Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. 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. Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. 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. 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. Huge hunks of those novels have male characters that helped me carry the drama. As she climbs the stairs to the apartment, however, she hears Mattie playing Etta's "loose life" records. 918-22. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a In dreaming of Lorraine the women acknowledge that she represents every one of them: she is their daughter, their friend, their enemy, and her brutal rape is the fulfillment of their own nightmares. 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. "When I was a kid I used to read a book a day," Naylor says. They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. 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. "I was able to conquer those things through my craft. Since the book was first published in 1982, critics have praised Gloria Naylor's characters. In her interview with Carabi, Naylor maintains that community influences one's identity. Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. Fowler tries to place Naylor's work within the context of African-American female writers since the 1960s. 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. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: "I still have Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. 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. Abshu Ben-Jamal. Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. Loyle Hairston, a review in Freedomways, Vol. ", Critics also recognize Naylor's ability to make history come alive. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." Each woman in the book has her own dream. The brick wall symbolizes the differences between the residents of Brewster Place and their rich neighbors on the other side of the wall. (Full name Neil Richard Gaiman), Teresa William died on April 18, 1644, at nearly 80 years old. | Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. 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, we are told, "was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. Yet the substance of the dream itself and the significance of the dreamer raise some further questions. In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. It just happened. 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.". The impact of his fist forced air into her constricted throat, and she worked her sore mouth, trying to form the one word that had been clawing inside of her "Please." ", At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. 3642. When her parents refuse to give her another for her thirteenth Christmas, she is heartbroken. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future. 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." Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. Source: Jill L. Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place" in Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1990, pp. Virginia C. Fowler, "'Ebony Phoenixes': The Women of Brewster Place," in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, edited by Frank Day, Twayne Publishers, 1996, pp. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. Naylor's temporary restoration of the objectifying gaze only emphasizes the extent to which her representation of violence subverts the conventional dynamics of the reading and viewing processes. WebThe Women of Brewster Place (TV Mini Series 1989) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. It also was turned into a television mini-series in 1989, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's "London," this reminder of Ben and Lorrin e blights the block party. Her little girls 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 This bond is complex and lasting; for example, when Kiswana Browne and her mother specifically discuss their heritage, they find that while they may demonstrate their beliefs differently, they share the same pride in their race. WebLife. 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. , 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.. Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. As a result of their offenses toward the women in the story, the women are drawn together. 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. In The Accused, a 1988 film in which Jody Foster gives an Oscar-winning performance as a rape victim, the problematics of transforming the victim's experience into visualizable form are addressed, at least in part, through the use of flashback; the rape on which the film centers is represented only at the end of the film, after the viewer has followed the trail of the victim's humiliation and pain. 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. While acknowledging the shriveling, death-bound images of Hughes's poem, Naylor invests with value the essence of deferralit resists finality. Lorraine reminds Ben of his estranged daughter, and Lorraine finds in Ben a new father to replace the one who kicked her out when she refused to lie about being a lesbian. He seldom works. 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. William Brewster/Place of burial. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. He is said to have been a 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. "I have written in the voice of men before, from my second novel on. This, too, is an inheritance. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. Later in the decade, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the culmination of ten years of violence against blacks. 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. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. Though Etta's journey starts in the same small town as Mattie's, the path she takes to Brewster Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. 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. 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. Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. As a result, Through prose and poetry, the author addresses issues of family violence, urban decay, spiritual renewal, and others, yet rises above the grim realism to find hope and inspiration. 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. According to Stoll in Magill's Literary Annual, "Gloria Naylor is already numbered among the freshest and most vital voices in contemporary American literature.". 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." 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. Research the era to discover what the movement was, who was involved, and what the goals and achievements were. The second theme, violence that men enact on women, connects with and strengthens the first. 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. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. They were, after all, only fantasies, and real dreams take more than one night to achieve. 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. "Power and violence," in Hannah Arendt's words, "are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" [On Violence, 1970]. 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. 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. Amid Naylor's painfully accurate depictions of real women and their real struggles, Cora's instant transformation into a devoted and responsible mother seems a "vain fantasy.". Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. 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 lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. . 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. ", The situation of black men, she says, is one that "still needs work. What does Brewster Place symbolize? The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. The Naylors were disappointed to learn that segregation also existed in the North, although it was much less obvious. 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. Eyeing the attractive visiting preacher, she wonders if it is not still possible for her to change her lot in life. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. Jehovah's Witnesses spread their message through face-to-face contact with people, but more importantly, through written publications. Introduction 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." And Naylor takes artistic license to resurrect Ben, the gentle janitor killed by a distraught rape victim, who functions as the novel's narrator. 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. She becomes friends with Cora Lee and succeeds, for one night, in showing her a different life. It won critical raves and an American Book Award for first fiction in 1983. Then Cora Lee notices that there is still blood on the bricks. Plot Summary Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. She vows that she will start helping them with homework and walking them to school. Michael Awkward, "Authorial Dreams of Wholeness: (Dis)Unity, (Literary) Parentage, and The Women of Brewster Place," in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Just as she is about to give up, she meets Eva Turner, an old woman who lives with her granddaughter, Ciel. ', "I was afraid that if I stayed it would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. "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. And so today I still have a dream. asks Ciel. Critics like her style and appreciate her efforts to deal with societal issues and psychological themes. 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. They say roughly one-third of black men have been jailed or had brushes with the law, but two-thirds are trying to hold their homes together, trying to keep their jobs, trying to keep their sanity, under the conditions in which they have to live. 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. 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. She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". For a week after Ben's death it rains continuously, and although they will not admit it to each other, all the women dream of Lorraine that week. 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. For many of the women who have lived there, Brewster Place is an anchor as well as a confinement and a burden; it is the social network that, like a web, both sustains and entraps. When Cora Lee turned thirteen, however, her parents felt that she was too old for baby dolls and gave her a Barbie. The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, The English Language Institute of America, 1975. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. Ciel loves her husband, Eugene, even though he abuses her verbally and threatens physical harm. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Naiad, 1989. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Early on, she lives with Turner and Mattie in North Carolina. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? 282-85. 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. 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. 4, December, 1990, pp. All of the Brewster Place women respect Mattie's strength, truthfulness, and morals as well as her ability to survive the abuse, loss, and betrayal she has suffered. Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. When they had finished and stopped holding her up, her body fell over like an unstringed puppet. She believes she must have a man to be happy. My emotional energy was spent in creating a woman's world, telling her side of it because I knew it hadn't been done enough in literature. "Woman," Mulvey observes, "stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic control by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Results Focused Influencer Marketing. Mattie's journey to Brewster Place begins in rural Tennessee, but when she becomes pregnant she leaves town to avoid her father's wrath. Influenced by Roots themes The search for a home; the hopefulness of migration; the power of personal connections But her first published work was a short story that was accepted by Marcia Gillespie, then editor of Essence magazine. 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. 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. 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. One critic has said that her character may be modeled after adherents of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. 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." 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).