ABSTRACT
Toni Morrison most recent novel, Paradise, the early American "Puritan" trajectories of purity and adultery, foundings and flights, are seen interpellated in, enforced on, enigmatically repeated in, the African-American story, with its own triumphant and yet cautionary tale of a city upon a hill. One of the original "captivity narratives", American-African slavery is both at odds with and yet deeply pliable to the "salvation history" of Protestant Christianity, which in its New England form went toward what Sacvan Bercovitch argues was the "Puritan origin" of the American self. The urgencies of the African-American story, and its address to the American idea, direct Morrison's topography in the novel Paradise. To the citizens of Ruby, implicated in the folds of the Puritan origins of the American idea, the Convent also speaks an ancient spell of witch-sponsored heterodox sexuality-secret, underground, alternative, a polymorphous carnality licensed by the pagan superstitions of Catholic incarnation.
