Ben relates to Plot Summary He convinced his mama to put her house on the line to keep him out of jail and then skipped town, forcing Naylor wrote "The Women of Brewster Place" while she was a student, finishing it the very month she graduated in 1981. Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. But even Ciel, who doesn't know what has happened by the wall, reports that she has been dreaming of Ben and Lorraine. It just happened. Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. The men in the story exhibit cowardice, alcoholism, violence, laziness, and dishonesty. When he jumps bail, she loses the house she had worked thirty years to own, and her long journey from Tennessee finally ends in a small apartment on Brewster Place. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a fork in an electrical socket and died while he was fighting with his wife Ciel, turns out to be a closeted homosexual. "I was able to conquer those things through my craft. In Bonetti's, An Interview with Gloria Naylor, Naylor said "one character, one female protagonist, could not even attempt to represent the riches and diversity of the black female experience." dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party. Basil 2 episodes, 1989 Bebe Drake Cleo To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" There are also a greedy minister, a street gang member who murders his own brother, a playwright and community activist and a mentally handicapped boy who is a genius at playing blues piano. Joel Hughes, "Naylor Discusses Race Myths and Life," Yale Daily News, March 2, 1995. http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper. a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low , and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed " Hughes's poem and King's sermon can thus be seen as two poles between which Naylor steers. Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. Brewster Place, carries it within her, and shares its tragedies., Everyone in the community knows that this block party is significant and important because it is a way of moving forward after the terrible tragedy of Lorraine and Ben. The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." Linda Labin asserts in Masterpieces of Women's Literature, "In many ways, The Women of Brewster Place may prove to be as significant in its way as Southern writer William Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Lorraine, we are told, "was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. Having recognized Lorraine as a human being who becomes a victim of violence, the reader recoils from the unfamiliar picture of a creature who seems less human than animal, less subject than object. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. In the case of rape, where a violator frequently co-opts not only the victim's physical form but her power of speech, the external manifestations that make up a visual narrative of violence are anything but objective. 49-64. For a week after Ben's death it rains continuously, and although they will not admit it to each other, all the women dream of Lorraine that week. Annie Gottlieb, a review in The New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1982, p. 11. "The Men of Brewster Place" include Mattie Michael's son, Basil, who jumped bail and left his mother to forfeit the house she had put up as bond. did Brewster Place The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. He murders a man and goes to jail. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith, 1930. Her mother tries to console her by telling her that she still has all her old dolls, but Cora plaintively says, "But they don't smell and feel the same as the new ones." Mattie puts Criticism Early on, she lives with Turner and Mattie in North Carolina. After dropping out of college, Kiswana moves to Brewster Place to be a part of a predominantly African-American community. Cora Lee began life as a little girl who loved playing with new baby dolls. Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. When Miss Eva dies, her spirit lives on in the house that Mattie is able to buy from Miss Eva's estate. on Brewster Place, a dead end street cut off from the city by a wall. Official Sites falling action The falling action is found in Matties dream of the upcoming block party following Lorraines rape and Bens death. His wife, Mary, had Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. Explores interracial relationships, bi-and gay sexuality in the black community, and black women's lives through a study of the roles played by both black and white families. Of these unifying elements, the most notable is the dream motif, for though these women are living a nightmarish existence, they are united by their common dreams. After kissing her children good night, she returns to her bedroom and finds one of her shadow-like lovers waiting in her bed, and she folds "her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams" and lets her clothes drop to the floor. They were, after all, only fantasies, and real dreams take more than one night to achieve. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a fork in an electrical socket and died while he was fighting with his wife Ciel, turns out to be a closeted homosexual. Naylor creates two climaxes in The Women of Brewster Place. ." Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. For example, Deirdre Donahue, a reviewer for the Washington Post, says of Naylor, "Naylor is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. As she explains to Bellinelli in an interview, Naylor strives in TheWomen of Brewster Place to "help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours.". Yet the substance of the dream itself and the significance of the dreamer raise some further questions. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. It is on Brewster Place that the women encounter everyday problems, joys, and sorrows. When Cora Lee turned thirteen, however, her parents felt that she was too old for baby dolls and gave her a Barbie. Research the psychological effects of abortion, and relate the evidence from the story to the information you have discovered. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. The series starred talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who also served as co- executive producer . Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, living a life about which her beloved Billie Holiday, a blues musician, sings. After Ciel underwent an abortion, she had difficulty returning to the daily routine of her life. In 1974, Naylor moved first to North Carolina and then to Florida to practice full-time ministry, but had to work in fast-food restaurants and as a telephone operator to help support her religious work. The sermon's movement is from disappointment, through a recognition of deferral and persistence, to a reiteration of vision and hope: Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can't give up in life. In Naylor's representation, Lorraine's pain and not the rapist's body becomes the agent of violation, the force of her own destruction: "The screams tried to break through her corneas out into the air, but the tough rubbery flesh sent them vibrating back into her brain, first shaking lifeless the cells that nurtured her memory." It wasn't until she entered Brooklyn College as an English major in her mid-20s that she discovered "writers who were of my complexion.". By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. Mattie is the matriarch of Brewster Place; throughout the novel, she plays a motherly role for all of the characters. "Dawn" (the prologue) is coupled neither with death nor darkness, but with "dusk," a condition whose half-light underscores the half-life of the street. Novels for Students. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. Mattie's son, Basil, is born five months later. Samuel Michael, a God-fearing man, is Mattie's father. It wasn't easy to write about men. Each of the women in the story unconditionally loves at least one other woman. | Give evidence from the story that supports this notion. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. By considering the nature of personal and collective dreams within a context of specific social, political, and economic determinants, Naylor inscribes an ideology that affirms deferral; the capacity to defer and to dream is endorsed as life-availing. As the reader's gaze is centered within the victim's body, the reader, is stripped of the safety of aesthetic distance and the freedom of artistic response. She joins Mattie on Brewster Place after leaving the last in a long series of men. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. The sudden interjection of an "objective" perspective into Naylor's representation traces that process of authorization as the narrative pulls back from the subtext of the victim's pain to focus the reader's gaze on the "object" status of the victim's body. 4, December, 1990, pp. Lurking beneath the image of woman as passive signifier is the fact of a body turned traitor against the consciousness that no longer rules 21-58. Christine H. King asserts in Identities and Issues in Literature, "The ambiguity of the ending gives the story a mythic quality by stressing the continual possibility of dreams and the results of their deferral." Eugene, whose young Critics agree that one of Naylor's strongest accomplishments in The Women of Brewster Place is her use of the setting to frame the structure of the novel, and often compare it to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Though Etta's journey starts in the same small town as Mattie's, the path she takes to Brewster He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. "Linden Hills," which has parallels to Dante's "Inferno," is concerned with life in a suburb populated with well-to-do blacks. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. With these anonymous men, she gets pregnant, but doesn't have to endure the beatings or disappointment intimacy might bring. Angels Carabi, in an interview with Gloria Naylor, Belles Lettres 7, spring, 1992, pp. To see Lorraine scraping at the air in her bloody garment is to see not only the horror of what happened to her but the horror that is her. The collective dream of the last chapter constitutes a "symbolic act" which, as Frederic Jameson puts it, enables "real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, [to] find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm." Structuralists believe that there's no intelligent voice behind the prose, because they believe that the prose speaks to itself, speaks to other prose. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a "Rock Vale had no place for a black woman who was not only unwilling to play by the rules, but whose spirit challenged the very right of the game to exist." Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. A final symbol, in the form of toe-nail polish, stands for the deeper similarities that Kiswana and her mother discover. In Magill's Literary Annual, Rae Stoll concurs: "Ultimately then, The Women of Brewster Place is an optimistic work, offering the hope for a redemptive community of love as a counterforce to isolation and violence.". AUTHOR COMMENTARY The rape scene in The Women of Brewster Place occurs in "The Two," one of the seven short stories that make up the novel. She imagines that her daughter Maybelline "could be doing something like this some daystanding on a stage, wearing pretty clothes and saying fine things . Maybelline could go to collegeshe liked school." Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's "London," this reminder of Ben and Lorrin e blights the block party. Having been rejected by people they love As she watches the actors on stage and her children in the audience she is filled with remorse for not having been a more responsible parent. Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. "Does it matter?" She also encourages Mattie to save her money. After presenting a loose community of six stories, each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to "round off" the collection. Critical Overview Naylor attributes the success of The Women of Brewster Place as well as her other novels to her ability to infuse her work with personal experience. The women again pull together, overcoming their outrage over the destruction of one of their own. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place. The novel recognizes the precise political and social consequences of the cracked dream in the community it deals with, but asserts the vitality and life that persist even when faith in a particular dream has been disrupted. By manipulating the reader's placement within the scene of violence, Naylor subverts the objectifying power of the gaze; as the gaze is trapped within the erotic object, the necessary distance between the voyeur and the object of voyeuristic pleasure is collapsed. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. The Women of Brewster Place portrays a close-knit community of women, bound in sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world. Encyclopedia.com. For example, when one of the women faces the loss of a child, the others join together to offer themselves in any way that they can. A voracious reader since "the age of literacy," Naylor credits her mother as her greatest literary influence. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future. It's everybody you know and everybody you hope to know..". When she becomes pregnant again, however, it becomes harder to deny the problems. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. Brewster Place names the women, houses She leaves her boarding house room after a rat bites him because she cannot stay "another night in that place without nightmares about things that would creep out of the walls to attack her child." Encyclopedia.com. In the last sentence of the chapter, as in this culminating description of the rape, Naylor deliberately jerks the reader back into the distanced perspective that authorizes scopophilia; the final image that she leaves us with is an image not of Lorraine's pain but of "a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress, scraping at the air, crying, 'Please. The "community among women" stands out as the book's most obvious theme. Bellinelli, director, RTSJ-Swiss Television, producer, A Conversation with Gloria Naylor on In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors, (videotape), California Newsreel, 1992. http://www.newsreel.org/films/inblack.htm. Naylor's temporary restoration of the objectifying gaze only emphasizes the extent to which her representation of violence subverts the conventional dynamics of the reading and viewing processes. While the novel opens with Mattie as a woman in her 60s, it quickly flashes back to Mattie's teen years in Rock Vale, Tennessee, where Mattie lives a sheltered life with her over-protective father, Samuel, and her mother, Fannie. Kay Bonetti, "An Interview with Gloria Naylor" (audiotape), American Prose Library, 1988. Kiswana finds one of these wild children eating out of a dumpster, and soon Kiswana and Cora become friends. What prolongs both the text and the lives of Brewster's inhabitants is dream; in the same way that Mattie's dream of destruction postpones the end of the novel, the narrator's last words identify dream as that which affirms and perpetuates the life of the street. by Neera Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. According to Webster, in The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, the word "community" means "the state of being held in common; common possession, enjoyment, liability, etc." it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. Menu. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. Hairston says that none of the characters, except for Kiswana Browne, can see beyond their current despair to brighter futures. In the last paragraph of Cora's story, however, we find that the fantasy has been Cora's. At the end of the story, the women continue to take care of one another and to hope for a better future, just as Brewster Place, in its final days, tries to sustain its final generations. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. "It is really very tough to try to fight those kinds of images and still keep your home together. Ciel, for example, is not unwilling to cast the first brick and urges the rational Kiswana to join this "destruction of the temple." Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. Her thighs and stomach had become so slimy from her blood and their semen that the last two boys didn't want to touch her, so they turned her over, propped her head and shoulders against the wall, and took her from behind. Mattie is a resident of Brewster partly because of the failings of the men in her life: the shiftless Butch, who is sexually irresistible; her father, whose outraged assault on her prompts his wife to pull a gun on him; and her son, whom she has spoiled to the extent that he one day jumps bail on her money, costing her her home and sending her to Brewster Place. Kate Rushin, Black Back-ups, Firebrand Books, 1993. As a result, Yet, he remains more critical of her ability to make historical connectionsto explore the depths of the human experience. Kiswana cannot see the blood; there is only rain. PRINCIPAL WORKS When Lorraine and Teresa first move onto Brewster street, the other women are relieved that they seem like nice girls who will not be after their husbands. I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. GENERAL COMMENTARY The poem suggests that to defer one's dreams, desires, hopes is life-denying. , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. 571-73. And then on to good jobs in insurance companies and the post office, even doctors and lawyers. But perhaps the most revealing stories about 3642. 282-85. It also stands for the oppression the women have endured in the forms of prejudice, violence, racism, shame, and sexism. When he leaves her anyway, she finally sees him for what he is, and only regrets that she had not had this realization before the abortion. Although the epilogue begins with a meditation on how a street dies and tells us that Brewster Place is waiting to die, waiting is a present participle that never becomes past. 24, No. ", "Americans fear black men, individually and collectively," Naylor says. She uses the community of women she has created in The Women of Brewster Place to demonstrate the love, trust, and hope that have always been the strong spirit of African-American women. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended Linda Labin, Masterpieces of Women's Literature, edited by Frank Magill, HarperCollins, 1996, pp. In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. Not just black Americans along with white Americans, but also Hispanic-American writers and Asian-American writers.". They will tear down that which has separated them and made them "different" from the other inhabitants of the city. Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. Eva invites Mattie in for dinner and offers her a place to stay. It would be simple to make a case for the unflattering portrayal of men in this novel; in fact Naylor was concerned that her work would be seen as deliberately slighting of men: there was something that I was very self-conscious about with my first novel; I bent over backwards not to have a negative message come through about the men. ". She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. What was left of her mind was centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart. According to Stoll in Magill's Literary Annual, "Gloria Naylor is already numbered among the freshest and most vital voices in contemporary American literature.". There were particular challenges for Naylor in writing "The Men of Brewster Place.". The "real" party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. While Naylor sets the birth of Brewster Place right after the end of World War I, she continues the story of Brewster for approximately thirty years. Most men are incalculable hunters who come and go." Boyd offers guidelines for growth in a difficult world. In a ironic turn, Kiswana believes that her mother denies her heritage; during a confrontation, she is surprised when she learns that the two share a great deal. Naylor, 48, is the oldest of three daughters of a transit worker and a telephone operator, former sharecroppers who migrated from Mississippi to the New York burrough of Queens in 1949. Naylor created seven female characters with seven individual voices. Situated within the margins of the violator's story of rape, the reader is able to read beneath the bodily configurations that make up its text, to experience the world-destroying violence required to appropriate the victim's body as a sign of the violator's power. In this one sentence, Naylor pushes the reader back into the safety of a world of artistic mediation and restores the reader's freedom to navigate safely through the details of the text. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. Naylor uses many symbols in The Women of Brewster Place. Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/women-brewster-place, "The Women of Brewster Place Now, clearly Mattie did not intend for this to happen. When he jumps bail, Mattie loses her house. Then she opened her eyes and they screamed and screamed into the face above hersthe face that was pushing this tearing pain inside of her body. The Women of Brewster Place | Encyclopedia.com She cannot admit that she craves his physical touch as a reminder of home. Although they come to it by very different routes, Brewster is a reality that they are "obliged to share" [as Smith States in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Conditions, 1977.] They contend that her vivid portrayal of the women, their relationships, and their battles represents the same intense struggle all human beings face in their quest for long, happy lives. Abshu Ben-Jamal. Both literally and figuratively, Brewster Place is a dead end streetthat is, the street itself leads nowhere and the women who live there are trapped by their histories, hopes, and dreams. Gloria Naylor died in 2016, at the age of 66. I liked " 1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, England, died from liver damage after he consumed 70 million units of Vitamin A and around 10 gallons (38 litres) of carrot juice over ten days, turning his skin bright yellow. As Jill Matus notes in "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place," "Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it.". Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. That year also marked the August March on Washington as well as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA).