The Women of Brewster Place Characters | Course Hero Web"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. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. 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. 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. A play she wrote for children is being produced in New York City by the Creative Arts Team, an organization dedicated to bringing theater to schools. Jehovah's Witnesses spread their message through face-to-face contact with people, but more importantly, through written publications. The novel begins with a flashback to Mattie's life as a typical young woman. 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. " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. She spends her life loving and caring for her son and denies herself adult love. One night after an argument with Teresa, Lorraine decides to go visit Ben. THE LITERARY WORK . For a week after Ben's death it rains continuously, and although they will not admit it to each other, all the women dream of Lorraine that week. Provide detailed support for your answer drawing from various perspectives, including historical or sociological. Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. 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. Did Not just black Americans along with white Americans, but also Hispanic-American writers and Asian-American writers.". Her babies "just seemed to keep comingalways welcome until they changed, and then she just didn't understand them." 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. Introduction Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? The women all share the experience of living on the dead end street that the rest of the world has forgotten. 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. Later, when Turner passes away, Mattie buys Turner's house but loses it when she posts bail for her derelict son. Sources WebMattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. 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. In a ironic turn, Kiswana believes that her mother denies her heritage; during a confrontation, she is surprised when she learns that the two share a great deal. He befriends Lorraine when no one else will. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. WebTheresa regrets her final words to her as she dies. 4964. "The Women of Brewster Place Ben belongs to Brewster Place even before the seven women do. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane ", "The enemy wasn't Black men," Joyce Ladner contends, " 'but oppressive forces in the larger society' " [When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, 1984], and Naylor's presentation of men implies agreement. 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. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. All six of the boys rape her, leaving her near death. He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. After presenting a loose community of six stories, each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to "round off" the collection. dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party. Writer The extended comparison between the street's "life" and the women's lives make the work an "allegory." Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a Although the epilogue begins with a meditation on how a street dies and tells us that Brewster Place is waiting to die, waiting is a present participle that never becomes past. "I was able to conquer those things through my craft. Alice Walker 1944 They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. The face pushed itself so close to hers that she could look into the flared nostrils and smell the decomposing food in its teeth.. By manipulating the reader's placement within the scene of violence, Naylor subverts the objectifying power of the gaze; as the gaze is trapped within the erotic object, the necessary distance between the voyeur and the object of voyeuristic pleasure is collapsed. What the women of Brewster Place dream is not so important as that they dream., Brewster's women live within the failure of the sixties' dreams, and there is no doubt a dimension of the novel that reflects on the shortfall. WebBasil grows into a spoiled, irresponsible young man due to Mattie's overbearing parenting. 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." If the epilogue recalls the prologue, so the final emphasis on dreams postponed yet persistent recalls the poem by Langston Hughes with which Naylor begins the book: "What happens to a dream deferred? " She resolved to write about her heritagethe black woman in America. In her representation of violence, the victim's pain is defined only through negation, her agony experienced only in the reader's imagination: Lorraine was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. 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.". More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. He convinced his mama to put her house on the line to keep him out of jail and then skipped town, forcing (February 22, 2023). It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. 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. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. We discover after a first reading, however, that the narrative of the party is in fact Mattie's dream vision, from which she awakens perspiring in her bed. She continues to protect him from harm and nightmares until he jumps bail and abandons her to her own nightmare. ", Critics also recognize Naylor's ability to make history come alive. 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. "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. Basil in Brewster Place 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." 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." her because she reminds him of his daughter. "Marcia Gillespie took me out for my first literary lunch," Naylor recalls. ), has her baby, ends up living with an older black woman named Eta and lives her life working 2 jobs to provide for her child, named Basil. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. Her mother tries to console her by telling her that she still has all her old dolls, but Cora plaintively says, "But they don't smell and feel the same as the new ones." It squeezed through her paralyzed vocal cords and fell lifelessly at their feet. 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. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. William Brewster/Place of burial. ". Fannie speaks her mind and often stands up to her husband, Samuel. 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. Historical Context The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. "The Men of Brewster Place" (Hyperion) presents their struggle to live and understand what it means to be men against the backdrop of Brewster Place, a tenement on a dead-end street in an unnamed northern city "where it always feels like dusk.". Biographical and critical study. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? The women who have settled on Brewster Place exist as products of their Southern rural upbringing. Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. There were particular challenges for Naylor in writing "The Men of Brewster Place.". 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. The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. The wall of Brewster Place is a powerful symbol of the ways racial oppression, sexual exploitation, and class domination constrains the life expectations and choices of the women who live there. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms from being pressed against the rough cement. Yet other critics applaud the ending for its very reassurance that the characters will not only survive but prosper. According to Bellinelli in A Conversation with Gloria Naylor, Naylor became aware of racism during the 60s: "That's when I first began to understand that I was different and that that difference meant something negative.".

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