Dialogue Between Politician And Journalist On Corruption, Articles D

Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. 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. Because the novel focuses on women, the men are essentially flat minor characters who are, with the exception of C. C. Baker and his gang, not so much villains as The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." He was buried in Burial Hill in Plymouth, where you can find a stone memorial honoring him as Patriarch of the Pilgrims.. What prolongs both the text and the lives of Brewster's inhabitants is dream; in the same way that Mattie's dream of destruction postpones the end of the novel, the narrator's last words identify dream as that which affirms and perpetuates the life of the street. "This lack of knowledge is going to have to fall on the shoulders of the educational institutions. 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. She couldn't tell when they changed places and the second weight, then the third and fourth, dropped on herit was all one continuous hacksawing of torment that kept her eyes screaming the only word she was fated to utter again and again for the rest of her life. The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. 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. When her mother comes to visit her they quarrel over Kiswana's choice of neighborhood and over her decision to leave school. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. 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. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. Etta Mae dreams of a man who can "move her off of Brewster Place for good," but she, too, has her dream deferred each time that a man disappoints her. He never helps his mother around the house. 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. Naylor tells each woman's story through the woman's own voice. In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. Most men are incalculable hunters who come and go." 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. The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. 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.". 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. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. I read all of Louisa May Alcott and all the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder.". Critical Overview 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. For Naylor, discovering the work of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Richard Wright, James Baldwin (whom she calls one of her favorite writers) and other black authors was a turning point. What happened to Ciel in Brewster Place? When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. 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. I had been the person behind `The Women of Brewster Place. How does Serena die in Brewster Place? She will encourage her children, and they can grow up to be important, talented people, like the actors on the stage. Struck A Chord With Color Purple 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. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. 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. Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. "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. Mattie's son, Basil, is born five months later. 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. 22 Feb. 2023 . By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. Critic Loyle Hairston readily agrees with the favorable analysis of Naylor's language, characterization, and story-telling. Soon after Naylor introduces each of the women in their current situations at Brewster Place, she provides more information on them through the literary technique known as "flashback." Kiswana finds one of these wild children eating out of a dumpster, and soon Kiswana and Cora become friends. Sadly, Lorraine's dream of not being "any different from anybody else in the world" is only fulfilled when her rape forces the other women to recognize the victimization and vulnerability that they share with her. But while she is aware that there is nothing enviable about the pressures, incapacities, and frustrations men absorb in a system they can neither beat nor truly join, her interest lies in evoking the lives of women, not men. The women all share the experience of living on the dead end street that the rest of the world has forgotten. 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. Joel Hughes, "Naylor Discusses Race Myths and Life," Yale Daily News, March 2, 1995. http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. 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." 21-58. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. Most Americans remember it as the year that Medgar Evers and President John F. Kennedy were assassinated. Cora Lee does not necessarily like men, but she likes having sex and the babies that result. Explored Male Violence and Sexism WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? Built strong by his years as a field hand, and cinnamon skinned, Mattie finds him irresistible. The exception is Kiswana, from Linden Hills, who is deliberately downwardly mobile.. She did not believe in being submissive to whites, and she did not want to marry, be a mother, and remain with the same man for the rest of her life. 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. Jehovah's Witnesses spread their message through face-to-face contact with people, but more importantly, through written publications. Lorraine, we are told, "was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. But her first published work was a short story that was accepted by Marcia Gillespie, then editor of Essence magazine. 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. She felt a weight drop on her spread body. 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. WebBrewster Place is at once a warm, loving community and a desolate and blighted neighborhood on the verge of collapsing. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. The sun comes out for the block party that Kiswana has been organizing to raise money to take the landlord to court. By denying the reader the freedom to observe the victim of violence from behind the wall of aesthetic convention, to manipulate that victim as an object of imaginative play, Naylor disrupts the connection between violator and viewer that Mulvey emphasizes in her discussion of cinematic convention. Inviting the viewer to enter the world of violence that lurks just beyond the wall of art, Naylor traps the reader behind that wall. Faulkner uses fifteen different voices to tell the story. 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.