'BREWSTER' TELLS THE OTHER SIDE OF STORY 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. King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: "I still have TITLE 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. ." Source: Jill L. Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place" in Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1990, pp. 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. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. In all physical pain, Elaine Scarry observes, "suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." Critic Loyle Hairston readily agrees with the favorable analysis of Naylor's language, characterization, and story-telling. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. The sun comes out for the block party that Kiswana has been organizing to raise money to take the landlord to court. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. 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. Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. Like the street, the novel hovers, moving toward the end of its line, but deferring. While the women were not literally born within the community of Brewster Place, the community provides the backdrop for their lives. . She felt a weight drop on her spread body. The year the Naylors moved into their home in Queens stands as a significant year in the memories of most Americans. Ben belongs to Brewster Place even before the seven women do. Unfortunately, he causes Mattie nothing but heartache. Did She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. ", At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. Linda Labin, Masterpieces of Women's Literature, edited by Frank Magill, HarperCollins, 1996, pp. It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. The brief poem Harlem introduces themes that run throughout Langston Hughess volume Montage of a Dream Deferred and throughout his, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, The Woman Destroyed (La Femme Rompue) by Simone de Beauvoir, 1968, The Women Who Loved Elvis all their Lives, The Women's Court in its Relation to Venereal Diseases, The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, The Wonderful Tar-Baby Story by Joel Chandler Harris, 1881, The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/women-brewster-place, One critic has said that the protagonist of. In her delirium and pain she sees movement at the end of the alley, and she picks up a brick to protect herself It just happened. 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. knelt between them and pushed up her dress and tore at the top of her pantyhose. Characters 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'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. Like them, her books sing of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America. Naylor uses Brewster Place to provide one commonality among the women who live there. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. And so today I still have a dream. Cora Lee does not necessarily like men, but she likes having sex and the babies that result. Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. Etta Mae was always looking for something that was just out of her reach, attaching herself to " any promising rising black star, and when he burnt out, she found another." Theresa wants Lorraine to toughen upto accept who she is and not try to please other people. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place. 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. Lucieliaknown as Cielis the granddaughter of Eva Turner, Mattie and Basils old benefactor. It was 1963, a turbulent year at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. But their dreams will be ended brutally with her rape and his death, and the image of Lorraine will later haunt the dreams of all the women on Brewster Place. After Ciel underwent an abortion, she had difficulty returning to the daily routine of her life. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Gloria Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won a National Book Award and became a TV mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. A comprehensive compilation of critical responses to Naylor's works, including: sections devoted to her novels, essays and seminal articles relating feminist perspectives, and comparisons of Naylor's novels to classical authors. Mattie's dream scripts important changes for Ciel: She works for an insurance company (good pay, independence, and status above the domestic), is ready to start another family, and is now connected to a good man. 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. Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. This unmovable and soothing will represents the historically strong communal spirit among all women, but especially African-American women. "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. Authorial sleight of hand in offering Mattie's dream as reality is quite deliberate, since the narrative counts on the reader's credulity and encourages the reader to take as narrative "presence" the "elsewhere" of dream, thereby calling into question the apparently choric and unifying status of the last chapter. "My horizons have broadened. But its reflection is subtle, achieved through the novel's concern with specific women and an individualized neighborhood and the way in which fiction, with its attention focused on the particular, can be made to reveal the play of large historical determinants and forces. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. And Basil inexplicably turns into a Narcissist, just like his grandfather. As a grown woman she continues to love the feel and smell of new babies, but once they grow into children she is frustrated with how difficult they are. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. 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. The men Naylor depicts in her novel are mean, cowardly, and lawless. Naylor created seven female characters with seven individual voices. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. Historical Context Sadly, Lorraine's dream of not being "any different from anybody else in the world" is only fulfilled when her rape forces the other women to recognize the victimization and vulnerability that they share with her. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". GENERAL COMMENTARY Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. 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." Ciel, for example, is not unwilling to cast the first brick and urges the rational Kiswana to join this "destruction of the temple." Michael Awkward, "Authorial Dreams of Wholeness: (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of Brewster Place," in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. 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. . He loses control and beats Mattie in an attempt to get her to name the baby's father. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? Basil in Brewster Place 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. 22 Feb. 2023 . A voracious reader since "the age of literacy," Naylor credits her mother as her greatest literary influence. Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact The power of the gaze to master and control is forced to its inevitable culmination as the body that was the object of erotic pleasure becomes the object of violence. By framing her own representation of rape with an "objective" description that promotes the violator's story of rape, Naylor exposes not only the connection between violation and objectification but the ease with which the reader may be persuaded to accept both. The author captures the faces, voices, feelings, words, and stories of an African-American family in the neighborhood and town where she grew up. When he jumps bail, Mattie loses her house. WebLucielia Louise Turner is the mother of a young girl, Serena. 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. He seldom works. "It took me a little time, but after I got over the writer's block, I never looked back.". It is morning and the sun is still shining; the wall is still standing, and everyone is getting ready for the block party. WebBrewster Place is at once a warm, loving community and a desolate and blighted neighborhood on the verge of collapsing. There is an attempt on Naylor's part to invoke the wide context of Brewster's particular moment in time and to blend this with her focus on the individual dreams and psychologies of the women in the stories. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin, 1983. While they are The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. Mattie's journey to Brewster Place begins in rural Tennessee, but when she becomes pregnant she leaves town to avoid her father's wrath. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. Mattie is moving into Brewster Place when the novel opens. She tries to protect Mattie from the brutal beating Samuel Michael gives her when she refuses to name her baby's father. Lorraine's decision to return home through the shortcut of an alley late one night leads her into an ambush in which the anger of seven teenage boys erupts into violence: Lorraine saw a pair of suede sneakers flying down behind the face in front of hers and they hit the cement with a dead thump. [C.C. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. 23, No. The idea that I could have what I really dreamed of, a writing career, seemed overwhelming. Critics say that Naylor may have fashioned Kiswana's character after activists from the 60s, particularly those associated with the Black Power Movement. Built strong by his years as a field hand, and cinnamon skinned, Mattie finds him irresistible. She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. All six of the boys rape her, leaving her near death. The story, published in a 1980 issue of the magazine, later become a part of her first novel. Her family moved several times during her childhood, living at different times in a housing project in upper Bronx, a Harlem apartment building, and in Queens. 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. Lorraine lay in that alley only screaming at the moving pain inside of her that refused to come to rest. In her representation of violence, the victim's pain is defined only through negation, her agony experienced only in the reader's imagination: Lorraine was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. ." The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. Criticism It also was turned into a television mini-series in 1989, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. An anthology of stories that relate to the black experience. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. Themes But the group effort at tearing down the wall is only a dreamMattie's dream-and just as the rain is pouring down, baptizing the women and their dream work, the dream ends. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. | The Women of Brewster Place Characters - eNotes.com The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. | 62, No. ". He never helps his mother around the house. 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. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. The Women of Brewster Place: Character List | SparkNotes As the title suggests, this is a novel about women and place. 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. PRINCIPAL WORKS This, too, is an inheritance. Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? Lurking beneath the image of woman as passive signifier is the fact of a body turned traitor against the consciousness that no longer rules As black families move onto the street, Ben remains on Brewster Place. He lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. The Women of Brewster Place depicts seven courageous black women struggling to survive life's harsh realities. As this chapter opens, people are gathering for Serena's funeral. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. 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." Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. Idealistic and yearning to help others, she dropped out of college and moved onto Brewster Place to live amongst other African-American people. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. 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. ". In a frenzy the women begin tearing down the wall. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. She also encourages Mattie to save her money. Brewster Place names the women, houses According to Annie Gottlieb in Women Together, a review of The Women of Brewster Place," all our lives those relationships had been the backdrop, while the sexy, angry fireworks with men were the show the bonds between women are the abiding ones. Biographical and critical study. This technique works for Naylor because she has used the setting to provide the unity underlying the story. Lorraine's body was twisting in convulsions of fear that they mistook for resistance, and C.C. Research the psychological effects of abortion, and relate the evidence from the story to the information you have discovered. Cora is skeptical, but to pacify Kiswana she agrees to go. 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. Naylor represents Lorraine's silence not as a passive absence of speech but as a desperate struggle to regain the voice stolen from her through violence. But while she is aware that there is nothing enviable about the pressures, incapacities, and frustrations men absorb in a system they can neither beat nor truly join, her interest lies in evoking the lives of women, not men. Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. 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. The men in the story exhibit cowardice, alcoholism, violence, laziness, and dishonesty. Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. By denying the reader the freedom to observe the victim of violence from behind the wall of aesthetic convention, to manipulate that victim as an object of imaginative play, Naylor disrupts the connection between violator and viewer that Mulvey emphasizes in her discussion of cinematic convention. Inviting the viewer to enter the world of violence that lurks just beyond the wall of art, Naylor traps the reader behind that wall. 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. Basil grows up to be a bothered younger guy who is unable to claim accountability for his actions. Many male critics complain about the negative images of black men in the story. 4, 1983, pp. WebC.C. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. ), has her baby, ends up living with an older black woman named Eta and lives her life working 2 jobs to provide for her child, named Basil. She reminds him of his daughter, and this friendship assuages the guilt he feels over his daughter's fate. Later that year, Naylor began to study nursing at Medgar Evers College, then transferred to Brooklyn College of CUNY to study English. 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. 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. 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. Hairston says that none of the characters, except for Kiswana Browne, can see beyond their current despair to brighter futures. It is a sign that she is tied to ." Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. It squeezed through her paralyzed vocal cords and fell lifelessly at their feet. Source: Donna Woodford, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998. According to Stoll in Magill's Literary Annual, "Gloria Naylor is already numbered among the freshest and most vital voices in contemporary American literature.". It will also examine the point at which dreams become "vain fantasy.". Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". 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. 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. Only when Kiswana says that "babies grow up" does Cora Lee begin to question her life; she realizes that while she does like babies, she does not know what to do with children when they grow up. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. 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. The chapter begins with a mention of the troubling dreams that haunt all the women and girls of Brewster Place during the week after Ben's death and Lorraine's rape. FURTHER READING After a frightening episode with a rat in her apartment, Mattie looks for new housing. 1, spring, 1990, pp. (February 22, 2023). " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. Explored Male Violence and Sexism It also stands for the oppression the women have endured in the forms of prejudice, violence, racism, shame, and sexism. The series was a spinoff of the 1989 miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, which was based upon Gloria Naylor 's novel of the same name. 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 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. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. She did not believe in being submissive to whites, and she did not want to marry, be a mother, and remain with the same man for the rest of her life. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. Gloria Naylor's novel, The Women of Brewster Place, is, as its subtitle suggests, "a novel in seven stories"; but these stories are unified by more than the street on which the characters live. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended Alice Walker 1944 or want to love, Lorraine and Ben become friends. Eyeing the attractive visiting preacher, she wonders if it is not still possible for her to change her lot in life. The image of the ebony phoenix developed in the introduction to the novel is instructive: The women rise, as from the ashes, and continue to live. The Women of Brewster Place "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. 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.". I was totally freaked out when that happened and I didn't write for another seven or eight months. Like many of those people, Naylor's parents, Alberta McAlpin and Roosevelt Naylor, migrated to New York in 1949. And I knew better. Driving an apple-green Cadillac with a white vinyl top and Florida plates, Etta Mae causes quite a commotion when she arrives at Brewster Place. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane WebIn ''The Women of Brewster Place,'' for example, we saw Eugene in the background, brawling with his wife, Ceil, forgetting to help look out for his baby daughter, who was about to stick Naylor's novel does not offer itself as a definitive treatment of black women or community, but it reflects a reality that a great many black women share; it is at the same time an indictment of oppressive social forces and a celebration of courage and persistence. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. He implies that the story has a hopeless ending. Better lay the fuck still, cunt, or I'll rip open your guts. As a result, In other words, she takes the characters back in time to show their backgrounds. They teach you to minutely dissect texts and (I thought) `How could I ever just cut that off from myself and go on to do what I have to do?' When Mattie moves to Brewster Place, Ciel has grown up and has a child of her own. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. When the sun began to warm the air and the horizon brightened, she still lay there, her mouth crammed with paper bag, her dress pushed up under her breasts, her bloody pantyhose hanging from her thighs." At that point, Naylor returns Maggie to her teen years in Rock Vale, Tennessee, where Butch Fuller seduced her after sharing sugar cane with her. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you to go on in spite of all. The second theme, violence that men enact on women, connects with and strengthens the first. The Mediterranean families knew him as the man who would quietly do repairs with alcohol on his breath. 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.
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