They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. ", 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." Butch Fuller exudes charm. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. The oldest of three girls, Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. 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. Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. As the title suggests, this is a novel about women and place. Much to his Mattie's dismay, he ends up in trouble and in jail. 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. 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. 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. by Neera 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. While the women were not literally born within the community of Brewster Place, the community provides the backdrop for their lives. Referring to Mattie' s dream of tearing the wall down together with the women of Brewster Place, Linda Labin contends in Masterpieces of Women's Literature: "It is this remarkable, hope-filled ending that impresses the majority of scholars." 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. 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. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. Then Cora Lee notices that there is still blood on the bricks. He associates with the wrong people. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future. 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 Each of the women in the story unconditionally loves at least one other woman. Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place Offers a general analysis of the structure, characters, and themes of the novel. There were particular challenges for Naylor in writing "The Men of Brewster Place.". 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. (Full name Neil Richard Gaiman), Teresa Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. When they had finished and stopped holding her up, her body fell over like an unstringed puppet. 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. She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. 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. In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. 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. Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". But her first published work was a short story that was accepted by Marcia Gillespie, then editor of Essence magazine. Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. Mattie's son, Basil, is born five months later. The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. Like them, her books sing of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America. 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." WebMattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. falling action The falling action is found in Matties dream of the upcoming block party following Lorraines rape and Bens death. The idea that I could have what I really dreamed of, a writing career, seemed overwhelming. Naylor uses each woman's sexuality to help define her character. 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. Excitedly she tells Cora, "if we really pull together, we can put pressure on [the landlord] to start fixing this place up." In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. 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. 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. Virginia C. Fowler, "'Ebony Phoenixes': The Women of Brewster Place," in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, edited by Frank Day, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. My interest here is to look at the way in which Naylor rethinks the poem in her novel's attention to dreams and desires and deferral., The dream of the last chapter is a way of deferring closure, but this deferral is not evidence of the author's self-indulgent reluctance to make an end. Although they come to it by very different routes, Brewster is a reality that they are "obliged to share" [as Smith States in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Conditions, 1977.] The "real" party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. Gloria Naylor, 'The Women Of Brewster Place' Author, Dies At 66 According to Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Naylor believes that "individual identity is shaped within the matrix of a community." Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, " 'Blood ain't got no right still being here'." As she is thinking this, they hear a scream from Serena, who had stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. ". We discover after a first reading, however, that the narrative of the party is in fact Mattie's dream vision, from which she awakens perspiring in her bed. He is said to have been a The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". Naylor brings the reader to the edge of experience only to abandon him or her to the power of the imagination; in this case, however, the structured blanks that the novel asks the reader to fill in demand the imaginative construction of the victim's pain rather than the violator's pleasure.. They were, after all, only fantasies, and real dreams take more than one night to achieve. Influenced by Roots There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. Naylor's novel is not exhortatory or rousing in the same way; her response to the fracture of the collective dream is an affirmation of persistence rather than a song of culmination and apocalypse. Based on women Naylor has known in her life, the characters convincingly portray the struggle for survival that black women have shared throughout history. or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." When she dreams of the women joining together to tear down the wall that has separated them from the rest of the city, she is dreaming of a way for all of them to achieve Lorraine's dream of acceptance. 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. They did find, though, that their children could attend schools and had access to libraries, opportunities the Naylors had not enjoyed as black children. Writer 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. WebC.C. 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." A voracious reader since "the age of literacy," Naylor credits her mother as her greatest literary influence. Her mother tries to console her by telling her that she still has all her old dolls, but Cora plaintively says, "But they don't smell and feel the same as the new ones." Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. The gaze that in Mulvey reduces woman to erotic object is here centered within that woman herself and projected outward. 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. As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. | Place is very different. | Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. They have to face the stigma created by the (errant) one-third and also the fact that they live as archetypes in the mind of Americans -- something dark and shadowy and unknown.". The sudden interjection of an "objective" perspective into Naylor's representation traces that process of authorization as the narrative pulls back from the subtext of the victim's pain to focus the reader's gaze on the "object" status of the victim's body. 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. Are we to take it that Ciel never really returns from San Francisco and Cora is not taking an interest in the community effort to raise funds for tenants' rights? Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. She comes home that night filled with good intentions. She won a scholarship to Yale University where she received a master's degree in Afro-American studies, with a concentration in American literature, in 1983. It also stands for the oppression the women have endured in the forms of prejudice, violence, racism, shame, and sexism. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. Two, edited by Frank Magill, Salem Press, 1983, pp. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. He seldom works. 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. Author Biography With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. Yet, he remains more critical of her ability to make historical connectionsto explore the depths of the human experience. She tries to protect Mattie from the brutal beating Samuel Michael gives her when she refuses to name her baby's father. Jill Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place." 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. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. 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. WebBrewster Place is an American drama series which aired on ABC in May 1990. Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. The most important character in Having her in his later years and already set in his ways, he tolerates little foolishness and no disobedience. "When I was a kid I used to read a book a day," Naylor says. 'And something bad had happened to me by the wallI mean hersomething bad had happened to her'." The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. 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. Many immigrants and Southern blacks arrived in New York after the War, searching for jobs. 282-85. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Naiad, 1989. "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. And I knew better. In other words, she takes the characters back in time to show their backgrounds. Insofar as the reader's gaze perpetuates the process of objectification, the reader, too, becomes a violator. Boyd offers guidelines for growth in a difficult world. ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. A final symbol, in the form of toe-nail polish, stands for the deeper similarities that Kiswana and her mother discover. One night Basil is arrested and thrown in jail for killing a man during a bar fight. "Does it matter?" WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. According to Stoll in Magill's Literary Annual, "Gloria Naylor is already numbered among the freshest and most vital voices in contemporary American literature.". 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. "This lack of knowledge is going to have to fall on the shoulders of the educational institutions. I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. Did The close of the novel turns away from the intensity of the dream, and the satisfaction of violent protest, insisting rather on prolonged yearning and dreaming amid conditions which do not magically transform. Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. "I was able to conquer those things through my craft. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? All that the dream has promised is undercut, it seems. Better lay the fuck still, cunt, or I'll rip open your guts. WebSo Mattie runs away to the city (not yet Brewster though! She joins Mattie on Brewster Place after leaving the last in a long series of men. Brewster Place Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a fork in an electrical socket and died while he was fighting with his wife Ciel, turns out to be a closeted homosexual. And Basil inexplicably turns into a Narcissist, just like his grandfather. 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." Explored Male Violence and Sexism After high school graduation in 1968, Naylor's solution to the shock and confusion she experienced in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination that same spring was to postpone college and become a Jehovah's Witness missionary.