Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. Women of Brewster Place Characters The violation of her personhood that is initiated with the rapist's objectifying look becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy borne out by the literal destruction of her body; rape reduces its victim to the status of an animal and then flaunts as authorization the very body that it has mutilated. Cora Lee began life as a little girl who loved playing with new baby dolls. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place. 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.". Baker is the leader of a gang of hoodlums that haunt the alley along the wall of Brewster Place, where they trap and rape Lorraine. Official Sites To pacify Kiswana, Cora Lee agrees to take her children to a Shakespeare play in the local park. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. "It is really very tough to try to fight those kinds of images and still keep your home together. Then the cells went that contained her powers of taste and smell. As a black girl growing up in a still-segregated South, Etta Mae broke all the rules. ", Critics also recognize Naylor's ability to make history come alive. Basil in Brewster Place Kiswana thinks that she is nothing like her mother, but when her mother's temper flares Kiswana has to admit that she admires her mother and that they are more alike that she had realized. In her delirium and pain she sees movement at the end of the alley, and she picks up a brick to protect herself He lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. It was 1963, a turbulent year at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. Her babies "just seemed to keep comingalways welcome until they changed, and then she just didn't understand them." THE LITERARY WORK Influenced by Roots Mattie's dream has not been fulfilled yet, but neither is it folded and put away like Cora's; a storm is heading toward Brewster Place, and the women are "gonna have a party.". WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. 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. Recognizing that pain defies representation, Naylor invokes a referential system that focuses on the bodily manifestations of painskinned arms, a split rectum, a bloody skullonly to reject it as ineffective. The series starred talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who also served as co- executive producer . WebBasil the Physician (died c.1111 or c.1118) was the Bogomil leader condemned as a heretic by Patriarch Nicholas III of Constantinople and burned at the stake by Byzantine Emperor 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. He loves Mattie very much and blames himself for her pregnancy, until she tells him that the baby is not Fred Watson'sthe man he had chosen for her. After the child's death, Ciel nearly dies from grief. As presented, Brewster Place is largely a community of women; men are mostly absent or itinerant, drifting in and out of their women's lives, and leaving behind them pregnancies and unpaid bills. Instead, that gaze, like Lorraine's, is directed outward; it is the violator upon whom the reader focuses, the violator's body that becomes detached and objectified before the reader's eyes as it is reduced to "a pair of suede sneakers," a "face" with "decomposing food in its teeth." She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? Frustrated with perpetual pregnancy and the burdens of poverty and single parenting, Cora joins in readily, and Theresa, about to quit Brewster Place in a cab, vents her pain at the fate of her lover and her fury with the submissiveness that breeds victimization. As a result of their offenses toward the women in the story, the women are drawn together. As black families move onto the street, Ben remains on Brewster Place. York would provide their children with better opportunities than they had had as children growing up in a still-segregated South. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. When she discovers that sex produces babies, she starts to have sex in order to get pregnant. In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. She becomes friends with Cora Lee and succeeds, for one night, in showing her a different life. 'BREWSTER' TELLS THE OTHER SIDE OF STORY Web"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. As she explains to Bellinelli in an interview, Naylor strives in TheWomen of Brewster Place to "help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours.". Sources The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, No. Two, edited by Frank Magill, Salem Press, 1983, pp. In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". As an adult, she continues to prefer the smell and feel of her new babies to the trials and hassles of her growing children. A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. The Women of Brewster Place depicts seven courageous black women struggling to survive life's harsh realities. Mattie's son Basil, who has also fled from Brewster Place, is contrastingly absent. 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." Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. Brewster Place is born, in Naylor's words, a "bastard child," mothers three generations, and "waits to die," having "watched its last generation of children torn away from it by court orders and eviction notices too tired and sick to help them." Better lay the fuck still, cunt, or I'll rip open your guts. Brewster Place "The Women" was a stunning debut for Naylor. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. Basil the Elder - Wikipedia Samuel Michael, a God-fearing man, is Mattie's father. 'And something bad had happened to me by the wallI mean hersomething bad had happened to her'." Black American Literature Forum, Vol. And like all of Naylor's novels so far, it presents a self-contained universe that some critics have compared to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Attending church with Mattie, she stares enviously at the "respectable" wives of the deacons and wishes that she had taken a different path. As a result, Biographical and critical study. Did But just as the pigeon she watches fails to ascend gracefully and instead lands on a fire escape "with awkward, frantic movements," so Kiswana's dreams of a revolution will be frustrated by the grim realities of Brewster Place and the awkward, frantic movements of people who are busy merely trying to survive. According to Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Naylor believes that "individual identity is shaped within the matrix of a community." 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." 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. The gaze that in Mulvey reduces woman to erotic object is here centered within that woman herself and projected outward. Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place is made up of seven stories of the women who live Although the reader's gaze is directed at Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." ", "Americans fear black men, individually and collectively," Naylor says. Hairston says that none of the characters, except for Kiswana Browne, can see beyond their current despair to brighter futures. Although remarkably similar to Dr. King's sermon in the recognition of blasted hopes and dreams deferred, The Women of Brewster Place does not reassert its faith in the dream of harmony and equality: It stops short of apocalypse in its affirmation of persistence. When she becomes pregnant again, however, it becomes harder to deny the problems. The women all share the experience of living on the dead end street that the rest of the world has forgotten. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. "I like Faulkner's work," Naylor says. Like them, her books sing of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. Despite the fact that in the epilogue Brewster Place is abandoned, its daughters still get up elsewhere and go about their daily activities. Naylor created seven female characters with seven individual voices. The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" While Mattie has accepted the loss of her house at the hands of Basil, and has accepted her fate in Brewster Place, she refuses to discuss the circumstances that have In other words, he contends in a review in Freedomways that Naylor limits the concerns of Brewster Place to the "warts and cankers of individual personality, neglecting to delineate the origins of those social conditions which so strongly affect personality and behavior." Many commentators have noted the same deft touch with the novel's supporting characters; in fact, Hairston also notes, "Other characters are equally well-drawn. Linda Labin, Masterpieces of Women's Literature, edited by Frank Magill, HarperCollins, 1996, pp. Source: Jill L. Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place" in Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1990, pp. "The Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. Again, expectations are subverted and closure is subtly deferred. Observes that Naylor's "knowing portrayal" of Mattie unites the seven stories that form the novel. 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. The reader is locked into the victim's body, positioned behind Lorraine's corneas along with the screams that try to break out into the air. Amid Naylor's painfully accurate depictions of real women and their real struggles, Cora's instant transformation into a devoted and responsible mother seems a "vain fantasy.". One critic has said that her character may be modeled after adherents of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. The attempt to translate violence into narrative, therefore, very easily lapses into a choreography of bodily positions and angles of assault that serves as a transcription of the violator's story. 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. He never helps his mother around the house. Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor and Bill Phillips, Little Brown, 1997. In his Freedomways review, he says of The Women of Brewster Place: "Naylor's first effort seems to fall in with most of the fiction being published today, which bypasses provocative social themes to play, instead, in the shallower waters of isolated personal relationships.". Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. I had been the person behind `The Women of Brewster Place. Just as she is about to give up, she meets Eva Turner, an old woman who lives with her granddaughter, Ciel. Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. "Does it really matter?" Release Dates Dreams keep the street alive as well, if only in the minds of its former inhabitants whose stories the dream motif unites into a coherent novel. Lorraine's inability to express her own pain forces her to absorb not only the shock of bodily violation but the sudden rupture of her mental and psychological autonomy. In the epilogue we are told that Brewster Place is abandoned, but does not die, because the dreams of the women keep it alive: But the colored daughters of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn. Give evidence from the story that supports this notion. ", Her new dream of maternal devotion continues as they arrive home and prepare for bed. Basil in Brewster Place 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. Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? It wasn't easy to write about men. Lorraine, we are told, "was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. Alice Walker 1944 Following the abortion, Ciel is already struggling emotionally when young Serena dies in a freak accident. She stresses that African Americans must maintain their identity in a world dominated by whites. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. Gloria Naylor died in 2016, at the age of 66. or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." The rape scene in The Women of Brewster Place occurs in "The Two," one of the seven short stories that make up the novel. Excitedly she tells Cora, "if we really pull together, we can put pressure on [the landlord] to start fixing this place up." 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. He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. She cannot admit that she craves his physical touch as a reminder of home. The Mediterranean families knew him as the man who would quietly do repairs with alcohol on his breath. Angels Carabi, in an interview with Gloria Naylor, Belles Lettres 7, spring, 1992, pp. Did After she aborts the child she knows Eugene does not want, she feels remorse and begins to understand the kind of person Eugene really is. As a high school student in the late 1960s, Naylor was taught the English classics and the traditional writers of American literature -- Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. 55982. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. ." Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. | Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Please. Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. And Naylor takes artistic license to resurrect Ben, the gentle janitor killed by a distraught rape victim, who functions as the novel's narrator. Ciel dreams of love, from her boyfriend and from her daughter and unborn child, but an unwanted abortion, the death of her daughter, and the abandonment by her boyfriend cruelly frustrates these hopes. These two events, she says, "got me to thinking about the two-thirds of black men who are not in jail and have not had brushes with the criminal law system. 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. 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. 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.