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A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. 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? " 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.] from what she perceives as a possible threat. It will also examine the point at which dreams become "vain fantasy.". She comes home that night filled with good intentions. The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. Butch Fuller exudes charm. Fifteen years after the publication of her best-selling first novel, "The Women of Brewster Place," Gloria Naylor revisits the same territory to give voices to the men who were in the background. There is an attempt on Naylor's part to invoke the wide context of Brewster's particular moment in time and to blend this with her focus on the individual dreams and psychologies of the women in the stories. I read all of Louisa May Alcott and all the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.". 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. Critics have praised Naylor's style since The Women of Brewster Place was published in 1982. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended 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. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. According to Bellinelli in A Conversation with Gloria Naylor, Naylor became aware of racism during the 60s: "That's when I first began to understand that I was different and that that difference meant something negative.". He seldom works. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". In that violence, the erotic object is not only transformed into the object of violence but is made to testify to the suitability of the object status projected upon it. 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. There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane In summary, the general consensus of critics is that Naylor possesses a talent that is seldom seen in new writers. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. Each woman in the book has her own dream. They teach you to minutely dissect texts and (I thought) `How could I ever just cut that off from myself and go on to do what I have to do?' For a while she manages to earn just enough money to pay rent on the room she shares with her baby, Basil. In a novel full of unfulfilled and constantly deferred dreams, the only the dream that is fully realized is Lorraine's dream of being recognized as "a lousy human being who's somebody's daughter | by Neera 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. ." 4964. Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. 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. 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. Lorraine's body was twisting in convulsions of fear that they mistook for resistance, and 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. What happened to Ciel in Brewster Place? The "community among women" stands out as the book's most obvious theme. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. 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. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. She sets the beginning of The Women of Brewster Place at the end of World War I and brings it forward thirty years. Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. Alice Walker 1944 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. Attending church with Mattie, she stares enviously at the "respectable" wives of the deacons and wishes that she had taken a different path. ". 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. 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). 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. The rape scene in The Women of Brewster Place occurs in "The Two," one of the seven short stories that make up the novel. The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. 37-70. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. 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. Fowler tries to place Naylor's work within the context of African-American female writers since the 1960s. Plot Summary Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing. Women and people of color comprise the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses, perhaps because, according to Harrison in Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, "Their religion allows their voices to emerge People listen to them; they are valuable, bearers of a life-giving message." 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. The oldest of three girls, Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. Critics like her style and appreciate her efforts to deal with societal issues and psychological themes. 918-22. 282-85. The "real" party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. 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. Later that year, Naylor began to study nursing at Medgar Evers College, then transferred to Brooklyn College of CUNY to study English. Excitedly she tells Cora, "if we really pull together, we can put pressure on [the landlord] to start fixing this place up." Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. Members of poor, sharecropping families, Alberta and Roosevelt felt that New Unfortunately, he causes Mattie nothing but heartache. "It took me a little time, but after I got over the writer's block, I never looked back.". 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. 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. "(The challenges) were mostly inside myself, because I was under a lot of duress when I wrote the book," she says. I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. The extended comparison between the street's "life" and the women's lives make the work an "allegory." 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. Style To pacify Kiswana, Cora Lee agrees to take her children to a Shakespeare play in the local park. Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. 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. Explain. 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. WebMattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. 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. In the following excerpt, Matus discusses the final chapter of The Women of Brewster Place and the effect of deferring or postponing closure. Webclimax Lorraines brutal gang rape in Brewster Places alley by C. C. Baker and his friends is the climax of the novel. 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.". Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, " 'Blood ain't got no right still being here'." WebLucielia Louise Turner is the mother of a young girl, Serena. Yet other critics applaud the ending for its very reassurance that the characters will not only survive but prosper. Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. She disappoints no one in her tight willow-green sundress and her large two-toned sunglasses. The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. Characters them, and defines their underprivileged status. 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. Brewster is a place for women who have no realistic expectations of revising their marginality, most of whom have "come down" in the world. It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. Linda Labin asserts in Masterpieces of Women's Literature, "In many ways, The Women of Brewster Place may prove to be as significant in its way as Southern writer William Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. And so today I still have a dream. 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. "She told me she hadn't read things like mine since James Baldwin. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. Samuel Michael, a God-fearing man, is Mattie's father. 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. 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. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. In other words, she takes the characters back in time to show their backgrounds. She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? 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." 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. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. Novels for Students. He complains that he will never be able to get ahead with her and two babies to care for, and although she does not want to do it, she gets an abortion. A voracious reader since "the age of literacy," Naylor credits her mother as her greatest literary influence. Encyclopedia.com. 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. [C.C.] He convinced his mama to put her house on the line to keep him out of jail and then skipped town, forcing 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. Mattie's dream has not been fulfilled yet, but neither is it folded and put away like Cora's; a storm is heading toward Brewster Place, and the women are "gonna have a party.". Her success probably stems from her exploration of the African-American experience, and her desire to " help us celebrate voraciously that which is ours," as she tells Bellinelli in the interview series, In Black and White. The "imagised, eroticized concept of the world that makes a mockery of empirical objectivity" is here replaced by the discomforting proximity of two human faces locked in violent struggle and defined not by eroticism but by the pain inflicted by one and borne by the other: 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. Each foray away from the novel gives me something fresh and new to bring back to it when I'm ready. That year also marked the August March on Washington as well as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. 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. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. I liked " 1974: Basil Brown, a 48-year-old health food advocate from Croydon, England, died from liver damage after he consumed 70 million units of Vitamin A and around 10 gallons (38 litres) of carrot juice over ten days, turning his skin bright yellow. ", At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. While the novel opens with Mattie as a woman in her 60s, it quickly flashes back to Mattie's teen years in Rock Vale, Tennessee, where Mattie lives a sheltered life with her over-protective father, Samuel, and her mother, Fannie. Obliged comes from the political, social, and economic realities of post-sixties' Americaa world in which the women are largely disentitled. 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. Although the reader's gaze is directed at it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear." She renews ties here with both Etta Mae and Ciel. 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." Their dreams, even those that are continually deferred, are what keep them alive, continuing to sleep, cook, and care for their children. Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. "I started with the A's in the children's section of the library, and I read all the way down to the W's. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. | Situated within the margins of the violator's story of rape, the reader is able to read beneath the bodily configurations that make up its text, to experience the world-destroying violence required to appropriate the victim's body as a sign of the violator's power. 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. 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. When Samuel discovers that Mattie is pregnant by Fuller, he goes into a rage and beats her. As a result of their offenses toward the women in the story, the women are drawn together. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. She leaves her middle-class family, turning her back on an upbringing that, she feels, ignored her heritage.