She meets Eva Turner and her grand-daughter, Lucielia (Ciel), and moves in with them. Naylor uses each woman's sexuality to help define her character. to be an unfortunate place since the people linked to its creation are all corrupt. planned by the tenants association. Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbian residents of Brewster Place. Later in the decade, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the culmination of ten years of violence against blacks. 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. Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. 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. Unfortunately, the realization comes too late for Ciel. When they had finished and stopped holding her up, her body fell over like an unstringed puppet. Naylor piles pain upon paineach one an experience of agony that the reader may compare to his or her own experienceonly to define the total of all these experiences as insignificant, incomparable to the "pounding motion that was ripping [Lorraine's] insides apart." 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. For Further Study While Naylor's novel portrays the victim's silence in its narrative of rape, it, too, probes beneath the surface of the violator's story to reveal the struggle beneath that enforced silence. Brewster Place names the women, houses Yet Ciel's dream identifies her with Lorraine, whom she has never met and of whose rape she knows nothing. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. This is a story that depicts a family's struggle with grieving and community as they prepare to bury their dead mother. But this ordinary life is brought to an abrupt halt by her father's brutal attack on her for refusing to divulge the name of her baby's father. 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. Etta Mae has always lived a life very different from that of Mattie Michael. As a grown woman she continues to love the feel and smell of new babies, but once they grow into children she is frustrated with how difficult they are. 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. Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil AUTHOR COMMENTARY She In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. In Mattie's dream of the block party, even Ciel, who knows nothing of Lorraine, admits that she has dreamed of "a woman who was supposed to be me She didn't look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me.". One night a rat bites the baby while they are sleeping and Mattie begins to search for a better place to live. Mattie is a resident of Brewster partly because of the failings of the men in her life: the shiftless Butch, who is sexually irresistible; her father, whose outraged assault on her prompts his wife to pull a gun on him; and her son, whom she has spoiled to the extent that he one day jumps bail on her money, costing her her home and sending her to Brewster Place. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? She left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1975 and moved back home; shortly after returning to New York, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Brewster Place provides the connection among the seven very unique women with stories of their own to tell. 62, No. Lorraine turns to the janitor, Ben, for friendship. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. 5 How does Lorraine remind Ben of his daughter? Although remarkably similar to Dr. King's sermon in the recognition of blasted hopes and dreams deferred, The Women of Brewster Place does not reassert its faith in the dream of harmony and equality: It stops short of apocalypse in its affirmation of persistence. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms from being pressed against the rough cement. and her children are terribly neglected, since she can only care for them while To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. 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. but to Theresa, being a lesbian IS her identity, and it angers her that Lorraine doesn't recognize how that makes her different Cora Lee Eyeing the attractive visiting preacher, she wonders if it is not still possible for her to change her lot in life. Author Biography But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. John is an artistic, talented, misunderstood, ingenious, and oppressed teen. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. brought his fist down into her stomach. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. Built strong by his years as a field hand, and cinnamon skinned, Mattie finds him irresistible. on 2-49 accounts, Save 30% He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". Naylor gives Brewster Place human characteristics, using a literary technique known as personification. survives for decades, offering a home to one new wave of migrants after another. In all physical pain, Elaine Scarry observes, "suicide and murder converge, for one feels acted upon, annihilated, by inside and outside alike." A collection of works by noted authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and others. Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. As Jill Matus notes in "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place," "Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it.". Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership. When Samuel discovers that Mattie is pregnant by Fuller, he goes into a rage and beats her. According to Webster, in The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, the word "community" means "the state of being held in common; common possession, enjoyment, liability, etc." Kiswana is 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. She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. After When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. Eva Turner, an old, kind, light-skinned African-American woman who takes her into the performance. Anne Gottlieb, "Women Together," The New York Times, August 22, 1982, p. 11. Brewster After a 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." What do their feelings suggest about each of them? The sermon's movement is from disappointment, through a recognition of deferral and persistence, to a reiteration of vision and hope: Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can't give up in life. Lorraine manages to get up just as the sun is rising. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. Are we to take it that Ciel never really returns from San Francisco and Cora is not taking an interest in the community effort to raise funds for tenants' rights? Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. Ciel is present in Mattie's dream because she herself has dreamed about the ghastly rape and mutilation with such identification and urgency that she obeys the impulse to return to Brewster Place: " 'And she had on a green dress with like black trimming, and there were red designs or red flowers or something on the front.' She is taken by his looks, wealth, and status, but after sleeping with him, she 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. . He is the primary . As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. Explored Male Violence and Sexism Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. Brewster is a place for women who have no realistic expectations of revising their marginality, most of whom have "come down" in the world. hours and is forced to live in a dilapidated building. for a group? rumors about their behavior. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. 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. 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. After a fight with Theresa, Lorraine goes to a party on her own. To fund her work as a minister, she lived with her parents and worked as a switchboard operator. She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. She vows that she will start helping them with homework and walking them to school. The close of the novel turns away from the intensity of the dream, and the satisfaction of violent protest, insisting rather on prolonged yearning and dreaming amid conditions which do not magically transform. Encyclopedia.com. it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. A novel set in northern Italy in the late nineteenth century; published in Italian (as Teresa) in 1886, in English, Harlem She kisses them all goodnight. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. The extended comparison between the street's "life" and the women's lives make the work an "allegory." By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. For example, while Mattie Michael loses her home as a result of her son's irresponsibility, the strength she gains enables her to care for the women whom she has known either since childhood and early adulthood or through her connection to Brewster Place. While acknowledging the shriveling, death-bound images of Hughes's poem, Naylor invests with value the essence of deferralit resists finality. Encyclopedia.com. theres a nameless man waiting for her. couple. 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.". Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. 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. The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. determined to leave. Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. She works long Bellinelli, director, RTSJ-Swiss Television, producer, A Conversation with Gloria Naylor on In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors, (videotape), California Newsreel, 1992. http://www.newsreel.org/films/inblack.htm. Rae Stoll, Magill's Literary Annual, Vol. Samuel Michael, a God-fearing man, is Mattie's father. When he jumps bail, Mattie loses her house. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. In the epilogue we are told that Brewster Place is abandoned, but does not die, because the dreams of the women keep it alive: But the colored daughters of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn.
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