The Mediterranean families knew him as the man who would quietly do repairs with alcohol on his breath. 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. Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, searching for acceptance. Baker and his friends, the teenage boys who terrorize Brewster Place. "When I was a kid I used to read a book a day," Naylor says. 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. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. Explored Male Violence and Sexism 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." Encyclopedia.com. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Naylor depicts the lives of 1940s blacks living in New York City in her next novel, The focus on the relationships among women in, While love and politics link the lives of the two women in, Critics have compared the theme of familial and African-American women in. To fund her work as a minister, she lived with her parents and worked as a switchboard operator. The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. 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. She renews ties here with both Etta Mae and Ciel. 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. All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. While Naylor's characters are fictional, they immortalize the spirit of her own grandmother, great aunt, and mother. Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. PRINCIPAL WORKS She says that she finally was spurred to tell their stories by the death of her father in 1993 and the Million Man March two years later. 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. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. | Ciel keeps taking Eugene back, even though he is verbally abusive and threatens her with physical abuse. As the body of the victim is forced to tell the rapist's story, that body turns against Lorraine's consciousness and begins to destroy itself, cell by cell. 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. Each woman in the book has her own dream. Why were Lorraine and Theresa, "The Two," such a threat to the women who resided at Brewster Place? "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." The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. Her chapter begins with the return of the boyfriend who had left her eleven months before when their baby, Serena, was only a month old. It's everybody you know and everybody you hope to know..". 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. That same year, she received the American Book Award for Best First Novel, served as writer-in-residence at Cummington Community of the Arts, and was a visiting lecturer at George Washington University. 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. Naylor went on to write the novels "Linden Hills" (Penguin paperback), "Mama Day" and "Bailey's Cafe" (both Random House paperback), but the men who were merely dramatic devices in her first novel have haunted her all these years. William Brewster/Place of burial. She assures Mattie that carrying a baby is nothing to be ashamed about. Introduction Share directs emphasis to what they have in common: They are women, they are black, and they are almost invariably poor. He is said to have been a When Naylor speaks of her first novel, she says that the work served to "exorcise demons," according to Angels Carabi in Belles Lettres 7. 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. She refuses to see any faults in him, and when he gets in trouble with the law she puts up her house to bail him out of jail. them, and defines their underprivileged status. Official Sites Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 4, 1983, pp. 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. In her interview with Carabi, Naylor maintains that community influences one's identity. Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. Naylor places her characters in situations that evoke strong feelings, and she succeeds in making her characters come alive with realistic emotions, actions, and words. 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. Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. WebBasil turns out to be a spoiled young boy, and grows into a selfish man. The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, No. 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." 37-70. In a frenzy the women begin tearing down the wall. "The Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. her because she reminds him of his daughter. If the epilogue recalls the prologue, so the final emphasis on dreams postponed yet persistent recalls the poem by Langston Hughes with which Naylor begins the book: "What happens to a dream deferred? " Stultifying and confining, the rain prevents the inhabitants of Brewster's community from meeting to talk about the tragedy; instead they are faced with clogged gutters, debris, trapped odors in their apartments, and listless children. 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. 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. 3642. 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. Light-skinned, with smooth hair, Kiswana wants desperately to feel a part of the black community and to help her fellow African Americans better their lives. The displacement of reality into dream defers closure, even though the chapter appears shaped to make an end. Naylor earned a Master of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party. As an adult, she continues to prefer the smell and feel of her new babies to the trials and hassles of her growing children. In the following excerpt, Matus discusses the final chapter of The Women of Brewster Place and the effect of deferring or postponing closure. Technical Specs, See agents for this cast & crew on IMDbPro, post-production supervisor (2 episodes, 1989), second assistant director (2 episodes, 1989), first assistant director (2 episodes, 1989), assistant set decorator (2 episodes, 1989), construction coordinator (2 episodes, 1989), assistant art director (2 episodes, 1989), adr mixer (uncredited) (2 episodes, 1989), first assistant camera (2 episodes, 1989), second assistant camera (2 episodes, 1989), post-production associate (2 episodes, 1989), special musical consultant (2 episodes, 1989), transportation coordinator (2 episodes, 1989), production van technician (2 episodes, 1989), transportation captain (2 episodes, 1989), assistant to producers (2 episodes, 1989), production coordinator (2 episodes, 1989), crafts services/catering (2 episodes, 1989), stand-in: Oprah Winfrey (uncredited) (unknown episodes). "Power and violence," in Hannah Arendt's words, "are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" [On Violence, 1970]. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. 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.". A voracious reader since "the age of literacy," Naylor credits her mother as her greatest literary influence. After a frightening episode with a rat in her apartment, Mattie looks for new housing. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. Furthermore, he contends that he would have liked to see her provide some insight into those conditions that would enable the characters to envision hope of better times. ", The situation of black men, she says, is one that "still needs work. One night after an argument with Teresa, Lorraine decides to go visit Ben. The "imagised, eroticized concept of the world that makes a mockery of empirical objectivity" is here replaced by the discomforting proximity of two human faces locked in violent struggle and defined not by eroticism but by the pain inflicted by one and borne by the other: 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. 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. Criticism Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. ". The nicety of the polite word of social discourse that Lorraine frantically attempts to articulate"please"emphasizes the brute terrorism of the boys' act of rape and exposes the desperate means by which they rule. 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. 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. Offers a general analysis of the structure, characters, and themes of the novel. 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. slammed his kneecap into her spine and her body arched up, causing his nails to cut into the side of her mouth to stifle her cry. AUTHOR COMMENTARY One critic has said that her character may be modeled after adherents of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. "Linden Hills," which has parallels to Dante's "Inferno," is concerned with life in a suburb populated with well-to-do blacks. The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. The sun comes out for the block party that Kiswana has been organizing to raise money to take the landlord to court. Though Etta's journey starts in the same small town as Mattie's, the path she takes to Brewster He complains that he will never be able to get ahead with her and two babies to care for, and although she does not want to do it, she gets an abortion. To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. For one evening, Cora Lee envisions a new life for herself and her children. Discusses Naylor's literary heritage and her use of and divergence from her literary roots. 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. While Naylor's novel portrays the victim's silence in its narrative of rape, it, too, probes beneath the surface of the violator's story to reveal the struggle beneath that enforced silence. They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry, they're mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they're diapered around babies. Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin, 1983. 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. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear." Empowered by the distanced dynamics of a gaze that authorizes not only scopophilia but its inevitable culmination in violence, the reader who responds uncritically to the violator's story of rape comes to see the victim not as a human being, not as an object of violence, but as the object itself. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. Mattie is moving into Brewster Place when the novel opens. Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place is made up of seven stories of the women who live 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. Critics like her style and appreciate her efforts to deal with societal issues and psychological themes. Novels for Students. Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. Structuralists believe that there's no intelligent voice behind the prose, because they believe that the prose speaks to itself, speaks to other prose. While these ties have always existed, the women's movement has brought them more recognition. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. 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. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. 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. 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. , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. 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. "I started with the A's in the children's section of the library, and I read all the way down to the W's. "It was like a door opening for me when I discovered that there has been a history of black writers in this country since the 1800s," she says. Many male critics complain about the negative images of black men in the story. Mattie's son Basil, who has also fled from Brewster Place, is contrastingly absent. He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. She continues to protect him from harm and nightmares until he jumps bail and abandons her to her own nightmare. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. 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. All of the Brewster Place women respect Mattie's strength, truthfulness, and morals as well as her ability to survive the abuse, loss, and betrayal she has suffered. 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. and the boys] had been hiding up on the wall, watching her come up that back street, and they had waited. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Insofar as the reader's gaze perpetuates the process of objectification, the reader, too, becomes a violator. Most Americans remember it as the year that Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy were assassinated. 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. At that point in her life, she believed that after the turmoil of the 1960s, there was no hope for the world. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane 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. FURTHER READING 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 . I read all of Louisa May Alcott and all the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.". 1, spring, 1990, pp. 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. ", Cora Lee's story opens with a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:'True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain / begot of nothing but vain fantasy." Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. Naylor succeeds in communicating the victim's experience of rape exactly because her representation documents not only the violation of Lorraine's body from without but the resulting assault on her consciousness from within. Jill Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place." Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. What was left of her mind was centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart. Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". He was buried in Burial Hill in Plymouth, where you can find a stone memorial honoring him as Patriarch of the Pilgrims.. Because the novel focuses on women, the men are essentially flat minor characters who are, with the exception of C. C. Baker and his gang, not so much villains as This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. Historical Context 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." Although the idea of miraculous transformation associated with the phoenix is undercut by the starkness of slum and the perpetuation of poverty, the notion of regeneration also associated with the phoenix is supported by the quiet persistence of women who continue to dream on. Novels for Students. When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. ". Miss Eva opens her home to Mattie and her infant son, Basil. In the last paragraph of Cora's story, however, we find that the fantasy has been Cora's. Lucieliaknown as Cielis the granddaughter of Eva Turner, Mattie and Basils old benefactor. But perhaps the mode of the party about to take place will be neither demonic nor apocalyptic. She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. The Naylors were disappointed to learn that segregation also existed in the North, although it was much less obvious.