Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still "gonna have a party.". "But I didn't consciously try to do that. 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. 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. For example, while Mattie Michael loses her home as a result of her son's irresponsibility, the strength she gains enables her to care for the women whom she has known either since childhood and early adulthood or through her connection to Brewster Place. Why is the anger and frustration that the women feel after the rape of Lorraine displaced into dream? As the object of the reader's gaze is suddenly shifted, that reader is thrust into an understanding of the way in which his or her own look may perpetuate the violence of rape. 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. 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. WebWhen 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. One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine, and soon after she negotiated a book contract. 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. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. 49-64. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. In a catalog of similes, Hughes evokes the fate of dreams unfulfilled: They dry up like raisins in the sun, fester like sores, stink like rotten meat, crust over like syrupy sweets: They become burdensome, or possibly explosive. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. 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. 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. She leaves her middle-class family, turning her back on an upbringing that, she feels, ignored her heritage. WebBrewster Place is at once a warm, loving community and a desolate and blighted neighborhood on the verge of collapsing. At that point in her life, she believed that after the turmoil of the 1960s, there was no hope for the world. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. 4964. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Yet, he remains more critical of her ability to make historical connectionsto explore the depths of the human experience. 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. It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. The women again pull together, overcoming their outrage over the destruction of one of their own. Sources The wall of Brewster Place is a powerful symbol of the ways racial oppression, sexual exploitation, and class domination constrains the life expectations and choices of the women who live there. She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. WebBasil turns out to be a spoiled young boy, and grows into a selfish man. asks Ciel. She is a woman who knows her own mind. As the title suggests, this is a novel about women and place. In dreaming of Lorraine the women acknowledge that she represents every one of them: she is their daughter, their friend, their enemy, and her brutal rape is the fulfillment of their own nightmares. It is morning and the sun is still shining; the wall is still standing, and everyone is getting ready for the block party. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. 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. The Women of Brewster Place portrays a close-knit community of women, bound in sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Through prose and poetry, the author addresses issues of family violence, urban decay, spiritual renewal, and others, yet rises above the grim realism to find hope and inspiration. or want to love, Lorraine and Ben become friends. Christine King, Identities and Issues in Literature, Vol. 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. 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. Place is very different. He lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". Throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the women support one another, counteracting the violence of their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and sons. Now, clearly Mattie did not intend for this to happen. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. Etta Mae arrives at Brewster Place in what vehicle? He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. 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. Middle-class status and a white husband offer one alternative in the vision of escape from Brewster Place; the novel does not criticize Ciel's choices so much as suggest, by implication, the difficulty of envisioning alternatives to Brewster's black world of poverty, insecurity, and male inadequacy. Source: Jill L. Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place" in Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1990, pp. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. Lurking beneath the image of woman as passive signifier is the fact of a body turned traitor against the consciousness that no longer rules The story, published in a 1980 issue of the magazine, later become a part of her first novel. Even as she looks out her window at the wall that separates Brewster Place from the heart of the city, she is daydreaming: "she placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up." The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. While Naylor's characters are fictional, they immortalize the spirit of her own grandmother, great aunt, and mother. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. In The Accused, a 1988 film in which Jody Foster gives an Oscar-winning performance as a rape victim, the problematics of transforming the victim's experience into visualizable form are addressed, at least in part, through the use of flashback; the rape on which the film centers is represented only at the end of the film, after the viewer has followed the trail of the victim's humiliation and pain. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. Naylor wrote "The Women of Brewster Place" while she was a student, finishing it the very month she graduated in 1981. Hairston says that none of the characters, except for Kiswana Browne, can see beyond their current despair to brighter futures. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Mattie names her son, Basil, for the pleasant memory of the afternoon he was conceived in a fragrant basil patch. In Naylor's representation of rape, the power of the gaze is turned against itself; the aesthetic observer is forced to watch powerlessly as the violator steps up to the wall to stare with detached pleasure at an exhibit in which the reader, as well as the victim of violence, is on display. Rather than watching a distant action unfold from the anonymity of the darkened theater or reading about an illicit act from the safety of an arm-chair, Naylor's audience is thrust into the middle of a rape the representation of which subverts the very "sense of separation" upon which voyeurism depends. 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." Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. Critics have praised Naylor's style since The Women of Brewster Place was published in 1982. "It is really very tough to try to fight those kinds of images and still keep your home together. She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. She disappoints no one in her tight willow-green sundress and her large two-toned sunglasses. Critical Overview This bond is complex and lasting; for example, when Kiswana Browne and her mother specifically discuss their heritage, they find that while they may demonstrate their beliefs differently, they share the same pride in their race. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. That is, Naylor writes from the first-person point of view, but she writes from the perspective of the character on whom the story is focusing at the time. Faulkner uses fifteen different voices to tell the story. Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. Her success probably stems from her exploration of the African-American experience, and her desire to " help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours," as she tells Bellinelli in the interview series, In Black and White. He was buried in Burial Hill in Plymouth, where you can find a stone memorial honoring him as Patriarch of the Pilgrims.. Later in the decade, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the culmination of ten years of violence against blacks. Attending church with Mattie, she stares enviously at the "respectable" wives of the deacons and wishes that she had taken a different path. When Reverend Woods clearly returns her interest, Etta gladly accepts his invitation to go out for coffee, though Mattie expresses her concerns about his intentions. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. WebMattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Basil grows up to be a bothered younger guy who is unable to claim accountability for his actions. She believes she must have a man to be happy. 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.". The quotation is appropriate to Cora Lee's story not only because Cora and her children will attend the play but also because Cora's chapter will explore the connection between the begetting of children and the begetting of dreams. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms. She couldn't tell when they changed places. She didn't feel her split rectum or the patches in her skull where her hair had been torn off." One night a rat bites the baby while they are sleeping and Mattie begins to search for a better place to live. and the boys] had been hiding up on the wall, watching her come up that back street, and they had waited. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. 571-73. Joel Hughes, "Naylor Discusses Race Myths and Life," Yale Daily News, March 2, 1995. http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper. Naylor creates two climaxes in The Women of Brewster Place. This technique works for Naylor because she has used the setting to provide the unity underlying the story. As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. ("Conversation"), Bearing in mind the kind of hostile criticism that Alice Walker's The Color Purple evoked, one can understand Naylor's concern, since male sins in her novel are not insignificant. Her life revolves around her relationship with her husband and her desperate attempts to please him. 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. She spends her life loving and caring for her son and denies herself adult love. In all physical pain, Elaine Scarry observes, "suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." 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. 22 Feb. 2023 . 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." For example, in a review published in Freedomways, Loyle Hairston says that the characters " throb with vitality amid the shattering of their hopes and dreams." As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. falling action The falling action is found in Matties dream of the upcoming block party following Lorraines rape and Bens death. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/women-brewster-place, "The Women of Brewster Place . WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. Years later when the old woman dies, Mattie has saved enough money to buy the house. 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. 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. 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." Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. Mattie is the matriarch of Brewster Place; throughout the novel, she plays a motherly role for all of the characters. Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. She also encourages Mattie to save her money. 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. While the women were not literally born within the community of Brewster Place, the community provides the backdrop for their lives. 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. Lorraine's horrifying murder of Ben serves only to deepen the chasm of hopelessness felt at different times by all the characters in the story. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. Mattie Michael. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a Company Credits This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. 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. Naylor uses Brewster Place to provide one commonality among the women who live there. But soon the neighbors start to notice the loving looks that pass between the two women, and soon the other women in the neighborhood reject Lorraine's gestures of friendship. 23, No. ." Further, Naylor suggests that the shape and content of the dream should be capable of flexibility and may change in response to changing needs and times. She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. The presence of Ciel in Mattie's dream expresses the elder woman's wish that Ciel be returned to her and the desire that Ciel's wounds and flight be redeemed. People know each other in Brewster Place, and as imperfect and damaging as their involvement with each other may be, they still represent a community. She also gave her introverted first-born child a journal in which to record her thoughts. Women and people of color comprise the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses, perhaps because, according to Harrison in Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, "Their religion allows their voices to emerge People listen to them; they are valuable, bearers of a life-giving message." Cane, Gaiman, Neil 1960- ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. 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.". He seldom works. I read all of Louisa May Alcott and all the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.". With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Observes that Naylor's "knowing portrayal" of Mattie unites the seven stories that form the novel. This story explores the relationship between Theresa and Lorraine, two lesbians who move into the run-down complex of apartments that make up "Brewster Place." He never helps his mother around the house. The "objective" picture of a battered woman scraping at the air in a bloody green and black dress is shocking exactly because it seems to have so little to do with the woman whose pain the reader has just experienced. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. 62, No. A final symbol, in the form of toe-nail polish, stands for the deeper similarities that Kiswana and her mother discover. dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party. Novels for Students. , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. This, too, is an inheritance. They are still "gonna have a party," and the rain in Mattie's dream foreshadows the "the stormy clouds that had formed on the horizon and were silently moving toward Brewster Place." Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. There are countless slum streets like Brewster; streets will continue to be condemned and to die, but there will be other streets to whose decay the women of Brewster will cling. Novels for Students. 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. The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. They will not talk about these dreams; only a few of them will even admit to having them, but every one of them dreams of Lorraine, finally recognizing the bond they share with the woman they had shunned as "different."