But perhaps the mode of the party about to take place will be neither demonic nor apocalyptic. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. young men who had earlier insulted her because of her sexuality. Source: Donna Woodford, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998. 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. SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. Sometimes it can end up there. But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. She reminds him of his daughter, and this friendship assuages the guilt he feels over his daughter's fate. He loses control and beats Mattie in an attempt to get her to name the baby's father. 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. up her home and move to Brewster Place. bard college music faculty. Did you know you can highlight text to take a note? In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. Alice Walker 1944 In Naylor's representation, Lorraine's pain and not the rapist's body becomes the agent of violation, the force of her own destruction: "The screams tried to break through her corneas out into the air, but the tough rubbery flesh sent them vibrating back into her brain, first shaking lifeless the cells that nurtured her memory." Throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the women support one another, counteracting the violence of their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and sons. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. She stresses that African Americans must maintain their identity in a world dominated by whites. Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? Why were Lorraine and Theresa, "The Two," such a threat to the women who resided at Brewster Place? Benwho has been drinking heavilylies in her path. It is on Brewster Place that the women encounter everyday problems, joys, and sorrows. When he share-cropped in the South, his crippled daughter was sexually abused by a white landowner, and Ben felt powerless to do anything about it. on 2-49 accounts, Save 30% While acknowledging the shriveling, death-bound images of Hughes's poem, Naylor invests with value the essence of deferralit resists finality. She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. Jill Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place." How does Lorraine remind Ben of his daughter? When Samuel discovers that Mattie is pregnant by Fuller, he goes into a rage and beats her. 2. The oldest of three girls, Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. hours and is forced to live in a dilapidated building. Brewster Place inherits its last inhabitants, African-Americans, many of whom are theyre infants. All that the dream has promised is undercut, it seems. There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. with a new baby, Mattie takes a job working in an assembly line. Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. While these ties have always existed, the women's movement has brought them more recognition. responsibility for his actions. 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. 571-73. Joel Hughes, "Naylor Discusses Race Myths and Life," Yale Daily News, March 2, 1995. http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper. As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. So why not a last word on how it died? Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. 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. In the following essay, she discusses how the dream motif in The Women of Brewster Place connects the seven stories, forming them into a coherent novel. What do their feelings suggest about each of them? 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. "The Women of Brewster Place In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended The poem suggests that to defer one's dreams, desires, hopes is life-denying. 37-70. GENERAL COMMENTARY Serena, with a man named Eugene. 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. Instead, that gaze, like Lorraine's, is directed outward; it is the violator upon whom the reader focuses, the violator's body that becomes detached and objectified before the reader's eyes as it is reduced to "a pair of suede sneakers," a "face" with "decomposing food in its teeth." And then on to good jobs in insurance companies and the post office, even doctors and lawyers. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. Amen. FURTHER READING Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. For many years now, Lorraine has been taught to fear, hate, and despise men. The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. Her family moved several times during her childhood, living at different times in a housing project in upper Bronx, a Harlem apartment building, and in Queens. Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. 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. While Naylor sets the birth of Brewster Place right after the end of World War I, she continues the story of Brewster for approximately thirty years. After kissing her children good night, she returns to her bedroom and finds one of her shadow-like lovers waiting in her bed, and she folds "her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams" and lets her clothes drop to the floor. Both literally and figuratively, Brewster Place is a dead end streetthat is, the street itself leads nowhere and the women who live there are trapped by their histories, hopes, and dreams. . " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership. Plot Summary $24.99 Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. She is electrocuted and dies, leaving Lucielia However, when she goes to her own bed, 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. After Lorraine and John discover that Mr. Pignati's wife is dead, Lorraine feels very sad. Throughout the story, Naylor creates situations that stress the loneliness of the characters. children. Mattie names her son, Basil, for the pleasant memory of the afternoon he was conceived in a fragrant basil patch. 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. 27 Apr. Eva Turner, an old, kind, light-skinned African-American woman who takes her into The exception is Kiswana, from Linden Hills, who is deliberately downwardly mobile.. Please. They will tear down that which has separated them and made them "different" from the other inhabitants of the city. 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. 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." 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. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil Mattie allows herself to be seduced by Butch Fuller, whom Samuel thinks is worthless. Lorraine and Duncan are portrayed as characters who have yet to sober up and move on from the wasteful and opulent lifestyle they lived in the 1920s. Etta Mae has always lived a life very different from that of Mattie Michael. 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." She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. Provide detailed support for your answer drawing from various perspectives, including historical or sociological. Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. Renews May 7, 2023 Light-skinned, with smooth hair, Kiswana wants desperately to feel a part of the black community and to help her fellow African Americans better their lives. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. In the case of rape, where a violator frequently co-opts not only the victim's physical form but her power of speech, the external manifestations that make up a visual narrative of violence are anything but objective. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane taking her to his apartment and telling her the story of his daughter and wife. 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." The women again pull together, overcoming their outrage over the destruction of one of their own. Naylor uses Brewster Place to provide one commonality among the women who live there. lived there. 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. 3642. Ciel's eyes began to cloud. While Lucielia and Eugene are fighting, Serena chases a roach Far from having had it, the last words remind us that we are still "gonna have a party.". She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. 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. Brewster Place is a housing development in an unnamed city. Each of the women in the story unconditionally loves at least one other woman. Lorraine gains confidence from her burgeoning relationship with Ben. 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. What do they add to Mr. Pignati's life? 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. However, Ben is actually an incredibly compassionate and giving man whose death proves to be an important and tragic loss to the community. Instagram. 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. Kay Bonetti, "An Interview with Gloria Naylor" (audiotape), American Prose Library, 1988. front of which Ben died still has blood on it, so they begin to frantically tear it "Dawn" (the prologue) is coupled neither with death nor darkness, but with "dusk," a condition whose half-light underscores the half-life of the street. Cora Lee is so moved by Kiswanas brief 1, spring, 1990, pp. From that episode on, Naylor portrays men as people who take advantage of others. Naylor's writing reflects her experiences with the Jehovah's Witnesses, according to Virginia Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. A final symbol, in the form of toe-nail polish, stands for the deeper similarities that Kiswana and her mother discover. When her parents refuse to give her another for her thirteenth Christmas, she is heartbroken. The changing ethnicity of the neighborhood reflects the changing demographics of society. Why does she have these mixed feelings? "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. She does not share her opinion, she keeps it inside. O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered: Accept our prayers on behalf of thy servant Robert, and grant him an entrance into the land of light and joy, in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. 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. 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. 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." 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. An anthology of stories that relate to the black experience. Kate Rushin, Black Back-ups, Firebrand Books, 1993. After The Women of Brewster Place is a novel told in seven stories. As she watches the actors on stage and her children in the audience she is filled with remorse for not having been a more responsible parent. Share. survives for decades, offering a home to one new wave of migrants after another. Discusses Naylor's literary heritage and her use of and divergence from her literary roots. Then she opened her eyes and they screamed and screamed into the face above hersthe face that was pushing this tearing pain inside of her body. Give reasons. Research the era to discover what the movement was, who was involved, and what the goals and achievements were. 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. 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.
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