As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. People know each other in Brewster Place, and as imperfect and damaging as their involvement with each other may be, they still represent a community. She renews ties here with both Etta Mae and Ciel. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. 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. Annie Gottlieb, a review in The New York Times Book Review, August 22, 1982, p. 11. Each of the women in the story unconditionally loves at least one other woman. 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. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms from being pressed against the rough cement. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. 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. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. Structuralists believe that there's no intelligent voice behind the prose, because they believe that the prose speaks to itself, speaks to other prose. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. "The Women of Brewster Place WebBasil the Physician (died c.1111 or c.1118) was the Bogomil leader condemned as a heretic by Patriarch Nicholas III of Constantinople and burned at the stake by Byzantine Emperor Source: Donna Woodford, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998. Idealistic and yearning to help others, she dropped out of college and moved onto Brewster Place to live amongst other African-American people. When Cora Lee turned thirteen, however, her parents felt that she was too old for baby dolls and gave her a Barbie. She thought about quitting, but completed her degree when the school declared that her second novel, "Linden Hills," would fulfill the thesis requirement. Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. As a black girl growing up in a still-segregated South, Etta Mae broke all the rules. WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. 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. In 1989, Baker 2 episodes aired. But their dreams will be ended brutally with her rape and his death, and the image of Lorraine will later haunt the dreams of all the women on Brewster Place. Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. Naylor places her characters in situations that evoke strong feelings, and she succeeds in making her characters come alive with realistic emotions, actions, and words. Naylor's temporary restoration of the objectifying gaze only emphasizes the extent to which her representation of violence subverts the conventional dynamics of the reading and viewing processes. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future. 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. Christine King, Identities and Issues in Literature, Vol. 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. In the last sentence of the chapter, as in this culminating description of the rape, Naylor deliberately jerks the reader back into the distanced perspective that authorizes scopophilia; the final image that she leaves us with is an image not of Lorraine's pain but of "a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress, scraping at the air, crying, 'Please. Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. And like all of Naylor's novels so far, it presents a self-contained universe that some critics have compared to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Ben relates to When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. 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. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". 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. She left the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1975 and moved back home; shortly after returning to New York, she suffered a nervous breakdown. 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. It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. She didn't feel her split rectum or the patches in her skull where her hair had been torn off by grating against the bricks. But the group effort at tearing down the wall is only a dreamMattie's dream-and just as the rain is pouring down, baptizing the women and their dream work, the dream ends. I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. or want to love, Lorraine and Ben become friends. William died on April 18, 1644, at nearly 80 years old. ." The gaze that in Mulvey reduces woman to erotic object is here centered within that woman herself and projected outward. I was totally freaked out when that happened and I didn't write for another seven or eight months. The brick wall symbolizes the differences between the residents of Brewster Place and their rich neighbors on the other side of the wall. After she aborts the child she knows Eugene does not want, she feels remorse and begins to understand the kind of person Eugene really is. 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." Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. Ciel, for example, is not unwilling to cast the first brick and urges the rational Kiswana to join this "destruction of the temple." Not just black Americans along with white Americans, but also Hispanic-American writers and Asian-American writers.". Like many of those people, Naylor's parents, Alberta McAlpin and Roosevelt Naylor, migrated to New York in 1949. "The Block Party" tells the story of another deferred dream, this one literally dreamt by Mattie the night before the real Block Party. 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." Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? She becomes friends with Cora Lee and succeeds, for one night, in showing her a different life. The story, published in a 1980 issue of the magazine, later become a part of her first novel. Having her in his later years and already set in his ways, he tolerates little foolishness and no disobedience. 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. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. When she discovers that sex produces babies, she starts to have sex in order to get pregnant. Research the era to discover what the movement was, who was involved, and what the goals and achievements were. 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. Authorial sleight of hand in offering Mattie's dream as reality is quite deliberate, since the narrative counts on the reader's credulity and encourages the reader to take as narrative "presence" the "elsewhere" of dream, thereby calling into question the apparently choric and unifying status of the last chapter. a dream today that one day every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill will be made low , and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed " Hughes's poem and King's sermon can thus be seen as two poles between which Naylor steers. That is, Naylor writes from the first-person point of view, but she writes from the perspective of the character on whom the story is focusing at the time. As the object of the reader's gaze is suddenly shifted, that reader is thrust into an understanding of the way in which his or her own look may perpetuate the violence of rape. 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. Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. Since 1983, Naylor has continued to write, lecture, and receive awards for her writing. At first there is no explanation given for the girl's death. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. ". In the last paragraph of Cora's story, however, we find that the fantasy has been Cora's. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. The series was a spinoff of the 1989 miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, which was based upon Two of the boys pinned her arms, two wrenched open her legs, while C.C. 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. Ciel loves her husband, Eugene, even though he abuses her verbally and threatens physical harm. GENERAL COMMENTARY Throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the women support one another, counteracting the violence of their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and sons. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. 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. 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.". Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. In their separate spaces the women dream of a tall yellow woman in a bloody green and black dress Lorraine. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. York would provide their children with better opportunities than they had had as children growing up in a still-segregated South. All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. What happened to Basil on Brewster Place? WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? She awakes to find the sun shining for the first time in a week, just like in her dream. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. Following the abortion, Ciel is already struggling emotionally when young Serena dies in a freak accident. Years later when the old woman dies, Mattie has saved enough money to buy the house. WebSo Mattie runs away to the city (not yet Brewster though! 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. In a catalog of similes, Hughes evokes the fate of dreams unfulfilled: They dry up like raisins in the sun, fester like sores, stink like rotten meat, crust over like syrupy sweets: They become burdensome, or possibly explosive. 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. She is relieved to have him back, and she is still in love with him, so she tries to ignore his irresponsible behavior and mean temper. The men in the story exhibit cowardice, alcoholism, violence, laziness, and dishonesty. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. His wife, Mary, had and the boys] had been hiding up on the wall, watching her come up that back street, and they had waited. The Women of Brewster Place portrays a close-knit community of women, bound in sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world. The series was a spinoff of the 1989 miniseries The Women of Brewster Place, which was based upon Gloria Naylor 's novel of the same name. Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place is made up of seven stories of the women who live She goes into a deep depression after her daughter's death, but Mattie succeeds in helping her recover. Encyclopedia.com. She stresses that African Americans must maintain their identity in a world dominated by whites. There is also the damning portrait of a minister on the make in Etta Mae's story, the abandonment of Ciel by Eugene, and the scathing presentation of the young male rapists in "The Two. "This lack of knowledge is going to have to fall on the shoulders of the educational institutions. Author Biography 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. The changing ethnicity of the neighborhood reflects the changing demographics of society. Attending church with Mattie, she stares enviously at the "respectable" wives of the deacons and wishes that she had taken a different path. 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." She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders. He pushed her arched body down onto the cement. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. One night Basil is arrested and thrown in jail for killing a man during a bar fight. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? Offers a general analysis of the structure, characters, and themes of the novel. 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. And so today I still have a dream. Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions Naylor's potency wells up from her language. The first black on Brewster Place, he arrived in 1953, just prior to the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka decision. 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. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith, 1930. 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. And Naylor takes artistic license to resurrect Ben, the gentle janitor killed by a distraught rape victim, who functions as the novel's narrator. But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. My interest here is to look at the way in which Naylor rethinks the poem in her novel's attention to dreams and desires and deferral., The dream of the last chapter is a way of deferring closure, but this deferral is not evidence of the author's self-indulgent reluctance to make an end. Etta Mae was always looking for something that was just out of her reach, attaching herself to " any promising rising black star, and when he burnt out, she found another." Source: Jill L. Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place" in Black American Literature Forum, spring, 1990, pp. 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).
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