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. Webclimax Lorraines brutal gang rape in Brewster Places alley by C. C. Baker and his friends is the climax of the novel. Sources The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. Mattie Michael. 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. Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. 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. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. 571-73. Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, searching for acceptance. Explain. 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. She joins Mattie on Brewster Place after leaving the last in a long series of men. Mattie is the matriarch of Brewster Place; throughout the novel, she plays a motherly role for all of the characters. Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. Naylor has died at age Brewster Place names the women, houses Yet other critics applaud the ending for its very reassurance that the characters will not only survive but prosper. 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. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact The "community among women" stands out as the book's most obvious theme. Ciel keeps taking Eugene back, even though he is verbally abusive and threatens her with physical abuse. Ciel's parents take her away, but Mattie stays on with Basil. Having been denied library-borrowing privileges in the South because of her race, Naylor's mother encouraged her children to visit the library and read as much as they could. The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. She is similarly convinced that it will be easy to change Cora's relationship with her children, and she eagerly invites them to her boyfriend's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. He implies that the story has a hopeless ending. The face pushed itself so close to hers that she could look into the flared nostrils and smell the decomposing food in its teeth.. She stresses that African Americans must maintain their identity in a world dominated by whites. Lorraine, we are told, "was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. Ciel's eyes began to cloud. Anne Gottlieb, "Women Together," The New York Times, August 22, 1982, p. 11. To pacify Kiswana, Cora Lee agrees to take her children to a Shakespeare play in the local park. WebBrewster Place is at once a warm, loving community and a desolate and blighted neighborhood on the verge of collapsing. In a frenzy the women begin tearing down the wall. 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. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms. She couldn't tell when they changed places. She didn't feel her split rectum or the patches in her skull where her hair had been torn off." As this chapter opens, people are gathering for Serena's funeral. 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." She spends her life loving and caring for her son and denies herself adult love. Christine H. King asserts in Identities and Issues in Literature, "The ambiguity of the ending gives the story a mythic quality by stressing the continual possibility of dreams and the results of their deferral." There are also a greedy minister, a street gang member who murders his own brother, a playwright and community activist and a mentally handicapped boy who is a genius at playing blues piano. They contend that her vivid portrayal of the women, their relationships, and their battles represents the same intense struggle all human beings face in their quest for long, happy lives. As black families move onto the street, Ben remains on Brewster Place. The Women of Brewster Place Discovering early on that America is not yet ready for a bold, confident, intelligent black woman, she learns to survive by attaching herself "to any promising rising black star, and when he burnt out, she found another." Yes, that's what would happen to her babies. 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. I was totally freaked out when that happened and I didn't write for another seven or eight months. Fowler tries to place Naylor's work within the context of African-American female writers since the 1960s. 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 Mediterranean families knew him as the man who would quietly do repairs with alcohol on his breath. The quotation is appropriate to Cora Lee's story not only because Cora and her children will attend the play but also because Cora's chapter will explore the connection between the begetting of children and the begetting of dreams. After a frightening episode with a rat in her apartment, Mattie looks for new housing. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Naylor earned a Master of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. 55982. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine, and soon after she negotiated a book contract. Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. 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. His wife, Mary, had , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. 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. Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. With these anonymous men, she gets pregnant, but doesn't have to endure the beatings or disappointment intimacy might bring. a body that is, in Mulvey's terms, "stylised and fragmented by close-ups," the body that is dissected by that gaze is the body of the violator and not his victim. This story explores the relationship between Theresa and Lorraine, two lesbians who move into the run-down complex of apartments that make up "Brewster Place." He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". Kiswana thinks that she is nothing like her mother, but when her mother's temper flares Kiswana has to admit that she admires her mother and that they are more alike that she had realized. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. 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. 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. Baker and his friends, the teenage boys who terrorize Brewster Place. The Women of Brewster Place Characters - eNotes.com 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. ", "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. 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. Dorothy Wickenden, a review in The New Republic, September 6, 1982, p. 37. Critical Overview It won critical raves and an American Book Award for first fiction in 1983. Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. Basil and Eugene are forever on the run; other men in the stories (Kiswana's boyfriend Abshu, Cora Lee's shadowy lovers) are narrative ciphers. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. Much to his Mattie's dismay, he ends up in trouble and in jail. The inconclusive last chapter opens into an epilogue that too teases the reader with the sense of an ending by appearing to be talking about the death of the street, Brewster Place. Two years later, she read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; it was the first time she had read a novel written by a black woman. A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. ." (February 22, 2023). She renews ties here with both Etta Mae and Ciel. They agree that Naylor's clear, yet often brash, language creates images both believable and consistent. Critic Loyle Hairston readily agrees with the favorable analysis of Naylor's language, characterization, and story-telling. While much of her prose soars lyrically, her poetry, she says, tends to be "stark and linear. He seldom works. In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. 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. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. Ciel dreams of love, from her boyfriend and from her daughter and unborn child, but an unwanted abortion, the death of her daughter, and the abandonment by her boyfriend cruelly frustrates these hopes. All six of the boys rape her, leaving her near death. 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. 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. The remainder of the sermon goes on to celebrate the resurrection of the dream"I still have a dream" is repeated some eight times in the next paragraph. Following the abortion, Ciel is already struggling emotionally when young Serena dies in a freak accident. The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. Years later when the old woman dies, Mattie has saved enough money to buy the house. Encyclopedia.com. or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. "Marcia Gillespie took me out for my first literary lunch," Naylor recalls. Eyeing the attractive visiting preacher, she wonders if it is not still possible for her to change her lot in life. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. to in the novelthe making of soup, the hanging of laundry, the diapering of babies, Brewster's death is forestalled and postponed. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. She resolved to write about her heritagethe black woman in America. 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.. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith, 1930. He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. William died on April 18, 1644, at nearly 80 years old. Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylors The Women of Brewster Place The Women of Brewster Place (TV Mini Series 1989) - IMDb Etta Mae arrives at Brewster Place in what vehicle? Although remarkably similar to Dr. King's sermon in the recognition of blasted hopes and dreams deferred, The Women of Brewster Place does not reassert its faith in the dream of harmony and equality: It stops short of apocalypse in its affirmation of persistence. Mattie's journey to Brewster Place begins in rural Tennessee, but when she becomes pregnant she leaves town to avoid her father's wrath. The violation of her personhood that is initiated with the rapist's objectifying look becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy borne out by the literal destruction of her body; rape reduces its victim to the status of an animal and then flaunts as authorization the very body that it has mutilated. WebThe Women of Brewster Place: With Oprah Winfrey, Mary Alice, Olivia Cole, Robin Givens. I had been the person behind `The Women of Brewster Place. The sixth boy took a dirty paper bag lying on the ground and stuffed it into her mouth. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. Sources Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still "gonna have a party.". The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. 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. Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing. ", 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." The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. At that point in her life, she believed that after the turmoil of the 1960s, there was no hope for the world. A play she wrote for children is being produced in New York City by the Creative Arts Team, an organization dedicated to bringing theater to schools. 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. Because the victim's story cannot be told in the representation itself, it is told first; in the representation that follows, that story lingers in the viewer's mind, qualifying the victim's inability to express herself and providing, in essence, a counter-text to the story of violation that the camera provides. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. William Brewster/Place of burial. In the epilogue we are told that Brewster Place is abandoned, but does not die, because the dreams of the women keep it alive: But the colored daughters of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn. Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. Ciel, the grandchild of Eva Turner, also ends up on Brewster Place. 62, No. In Magill's Literary Annual, Rae Stoll concurs: "Ultimately then, The Women of Brewster Place is an optimistic work, offering the hope for a redemptive community of love as a counterforce to isolation and violence.". She will not change her actions and become a devoted mother, and her dreams for her children will be deferred. ), 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. 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. Naylor wrote "The Women of Brewster Place" while she was a student, finishing it the very month she graduated in 1981. 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. 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. Abshu Ben-Jamal is Kiswana Browne's boyfriend as well as the man behind the black production of A Midsummer's Night Dream performed in the park and attended by Cora Lee and her children. He never helps his mother around the house. Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. Like Martin Luther King, Naylor resists a history that seeks to impose closure on black American dreams, recording also in her deferred ending a reluctance to see "community" as a static or finished work. By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. | Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. Just as she is about to give up, she meets Eva Turner, an old woman who lives with her granddaughter, Ciel. There were particular challenges for Naylor in writing "The Men of Brewster Place.". 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. 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." Naylor uses many symbols in The Women of Brewster Place. them, and defines their underprivileged status. Official Sites Naylor's writing reflects her experiences with the Jehovah's Witnesses, according to Virginia Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. Etta Mae Johnson arrives at Brewster Place with style. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Naiad, 1989. 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.