Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. The This unmovable and soothing will represents the historically strong communal spirit among all women, but especially African-American women. 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. He associates with the wrong people. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. 4964. The men in the story exhibit cowardice, alcoholism, violence, laziness, and dishonesty. Introduction " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. Two of the boys pinned her arms, two wrenched open her legs, while C.C. Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. Insofar as the reader's gaze perpetuates the process of objectification, the reader, too, becomes a violator. WebBasil turns out to be a spoiled young boy, and grows into a selfish man. 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. 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.
did Brewster Place Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. In a reiteration of the domestic routines that are always carefully attended 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. In her delirium and pain she sees movement at the end of the alley, and she picks up a brick to protect herself Though Etta's journey starts in the same small town as Mattie's, the path she takes to Brewster When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, living a life about which her beloved Billie Holiday, a blues musician, sings. All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. Mattie's son Basil, who has also fled from Brewster Place, is contrastingly absent. The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. Influenced by Roots She leaves her middle-class family, turning her back on an upbringing that, she feels, ignored her heritage. The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, The English Language Institute of America, 1975. Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. 55982. Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. (February 22, 2023). brought his fist down into her stomach. . 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. Her story starts with a description of her happy childhood. 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. As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. WebBrewster Place. Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears.
The Women of Brewster Place Characters | Course Hero "My horizons have broadened. 24, No. It's everybody you know and everybody you hope to know..". 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. 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. 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. As the rain comes down, hopes for a community effort are scotched and frustration reaches an intolerable level. 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. "Marcia Gillespie took me out for my first literary lunch," Naylor recalls. He befriends Lorraine when no one else will. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane In all physical pain, Elaine Scarry observes, "suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." She refuses to see any faults in him, and when he gets in trouble with the law she puts up her house to bail him out of jail. 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. Although the reader's gaze is directed at Hairston says that none of the characters, except for Kiswana Browne, can see beyond their current despair to brighter futures. This is a story that depicts a family's struggle with grieving and community as they prepare to bury their dead mother. At that point, Naylor returns Maggie to her teen years in Rock Vale, Tennessee, where Butch Fuller seduced her after sharing sugar cane with her. Baker and his friends, the teenage boys who terrorize Brewster Place. 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. In other words, he contends in a review in Freedomways that Naylor limits the concerns of Brewster Place to the "warts and cankers of individual personality, neglecting to delineate the origins of those social conditions which so strongly affect personality and behavior." [C.C.] 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. The last that were screamed to death were those that supplied her with the ability to loveor hate. 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. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. Naylor uses each woman's sexuality to help define her character. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. 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.
Basil the Physician - Wikipedia Of these unifying elements, the most notable is the dream motif, for though these women are living a nightmarish existence, they are united by their common dreams. WebBasil grows into a spoiled, irresponsible young man due to Mattie's overbearing parenting. and the boys] had been hiding up on the wall, watching her come up that back street, and they had waited. As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. She will not change her actions and become a devoted mother, and her dreams for her children will be deferred. 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. Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? 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." Frustrated with perpetual pregnancy and the burdens of poverty and single parenting, Cora joins in readily, and Theresa, about to quit Brewster Place in a cab, vents her pain at the fate of her lover and her fury with the submissiveness that breeds victimization. She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". Results Focused Influencer Marketing. 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." Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live INTRODUCTION ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. 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. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. WebSo Mattie runs away to the city (not yet Brewster though! She uses the community of women she has created in The Women of Brewster Place to demonstrate the love, trust, and hope that have always been the strong spirit of African-American women. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. "The Women" was a stunning debut for Naylor. 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. In order to capture the victim's pain in words, to contain it within a narrative unable to account for its intangibility, Naylor turns referentiality against itself. Filming & Production "Does it matter?" Naylor creates two climaxes in The Women of Brewster Place. from what she perceives as a possible threat. Critics like her style and appreciate her efforts to deal with societal issues and psychological themes. Her chapter begins with the return of the boyfriend who had left her eleven months before when their baby, Serena, was only a month old. ", At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing.
Gloria Naylor, 'The Women Of Brewster Place' Author, Dies At 66 She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. She believes she must have a man to be happy. (Full name Neil Richard Gaiman), Teresa ". Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. 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 street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. Therefore, its best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publications requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. complete opposites, they have remained friends throughout the years, providing comfort to one another at difficult times in their lives. His wife, Mary, had 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. The first black on Brewster Place, he arrived in 1953, just prior to the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka decision. 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. To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. Linda Labin, Masterpieces of Women's Literature, edited by Frank Magill, HarperCollins, 1996, pp. 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. Black American Literature Forum, Vol. Cane, Gaiman, Neil 1960- 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." Cora is skeptical, but to pacify Kiswana she agrees to go. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. It is on Brewster Place that the women encounter everyday problems, joys, and sorrows. Like the street, the novel hovers, moving toward the end of its line, but deferring. This, too, is an inheritance. While much of her prose soars lyrically, her poetry, she says, tends to be "stark and linear. Sources He lives with this pain until Lorraine mistakenly kills him in her pain and confusion after being raped. Mattie's dream scripts important changes for Ciel: She works for an insurance company (good pay, independence, and status above the domestic), is ready to start another family, and is now connected to a good man. Mattie allows herself to be seduced by Butch Fuller, whom Samuel thinks is worthless. 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. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. "I like Faulkner's work," Naylor says. 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. Ben belongs to Brewster Place even before the seven women do. 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. Critical Overview It will also examine the point at which dreams become "vain fantasy.". She tries to protect Mattie from the brutal beating Samuel Michael gives her when she refuses to name her baby's father. But perhaps the most revealing stories about 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. It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. From that episode on, Naylor portrays men as people who take advantage of others. She felt a weight drop on her spread body. 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. 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. WebBrewster Place is an American drama series which aired on ABC in May 1990. 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. Mattie is the matriarch of Brewster Place; throughout the novel, she plays a motherly role for all of the characters. Naylor attributes the success of The Women of Brewster Place as well as her other novels to her ability to infuse her work with personal experience. Later that year, Naylor began to study nursing at Medgar Evers College, then transferred to Brooklyn College of CUNY to study English. At that point in her life, she believed that after the turmoil of the 1960s, there was no hope for the world. Struck A Chord With Color Purple The "community among women" stands out as the book's most obvious theme. Mattie names her son, Basil, for the pleasant memory of the afternoon he was conceived in a fragrant basil patch. Menu. 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. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. When the sun began to warm the air and the horizon brightened, she still lay there, her mouth crammed with paper bag, her dress pushed up under her breasts, her bloody pantyhose hanging from her thighs." In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. 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.
Brewster Place He implies that the story has a hopeless ending. Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, " 'Blood ain't got no right still being here'." It's never easy to write at all, but at least it was territory I had visited before.".
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." it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. One night Basil is arrested and thrown in jail for killing a man during a bar fight. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. 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. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. But its reflection is subtle, achieved through the novel's concern with specific women and an individualized neighborhood and the way in which fiction, with its attention focused on the particular, can be made to reveal the play of large historical determinants and forces. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. She assures Mattie that carrying a baby is nothing to be ashamed about. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions Naylor's potency wells up from her language. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. She cannot admit that she craves his physical touch as a reminder of home. Throughout the story, Naylor creates situations that stress the loneliness of the characters.