Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. He seldom works. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. "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. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place. Later in the decade, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the culmination of ten years of violence against blacks. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. 23, No. Co-opted by the rapist's story, the victim's bodyviolated, damaged and discarded is introduced as authorization for the very brutality that has destroyed it. Throughout the story, Naylor creates situations that stress the loneliness of the characters. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. 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." Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. 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. Why were Lorraine and Theresa, "The Two," such a threat to the women who resided at Brewster Place? The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" 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. 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. As the look of the audience ceases to perpetuate the victimizing stance of the rapists, the subject/object locations of violator and victim are reversed. Sources Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. 3642. For Naylor, discovering the work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Richard Wright, James Baldwin (whom she calls one of her favorite writers) and other black authors was a turning point. Of these unifying elements, the most notable is the dream motif, for though these women are living a nightmarish existence, they are united by their common dreams. 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. Later in the novel, a street gang rapes Lorraine, and she kills Ben, mistaking him for her attackers. In a frenzy the women begin tearing down the wall. Huge hunks of those novels have male characters that helped me carry the drama. While Naylor's characters are fictional, they immortalize the spirit of her own grandmother, great aunt, and mother. 571-73. Fowler tries to place Naylor's work within the context of African-American female writers since the 1960s. Kiswana (Melanie) Browne denounces her parents' middle-class lifestyle, adopts an African name, drops out of college, and moves to Brewster Place to be close to those to whom she refers as "my people." The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. Abshu Ben-Jamal. Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. From that episode on, Naylor portrays men as people who take advantage of others. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a 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." Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. Boyd offers guidelines for growth in a difficult world. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. As the reader's gaze is centered within the victim's body, the reader, is stripped of the safety of aesthetic distance and the freedom of artistic response. The Women of Brewster Place Characters - eNotes.com Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. 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. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. As a result of their offenses toward the women in the story, the women are drawn together. 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. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. 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. Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still "gonna have a party.". She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. 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. 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." The collective dream of the last chapter constitutes a "symbolic act" which, as Frederic Jameson puts it, enables "real social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, [to] find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm." Tayari Jones on The Women of Brewster Place, Nearly A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. 37-70. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future. One night a rat bites the baby while they are sleeping and Mattie begins to search for a better place to live. There is also the damning portrait of a minister on the make in Etta Mae's story, the abandonment of Ciel by Eugene, and the scathing presentation of the young male rapists in "The Two. Dreams keep the street alive as well, if only in the minds of its former inhabitants whose stories the dream motif unites into a coherent novel. In 1989, Baker 2 episodes aired. The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine, and soon after she negotiated a book contract. ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. 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. Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. Situated within the margins of the violator's story of rape, the reader is able to read beneath the bodily configurations that make up its text, to experience the world-destroying violence required to appropriate the victim's body as a sign of the violator's power. Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. ." Flipped Between Critical Opinion and, An illusory or hallucinatory psychic activity, particularly of a perceptual-visual nature, that occurs during sleep. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? knelt between them and pushed up her dress and tore at the top of her pantyhose. Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. Give evidence from the story that supports this notion. , Not only does Langston Hughes's poem speak generally about the nature of deferral and dreams unsatisfied, but in the historical context that Naylor evokes it also calls attention implicitly to the sixties' dream of racial equality and the "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.. She believes she must have a man to be happy. An anthology of stories that relate to the black experience. ", "The enemy wasn't Black men," Joyce Ladner contends, " 'but oppressive forces in the larger society' " [When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 1984], and Naylor's presentation of men implies agreement. Jill Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place." When she discovers that sex produces babies, she starts to have sex in order to get pregnant. 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. Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. 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. Better lay the fuck still, cunt, or I'll rip open your guts. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. She sets the beginning of The Women of Brewster Place at the end of World War I and brings it forward thirty years. 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. Idealistic and yearning to help others, she dropped out of college and moved onto Brewster Place to live amongst other African-American people. WebSo Mattie runs away to the city (not yet Brewster though! 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. Though Mattie's dream has not yet been fulfilled, there are hints that it will be. Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. Having recognized Lorraine as a human being who becomes a victim of violence, the reader recoils from the unfamiliar picture of a creature who seems less human than animal, less subject than object. 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. "Does it matter?" What does Brewster Place symbolize? The son of Macrina the Elder, Basil is said to have moved with his family to the shores of the Black Sea during the persecution of Christians under Galerius. She left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1975 and moved back home; shortly after returning to New York, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Web"The Men of Brewster Place" include Mattie Michael's son, Basil, who jumped bail and left his mother to forfeit the house she had put up as bond. The Women of Brewster Place | Encyclopedia.com What prolongs both the text and the lives of Brewster's inhabitants is dream; in the same way that Mattie's dream of destruction postpones the end of the novel, the narrator's last words identify dream as that which affirms and perpetuates the life of the street. Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor and Bill Phillips, Little Brown, 1997. What happened to Basil in Brewster Place? Brewster Place 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. 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. Plot Summary Historical Context She thought about quitting, but completed her degree when the school declared that her second novel, "Linden Hills," would fulfill the thesis requirement. Brewster Place lives on because the women whose dreams it has been a part of live on and continue to dream. Her life revolves around her relationship with her husband and her desperate attempts to please him. Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? 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." Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. 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. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. WebBrewster Place is at once a warm, loving community and a desolate and blighted neighborhood on the verge of collapsing. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms from being pressed against the rough cement. She is a woman who knows her own mind. As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. 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. Naylor piles pain upon paineach one an experience of agony that the reader may compare to his or her own experienceonly to define the total of all these experiences as insignificant, incomparable to the "pounding motion that was ripping [Lorraine's] insides apart." 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. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. Lorraine lay in that alley only screaming at the moving pain inside of her that refused to come to rest. Naylor wants people to understand the richness of the black heritage. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. Etta Mae dreams of a man who can "move her off of Brewster Place for good," but she, too, has her dream deferred each time that a man disappoints her. 'BREWSTER' TELLS THE OTHER SIDE OF STORY The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. did Brewster Place For example, Deirdre Donahue, a reviewer for the Washington Post, says of Naylor, "Naylor is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. What was left of her mind was centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart. Mattie is moving into Brewster Place when the novel opens. ". Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin, 1983. 29), edited by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, Greenwood, 1997. And so today I still have a dream. 62, No. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: "I still have Yet the substance of the dream itself and the significance of the dreamer raise some further questions. ("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. By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. 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. She stops eating and refuses to take care of herself, but Mattie will not let her die and finally gets Ciel to face her grief. So much of what you write is unconscious. Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place is made up of seven stories of the women who live Since the book was first published in 1982, critics have praised Gloria Naylor's characters. Many male critics complain about the negative images of black men in the story. While Mattie has accepted the loss of her house at the hands of Basil, and has accepted her fate in Brewster Place, she refuses to discuss the circumstances that have Like the street, the novel hovers, moving toward the end of its line, but deferring. WebLucielia Louise Turner is the mother of a young girl, Serena. She reminds him of his daughter, and this friendship assuages the guilt he feels over his daughter's fate. Women of Brewster Place Characters Webclimax Lorraines brutal gang rape in Brewster Places alley by C. C. Baker and his friends is the climax of the novel. Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. The limitations of narrative render any disruption of the violator/spectator affiliation difficult to achieve; while sadism, in Mulvey's words, "demands a story," pain destroys narrative, shatters referential realities, and challenges the very power of language. 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. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. "I like Faulkner's work," Naylor says. As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. ", "Americans fear black men, individually and collectively," Naylor says. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. She is relieved to have him back, and she is still in love with him, so she tries to ignore his irresponsible behavior and mean temper. It's never easy to write at all, but at least it was territory I had visited before.". 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. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. Etta Mae Johnson arrives at Brewster Place with style. And Basil inexplicably turns into a Narcissist, just like his grandfather. Now, clearly Mattie did not intend for this to happen. Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. 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. Naylor creates two climaxes in The Women of Brewster Place. 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. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. When he share-cropped in the South, his crippled daughter was sexually abused by a white landowner, and Ben felt powerless to do anything about it. Structuralists believe that there's no intelligent voice behind the prose, because they believe that the prose speaks to itself, speaks to other prose. 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." Menu. WebThe Women of Brewster Place: With Oprah Winfrey, Mary Alice, Olivia Cole, Robin Givens. The men Naylor depicts in her novel are mean, cowardly, and lawless. He is said to have been a She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". basil in brewster place ". As Naylor disentangles the reader from the victim's consciousness at the end of her representation, the radical dynamics of a female-gendered reader are thrown into relief by the momentary reintroduction of a distanced perspective on violence: "Lorraine lay pushed up against the wall on the cold ground with her eyes staring straight up into the sky. Mostly marginal and spectral in Brewster Place, the men reflect the nightmarish world they inhabit by appearing as if they were characters in a dream., "The Block Party" is a crucial chapter of the book because it explores the attempts to experience a version of community and neighborhood. 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. Based on women Naylor has known in her life, the characters convincingly portray the struggle for survival that black women have shared throughout history. WebC.C. In 1974, Naylor moved first to North Carolina and then to Florida to practice full-time ministry, but had to work in fast-food restaurants and as a telephone operator to help support her religious work. ." by Neera Who is Ciel in Brewster Place? chroniclesdengen.com | Yes, that's what would happen to her babies. Again, expectations are subverted and closure is subtly deferred. Gloria Naylor, 'The Women Of Brewster Place' Author, Dies At 66 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. 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. 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.". It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. While the rest of her friends attended church, dated, and married the kinds of men they were expected to, Etta Mae kept Rock Vale in an uproar. It was 1963, a turbulent year at the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. Each woman in the book has her own dream. In Mattie's dream of the block party, even Ciel, who knows nothing of Lorraine, admits that she has dreamed of "a woman who was supposed to be me She didn't look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me.".
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