Cora is skeptical, but to pacify Kiswana she agrees to go. Most Americans remember it as the year that Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy were assassinated. (February 22, 2023). For example, when one of the women faces the loss of a child, the others join together to offer themselves in any way that they can. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. 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. Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, " 'Blood ain't got no right still being here'." 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. For example, when the novel opens, Maggie smells something cooking, and it reminds her of sugar cane. Release Dates Novels for Students. 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. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. He befriends Lorraine when no one else will. The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. Butch Fuller exudes charm. Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: "I still have ". 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. Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. And yet, the placement of explosion and destruction in the realm of fantasy or dream that is a "false" ending marks Naylor's suggestion that there are many ways to dream and alternative interpretations of what happens to the dream deferred., The chapter begins with a description of the continuous rain that follows the death of Ben. She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. 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. 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. How does Serena die in Brewster Place? 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.. Critic Loyle Hairston readily agrees with the favorable analysis of Naylor's language, characterization, and story-telling. Under the pressure of the reader's controlling gaze, Lorraine is immediately reduced to the status of an objectpart mouth, part breasts, part thighssubject to the viewer's scrutiny. The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. 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 resents her conservative parents and their middle-class values and feels that her family has rejected their black heritage. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. As she climbs the stairs to the apartment, however, she hears Mattie playing Etta's "loose life" records. The residents of Brewster Place outside are sitting on stoops or playing in the street because of the heat. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. He murders a man and goes to jail. Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, Penguin, 1983. "She told me she hadn't read things like mine since James Baldwin. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. As a result, Kate Rushin, Black Back-ups, Firebrand Books, 1993. 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. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. AUTHOR COMMENTARY 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. 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. "The Women of Brewster Place 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. In all physical pain, Elaine Scarry observes, "suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. 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. Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. 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. Etta Mae Johnson arrives at Brewster Place with style. "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. 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. 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. She disappoints no one in her tight willow-green sundress and her large two-toned sunglasses. She vows that she will start helping them with homework and walking them to school. Later in the novel, a street gang rapes Lorraine, and she kills Ben, mistaking him for her attackers. After dropping out of college, Kiswana moves to Brewster Place to be a part of a predominantly African-American community. Eva invites Mattie in for dinner and offers her a place to stay. 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. 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. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." Novels for Students. Annie Gottlieb, a review in The New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1982, p. 11. While critics may have differing opinions regarding Naylor's intentions for her characters' future circumstances, they agree that Naylor successfully presents the themes of The Women of Brewster Place. She believes she must have a man to be happy. Even though the link between this neighborhood and the particular social, economic, and political realities of the sixties is muted rather than emphatic, defining characteristics are discernible. 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.". In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. | "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. It is morning and the sun is still shining; the wall is still standing, and everyone is getting ready for the block party. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. In the last paragraph of Cora's story, however, we find that the fantasy has been Cora's. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. He is the estranged husband of Elvira and father of an unnamed The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. "It is really very tough to try to fight those kinds of images and still keep your home together. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. Results Focused Influencer Marketing. 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. 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. Historical Context Theresa wants Lorraine to toughen upto accept who she is and not try to please other people. She reminds him of his daughter, and this friendship assuages the guilt he feels over his daughter's fate. She left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1975 and moved back home; shortly after returning to New York, she suffered a nervous breakdown. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. According to Webster, in The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, the word "community" means "the state of being held in common; common possession, enjoyment, liability, etc." 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. 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." While the women were not literally born within the community of Brewster Place, the community provides the backdrop for their lives. Refer to each styles convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates. As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. By considering the nature of personal and collective dreams within a context of specific social, political, and economic determinants, Naylor inscribes an ideology that affirms deferral; the capacity to defer and to dream is endorsed as life-availing. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. She provides shelter and a sense of freedom to her old friend, Etta Mae; also, she comes to the aid of Ciel when Ciel loses her desire to live. But perhaps the most revealing stories about Miss Eva opens her home to Mattie and her infant son, Basil. 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." I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. The changing ethnicity of the neighborhood reflects the changing demographics of society. They are still "gonna have a party," and the rain in Mattie's dream foreshadows the "the stormy clouds that had formed on the horizon and were silently moving toward Brewster Place." 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). In Brewster Place, who played Basil? A novel set in northern Italy in the late nineteenth century; published in Italian (as Teresa) in 1886, in English, Harlem "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." them, and defines their underprivileged status. Kiswana finds one of these wild children eating out of a dumpster, and soon Kiswana and Cora become friends. Official Sites In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. She becomes friends with Cora Lee and succeeds, for one night, in showing her a different life. Critical Overview Brewster Place is born, in Naylor's words, a "bastard child," mothers three generations, and "waits to die," having "watched its last generation of children torn away from it by court orders and eviction notices too tired and sick to help them." Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. 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. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. 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. ", The situation of black men, she says, is one that "still needs work. Provide detailed support for your answer drawing from various perspectives, including historical or sociological. 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. A nonfiction theoretical work concerning the rights of black women and the need to work for change relating to the issues of racism, sexism, and societal oppression. 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. Her story starts with a description of her happy childhood. To provide an "external" perspective on rape is to represent the story that the violator has created, to ignore the resistance of the victim whose body has been appropriated within the rapist's rhythms and whose enforced silence disguises the enormity of her pain. Etta Mae arrives at Brewster Place in what vehicle? To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. Her thighs and stomach had become so slimy from her blood and their semen that the last two boys didn't want to touch her, so they turned her over, propped her head and shoulders against the wall, and took her from behind. Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's "London," this reminder of Ben and Lorrin e blights the block party. After the child's death, Ciel nearly dies from grief. And Basil inexplicably turns into a Narcissist, just like his grandfather. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. 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. With these anonymous men, she gets pregnant, but doesn't have to endure the beatings or disappointment intimacy might bring. ." 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 portrays a close-knit community of women, bound in sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. Cora Lee does not necessarily like men, but she likes having sex and the babies that result. 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. 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. 37-70. He is said to have been a "Linden Hills," which has parallels to Dante's "Inferno," is concerned with life in a suburb populated with well-to-do blacks. As Naylor's representation retreats for even a moment to the distanced perspective the objectifying pressure of the reader's gaze allows that reader to see not the brutality of the act of violation but the brute-like characteristics of its victim. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. Naylor sets the story within Brewster Place so that she can focus on telling each woman's story in relationship to her ties to the community. Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. Author Biography Better lay the fuck still, cunt, or I'll rip open your guts. She imagines that her daughter Maybelline "could be doing something like this some daystanding on a stage, wearing pretty clothes and saying fine things . Maybelline could go to collegeshe liked school." In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. 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. Throughout the story, Naylor creates situations that stress the loneliness of the characters. He never helps his mother around the house. 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. 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. PRINCIPAL WORKS 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. Naylor has died at age As the dream ends, we are left to wonder what sort of register the "actual" block party would occupy. 'And something bad had happened to me by the wallI mean hersomething bad had happened to her'."