In the following excerpt, Matus discusses the final chapter of The Women of Brewster Place and the effect of deferring or postponing closure. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. Mattie's son Basil, who has also fled from Brewster Place, is contrastingly absent. THE LITERARY WORK Only when Kiswana says that "babies grow up" does Cora Lee begin to question her life; she realizes that while she does like babies, she does not know what to do with children when they grow up. 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." Retrieved February 22, 2023 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/women-brewster-place. Early on, she lives with Turner and Mattie in North Carolina. The author captures the faces, voices, feelings, words, and stories of an African-American family in the neighborhood and town where she grew up. According to Annie Gottlieb in Women Together, a review of The Women of Brewster Place," all our lives those relationships had been the backdrop, while the sexy, angry fireworks with men were the show the bonds between women are the abiding ones. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. 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. 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. Explored Male Violence and Sexism Having recognized Lorraine as a human being who becomes a victim of violence, the reader recoils from the unfamiliar picture of a creature who seems less human than animal, less subject than object. ." One night after an argument with Teresa, Lorraine decides to go visit Ben. The men in the story exhibit cowardice, alcoholism, violence, laziness, and dishonesty. "I like Faulkner's work," Naylor says. And so today I still have a dream. 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. 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. Themes 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. In Magill's Literary Annual, Rae Stoll concurs: "Ultimately then, The Women of Brewster Place is an optimistic work, offering the hope for a redemptive community of love as a counterforce to isolation and violence.". 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. 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. "The Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. One critic has said that her character may be modeled after adherents of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. 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." 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. Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? A final symbol, in the form of toe-nail polish, stands for the deeper similarities that Kiswana and her mother discover. TITLE COMMENTARY 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 dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. Excitedly she tells Cora, "if we really pull together, we can put pressure on [the landlord] to start fixing this place up." At first there is no explanation given for the girl's death. Gloria Naylor died in 2016, at the age of 66. The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. Fannie speaks her mind and often stands up to her husband, Samuel. The four sections cover such subjects as slavery, changing times, family, faith, "them and us," and the future. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. 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. She comes home that night filled with good intentions. Built strong by his years as a field hand, and cinnamon skinned, Mattie finds him irresistible. "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. Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. "Power and violence," in Hannah Arendt's words, "are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" [On Violence, 1970]. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. It wasn't until she entered Brooklyn College as an English major in her mid-20s that she discovered "writers who were of my complexion.". . Naylor, 48, is the oldest of three daughters of a transit worker and a telephone operator, former sharecroppers who migrated from Mississippi to the New York burrough of Queens in 1949. "This lack of knowledge is going to have to fall on the shoulders of the educational institutions. Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. 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. INTRODUCTION Critics say that Naylor may have fashioned Kiswana's character after activists from the 60s, particularly those associated with the Black Power Movement. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. 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. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. The novel recognizes the precise political and social consequences of the cracked dream in the community it deals with, but asserts the vitality and life that persist even when faith in a particular dream has been disrupted. It also was turned into a television mini-series in 1989, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." Jehovah's Witnesses spread their message through face-to-face contact with people, but more importantly, through written publications. Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. PRINCIPAL WORKS Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. Two, edited by Frank Magill, Salem Press, 1983, pp. Results Focused Influencer Marketing. King's sermon culminates in the language of apocalypse, a register which, as I have already suggested, Naylor's epilogue avoids: "I still have Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. She leaves her boarding house room after a rat bites him because she cannot stay "another night in that place without nightmares about things that would creep out of the walls to attack her child." The "real" party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. Her life revolves around her relationship with her husband and her desperate attempts to please him. 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. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. Most men are incalculable hunters who come and go." asks Ciel. Driving an apple-green Cadillac with a white vinyl top and Florida plates, Etta Mae causes quite a commotion when she arrives at Brewster Place. Support your reasons with evidence from the story. The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, The English Language Institute of America, 1975. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. ". Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live It just happened. GENERAL COMMENTARY Naylor earned a Master of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. Now, clearly Mattie did not intend for this to happen. AUTHOR COMMENTARY These two events, she says, "got me to thinking about the two-thirds of black men who are not in jail and have not had brushes with the criminal law system. For example, in a review published in Freedomways, Loyle Hairston says that the characters " throb with vitality amid the shattering of their hopes and dreams." Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. "Rock Vale had no place for a black woman who was not only unwilling to play by the rules, but whose spirit challenged the very right of the game to exist." ", Her new dream of maternal devotion continues as they arrive home and prepare for bed. 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. Many male critics complain about the negative images of black men in the story.