, their loved ones, and their pasts. In a similar manner, the tantalizing glimpses of paradise available to Deacon, Misner, and Anna imply that these characters might also be ready to experience healing through the legacy of Consolata's work and the possibility of the Convent women's return. For that to happen, they must enter the door or window and find out "what would be on the other side" (305).

Works Cited

Aguiar, Sarah Appleton. "'Everywhere and Nowhere': Beloved's 'Wild' Legacy in Toni Morrison's Jazz." Notes on Contemporary Literature 25.4 (September 1995): 11-12.

--."'Passing On' Death: Stealing Life in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 38.3 (Fall 2004): 513-19.

Allen, Paula Gunn. Off the Reservation. Boston: Beacon P, 1998.

Bent, Geoffrey. "Less Than Divine: Toni Morrison's Paradise." Southern Review 35.1 (Winter 1999): 145-49.

Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY P, 2000.

Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1998.

Carpenter, Lynette, and Wendy K. Kolmar, eds. Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991.

Clewell, Tammy. "From Destructive to Constructive Haunting in Toni Morrison's Paradise." West Coast Line: Writing Images Criticism 36.1 (Spring 2002): 130-42.

Dalsgard, Katrine. "The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African) American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 35.2 (Summer 2001): 233-48.

Davidson, Rob. "Racial Stock and 8-Rocks: Communal Historiography in Toni Morrison's Paradise." Twentieth Century Literature 47.3 (Fall 2001): 355-73.

Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. 1993. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Fraile-Marcos, Ana Maria. "Hybridizing the 'City upon a Hill' in Toni Morrison's Paradise." MELUS 28.4 (Winter 2003): 3-33.

Gauthier, Mami. "The Other Side of Paradise: Toni Morrison's (Un)Making of Mythic History." African American Review 39.3 (Fall 2005): 395-414.

Higgins, Therese E. "Paradise: The Final Frontier." Religiosity, Cosmology, and Folklore: The African Influences in the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Routledge, 2001. 119-39.

Kakutani, Michiko. "Worthy Women, Unredeemable Men." The New York Times 6 Jan. 1998: 8.

Kearly, Peter R. "Toni Morrison's Paradise and the Politics of Community." Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.2 (Summer 2000): 9-16.

Krumholz, Linda. "Reading and Insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 36.1 (Spring 2002): 21-34.

McKay, Nellie. "An Interview With Toni Morrison." 1983. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. 138-55.

McKee, Patricia. "Geographies of Paradise." The New Centennial Review 3.1 (Spring 2003): 197-223.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987. New York: Plume, 1998.

--.Paradise. 1997. New York: Plume, 1999.

--."Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mari Evans. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984. 339-45.

Nicholls, Peter. "The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison." Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader. Ed. Sue Vice. Cambridge, UK: Polity P, 1996. 50-74.

Page, Philip. "Furrowing All the Brows: Interpretation and the Transcendent in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 35.4 (Winter 2001): 637-49.

Read, Andrew." 'As if word-magic had anything to do with the courage it took to be a man': Black Masculinity in Toni Morrison's Paradise." African American Review 39.4 (Winter 2005): 527-40.

Tally, Justine. "The Nature of Erotica in Toni Morrison's Paradise and the Em-body-ment of Feminist Thought." Eros USA: Essays on the Culture and Literature of Desire. Eds. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and Jopi Nyman. Gdansk, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego, 2005. 60-74.

--."Reality and Discourse in Toni Morrison's Trilogy: Testing the Limits." Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands. Amsterdam: Rodopi B. V., 2002. 35-49.

Widdowson, Peter. "The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Paradise." Journal of American Studies 35.2 (August 2001): 313-35.

Notes

(1.) For discussions of the Founding Fathers/Old Fathers/New Fathers connection and the book's interaction with "mainstream" American history, see in particular Widdowson, Dalsgard, Davidson, Kearly, Read, and Gauthier. The date of the Convent massacre, July 1976, is also a point of comparison between Ruby and the larger context of American history.

(2.) Citing Morrison's original pre-trilogy wish to write a novel on the nature of "the beloved," Bouson identities Connie's work with the Convent women as a search for and acceptance of" 'the beloved': the authentic and divine part of the self hidden behind the socially constructed layers of the personality" (209).

(3.) Throughout the novel, Consolata is addressed as "Connie" by most characters. When she claims her identity and her past, she insists on her full name: Consolata Sosa. I use both "Connie" and "Consolata" throughout this essay to refer to her, depending upon what scene of the book I am analyzing.

(4.) Most critics read Connie as an individual of mixed race from South America, but there are other views. Kearly identifies Connie as a "baptized Native American woman" (12) perhaps left over from the Convent's school days, even though in the text Connie arrives in America with Mary Magna, and additionally, Connie claims no connection to the Native American girls in the Convent school: "She attended classes with the Indian girls but formed no attachments to them" (Paradise 225). Higgins and Page acknowledge Connie's affinity for the people of Ruby by identifying her as a "Black Madonna" (133) and a figuration of the "African deity Legba" (641), respectively. Clewell, however, believes Mary Magna rescued Connie from "a squalid life in Portugal" (137). Consolata's identity is remarkably amorphous and difficult to pin down within the text.

(5.) While Allen is a Native American critic and Off the Reservation focuses on the interplay between the Native American and Western worlds, she does discuss female writers of many backgrounds in her chapter "Thus Spake Pocahontas," making the claim that their work shares a connection to the "Void" and to each other through their multivocality and boundary-crossing emphases. She also comments on African American writers including Toni Cade Bamhara, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Morrison. Additionally, Native Americans certainly play a role in Paradise, particularly in the liminality of place and history connected to the Convent and to the land that Ruby occupies.

(6.) Dalsgard describes the Convent as "indefinable" (243), and McKee notes that it is a space of "borderlessness" (210). In a fuller discussion of the Convent's liminal positioning, Fralle-Marcos posits that it is a manifestation of Bhabha's "third space" and a metaphor for purgatory (22-23). Widdowson, Tally, and Kearly all read the Convent as a site of female power and security, describing it as a retreat from the patriarchal (330), a "woman's space as a safety zone" ("Nature" 63), and a "strong maternal space of community" (12), respectively.

(7.) Since Piedade actually appears later in the text, I interpret this as evidence of Consolata's connection to the space between life and death at this point. She already is aware of the destination she shares with these women and is foreshadowing rather than simply having a vision of an ideal life or of a mother figure.

(8.) The attack on the Convent bears a striking resemblance to other witch-hunts, particularly the episode in Salem, Massachusetts, in that the victims are on the outskirts of a highly structured society and become scapegoats for the mistakes of the accusers. Lone sardonically notes that Sargeant Person is supporting the posse because he wants to add the Convent land to his neighboring farm (277).

(9.) Interpretations of Piedade vary. Krumholz and Page read Piedade as an imagined lost mother figure for Consolata, and Page notes that the end of the novel is a "mystical transcendence beyond life and death, as Connie seems to blend into her idyllic visions and each of the four Convent women is spiritually reunited with her family" (646). Tally reads Piedade as a metaphorical mother in the vein of "Irigaray's feminine 'Myth of Origin'" ("Nature" 70). Widdowson views Piedade as a dream-figure and believes the "real ending" of the novel occurs earlier In the "Save-Marie" section before the women appear to their family members (333-34).