62, No. Kay Bonetti, "An Interview with Gloria Naylor" (audiotape), American Prose Library, 1988. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. It squeezed through her paralyzed vocal cords and fell lifelessly at their feet. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. Brewster Place names the women, houses Novels for Students. She believes she must have a man to be happy. Mattie allows herself to be seduced by Butch Fuller, whom Samuel thinks is worthless. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. 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. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. "Power and violence," in Hannah Arendt's words, "are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" [On Violence, 1970]. Brewster Place provides the connection among the seven very unique women with stories of their own to tell. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. 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. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). "(The challenges) were mostly inside myself, because I was under a lot of duress when I wrote the book," she says. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear." Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. WebIn ''The Women of Brewster Place,'' for example, we saw Eugene in the background, brawling with his wife, Ceil, forgetting to help look out for his baby daughter, who was about to stick Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. 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. Loyle Hairston, a review in Freedomways, Vol. 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 the dream ends, we are left to wonder what sort of register the "actual" block party would occupy. 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. Their ability to transform their lives and to stand strong against the difficulties that face them in their new environment and circumstances rings true with the spirit of black women in American today. Structuralists believe that there's no intelligent voice behind the prose, because they believe that the prose speaks to itself, speaks to other prose. Sadly, Lorraine's dream of not being "any different from anybody else in the world" is only fulfilled when her rape forces the other women to recognize the victimization and vulnerability that they share with her. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. 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. She assures Mattie that carrying a baby is nothing to be ashamed about. 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. Webclimax Lorraines brutal gang rape in Brewster Places alley by C. C. Baker and his friends is the climax of the novel. But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. 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. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. When Miss Eva dies, her spirit lives on in the house that Mattie is able to buy from Miss Eva's estate. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. Yes, that's what would happen to her babies. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. 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.] 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. Cora Lee does not necessarily like men, but she likes having sex and the babies that result. Anne Gottlieb, "Women Together," The New York Times, August 22, 1982, p. 11. This, too, is an inheritance. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. Mattie Michael. 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. The sun comes out for the block party that Kiswana has been organizing to raise money to take the landlord to court. Perhaps because her emphasis is on the timeless nature of dreams and the private mythology of each "ebony phoenix," the specifics of history are not foregrounded. The party seems joyful and successful, and Ciel even returns to see Mattie. Though Mattie's dream has not yet been fulfilled, there are hints that it will be. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. She left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1975 and moved back home; shortly after returning to New York, she suffered a nervous breakdown. The detachment that authorizes the process of imaginative identification with the rapist is withdrawn, forcing the reader within the confines of the victim's world. 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. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. Sapphire, American Dreams, Vintage, 1996. With these anonymous men, she gets pregnant, but doesn't have to endure the beatings or disappointment intimacy might bring. Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, searching for acceptance. He seldom works. Early on, she lives with Turner and Mattie in North Carolina. While the women were not literally born within the community of Brewster Place, the community provides the backdrop for their lives. Although the reader's gaze is directed at 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. 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. Give reasons. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. "Although I had been writing since I was 12 years old, the so-called serious writing happened when I was at Brooklyn College." It also stands for the oppression the women have endured in the forms of prejudice, violence, racism, shame, and sexism. She will not change her actions and become a devoted mother, and her dreams for her children will be deferred. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? As a black girl growing up in a still-segregated South, Etta Mae broke all the rules. , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. Etta Mae Johnson arrives at Brewster Place with style. When she remembers with guilt that her children no longer like school and are often truant, she resolves to change her behavior in order to ensure them brighter futures: "Junior high; high school; collegenone of them stayed little forever. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live 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." 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. complete opposites, they have remained friends throughout the years, providing comfort to one another at difficult times in their lives. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. 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." 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. The presence of Ciel in Mattie's dream expresses the elder woman's wish that Ciel be returned to her and the desire that Ciel's wounds and flight be redeemed. | Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. A man who is going to buy a sandwich turns away; it is more important that he stay and eat the sandwich than that he pay for it. Huge hunks of those novels have male characters that helped me carry the drama. 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. Mattie puts It wasn't easy to write about men. Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. One of her first short stories was published in Essence magazine, and soon after she negotiated a book contract. or want to love, Lorraine and Ben become friends. Biographical and critical study. She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". 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. 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. He is said to have been a knelt between them and pushed up her dress and tore at the top of her pantyhose. Just as she is about to give up, she meets Eva Turner, an old woman who lives with her granddaughter, Ciel. 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. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. "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. Fowler tries to place Naylor's work within the context of African-American female writers since the 1960s. Sources 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." They will not talk about these dreams; only a few of them will even admit to having them, but every one of them dreams of Lorraine, finally recognizing the bond they share with the woman they had shunned as "different." Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". The women all share the experience of living on the dead end street that the rest of the world has forgotten. Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. Obliged comes from the political, social, and economic realities of post-sixties' Americaa world in which the women are largely disentitled. Official Sites 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. Writer He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. 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. 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.". 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. In addition to planning her next novel, which may turn out to be a historical story involving two characters from her third novel, "Mama Day," Naylor also is involved in other art forms. But her first published work was a short story that was accepted by Marcia Gillespie, then editor of Essence magazine. 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. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. Gloria Naylor's debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won a National Book Award and became a TV mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey. Each of the women in the story unconditionally loves at least one other woman. 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. As this chapter opens, people are gathering for Serena's funeral. 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. As she explains to Bellinelli in an interview, Naylor strives in TheWomen of Brewster Place to "help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours.". Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. Brewster Place is an American drama series which aired on ABC in May 1990. Like those before them, the women who live on Brewster Place overcome their difficulties through the support and wisdom of friends who have experienced their struggles. She leaves her middle-class family, turning her back on an upbringing that, she feels, ignored her heritage. Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. Cora is skeptical, but to pacify Kiswana she agrees to go. 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. An anthology of stories that relate to the black experience. 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. "The Block Party" tells the story of another deferred dream, this one literally dreamt by Mattie the night before the real Block Party. It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. Critics say that Naylor may have fashioned Kiswana's character after activists from the 60s, particularly those associated with the Black Power Movement. Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. 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. By manipulating the reader's placement within the scene of violence, Naylor subverts the objectifying power of the gaze; as the gaze is trapped within the erotic object, the necessary distance between the voyeur and the object of voyeuristic pleasure is collapsed. Idealistic and yearning to help others, she dropped out of college and moved onto Brewster Place to live amongst other African-American people. The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. Naylor created seven female characters with seven individual voices. Much to his Mattie's dismay, he ends up in trouble and in jail. 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. When her mother comes to visit her they quarrel over Kiswana's choice of neighborhood and over her decision to leave school. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. From that episode on, Naylor portrays men as people who take advantage of others. Style Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still "gonna have a party.". WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. What was left of her mind was centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart. When Naylor speaks of her first novel, she says that the work served to "exorcise demons," according to Angels Carabi in Belles Lettres 7. The idea that I could have what I really dreamed of, a writing career, seemed overwhelming. Despite the fact that in the epilogue Brewster Place is abandoned, its daughters still get up elsewhere and go about their daily activities. 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? " To fund her work as a minister, she lived with her parents and worked as a switchboard operator. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Bellinelli, director, RTSJ-Swiss Television, producer, A Conversation with Gloria Naylor on In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors, (videotape), California Newsreel, 1992. http://www.newsreel.org/films/inblack.htm. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. Kate Rushin, Black Back-ups, Firebrand Books, 1993. After the child's death, Ciel nearly dies from grief. After dropping out of college, Kiswana moves to Brewster Place to be a part of a predominantly African-American community. Although the epilogue begins with a meditation on how a street dies and tells us that Brewster Place is waiting to die, waiting is a present participle that never becomes past. She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. Ciel keeps taking Eugene back, even though he is verbally abusive and threatens her with physical abuse. In a ironic turn, Kiswana believes that her mother denies her heritage; during a confrontation, she is surprised when she learns that the two share a great deal. The displacement of reality into dream defers closure, even though the chapter appears shaped to make an end. She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. He murders a man and goes to jail. Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? 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. Plot Summary 4, 1983, pp. This is a story that depicts a family's struggle with grieving and community as they prepare to bury their dead mother. One night a rat bites the baby while they are sleeping and Mattie begins to search for a better place to live. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. 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. 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. 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. 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. He lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. She disappoints no one in her tight willow-green sundress and her large two-toned sunglasses. Having been rejected by people they love She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. 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. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the women support one another, counteracting the violence of their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and sons. 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. Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's "London," this reminder of Ben and Lorrin e blights the block party. brought his fist down into her stomach. 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. | Influenced by Roots Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. ." It will also examine the point at which dreams become "vain fantasy.". As the rain comes down, hopes for a community effort are scotched and frustration reaches an intolerable level. He befriends Lorraine when no one else will. Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. She resolved to write about her heritagethe black woman in America. 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." As a grown woman she continues to love the feel and smell of new babies, but once they grow into children she is frustrated with how difficult they are. Historical Context She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. She also encourages Mattie to save her money. 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.". 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. The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. Unable to stop him in any other way, Fannie cocks the shotgun against her husband's chest. To pacify Kiswana, Cora Lee agrees to take her children to a Shakespeare play in the local park. 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. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. Ben is Brewster Place's first black resident and its gentle-natured, alcoholic building superintendent. Critics like her style and appreciate her efforts to deal with societal issues and psychological themes. Like them, her books sing of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America. ." In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. 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. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. Many immigrants and Southern blacks arrived in New York after the War, searching for jobs. 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. 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. She joins Mattie on Brewster Place after leaving the last in a long series of men. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. At the end of the story, the women continue to take care of one another and to hope for a better future, just as Brewster Place, in its final days, tries to sustain its final generations. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. 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. 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. Members of poor, sharecropping families, Alberta and Roosevelt felt that New The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. 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. or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." Naylor's novel does not offer itself as a definitive treatment of black women or community, but it reflects a reality that a great many black women share; it is at the same time an indictment of oppressive social forces and a celebration of courage and persistence. Among the women there is both commonality and difference: "Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story.