did basil die in brewster place
With prose as rich as poetry, a passage will suddenly take off and sing like a spiritual Vibrating with undisguised emotion, The Women of Brewster Place springs from the same roots that produced the blues. 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. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. Naylor's writing reflects her experiences with the Jehovah's Witnesses, according to Virginia Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary. WebBasil turns out to be a spoiled young boy, and grows into a selfish man. 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. | Yet other critics applaud the ending for its very reassurance that the characters will not only survive but prosper. 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. To pacify Kiswana, Cora Lee agrees to take her children to a Shakespeare play in the local park. 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. Unable to stop him in any other way, Fannie cocks the shotgun against her husband's chest. For a while she manages to earn just enough money to pay rent on the room she shares with her baby, Basil. Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. Abshu Ben-Jamal. As a black girl growing up in a still-segregated South, Etta Mae broke all the rules. Naylor uses each woman's sexuality to help define her character. WebC.C. The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. She spends her life loving and caring for her son and denies herself adult love. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. As Naylor disentangles the reader from the victim's consciousness at the end of her representation, the radical dynamics of a female-gendered reader are thrown into relief by the momentary reintroduction of a distanced perspective on violence: "Lorraine lay pushed up against the wall on the cold ground with her eyes staring straight up into the sky. Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions Naylor's potency wells up from her language. 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. 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. 62, No. 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. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. 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 Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. Critics say that Naylor may have fashioned Kiswana's character after activists from the 60s, particularly those associated with the Black Power Movement. Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, searching for acceptance. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. After a frightening episode with a rat in her apartment, Mattie looks for new housing. Lorraine and Theresa love each other, and their homosexuality separates them from the other women. Ben relates to Then Cora Lee notices that there is still blood on the bricks. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. 4, December, 1990, pp. 4964. "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." Ciel's eyes began to cloud. Historical Context When she becomes pregnant again, however, it becomes harder to deny the problems. Why is the anger and frustration that the women feel after the rape of Lorraine displaced into dream? The brick wall symbolizes the differences between the residents of Brewster Place and their rich neighbors on the other side of the wall. 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. She beats the drunken and oblivious Ben to death before Mattie can reach her and stop her. While the novel opens with Mattie as a woman in her 60s, it quickly flashes back to Mattie's teen years in Rock Vale, Tennessee, where Mattie lives a sheltered life with her over-protective father, Samuel, and her mother, Fannie. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." 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. She felt a weight drop on her spread body. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. 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. In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. 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). Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. 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. The dream of the collective party explodes in nightmarish destruction. "They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry, they're mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they're diapered around babies. When her mother comes to visit her they quarrel over Kiswana's choice of neighborhood and over her decision to leave school. As the look of the audience ceases to perpetuate the victimizing stance of the rapists, the subject/object locations of violator and victim are reversed. All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". She refuses to see any faults in him, and when he gets in trouble with the law she puts up her house to bail him out of jail. Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). As presented, Brewster Place is largely a community of women; men are mostly absent or itinerant, drifting in and out of their women's lives, and leaving behind them pregnancies and unpaid bills. Each foray away from the novel gives me something fresh and new to bring back to it when I'm ready. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. PRINCIPAL WORKS Cane, Gaiman, Neil 1960- 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. 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." 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." The Women of Brewster Place depicts seven courageous black women struggling to survive life's harsh realities. 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. In Naylor's description of Lorraine's rape "the silent image of woman" is haunted by the power of a thousand suppressed screams; that image comes to testify not to the woman's feeble acquiescence to male signification but to the brute force of the violence required to "tie" the woman to her place as "bearer of meaning.". They refers initially to the "colored daughters" but thereafter repeatedly to the dreams. 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. Observes that Naylor's "knowing portrayal" of Mattie unites the seven stories that form the novel. The first black on Brewster Place, he arrived in 1953, just prior to the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka decision. In The Accused, a 1988 film in which Jody Foster gives an Oscar-winning performance as a rape victim, the problematics of transforming the victim's experience into visualizable form are addressed, at least in part, through the use of flashback; the rape on which the film centers is represented only at the end of the film, after the viewer has followed the trail of the victim's humiliation and pain. By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. 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." Novels for Students. Ciel dreams of love, from her boyfriend and from her daughter and unborn child, but an unwanted abortion, the death of her daughter, and the abandonment by her boyfriend cruelly frustrates these hopes. Then the cells went that contained her powers of taste and smell. Recognizing that pain defies representation, Naylor invokes a referential system that focuses on the bodily manifestations of painskinned arms, a split rectum, a bloody skullonly to reject it as ineffective. 23, No. 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." Having been rejected by people they love ", The situation of black men, she says, is one that "still needs work. Facebook; Twitter; Instagram; Linkedin; Influencers; Brands; Blog; About; FAQ; Contact slammed his kneecap into her spine and her body arched up, causing his nails to cut into the side of her mouth to stifle her cry. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. In other words, she takes the characters back in time to show their backgrounds. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. 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. The most important character in "(The challenges) were mostly inside myself, because I was under a lot of duress when I wrote the book," she says. 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. 21-58. It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. Source: Laura E. Tanner, "Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place" in American Literature, Vol. 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. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. falling action The falling action is found in Matties dream of the upcoming block party following Lorraines rape and Bens death. What does Brewster Place symbolize? "It took me a little time, but after I got over the writer's block, I never looked back.". Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. Having her in his later years and already set in his ways, he tolerates little foolishness and no disobedience. The attempt to translate violence into narrative, therefore, very easily lapses into a choreography of bodily positions and angles of assault that serves as a transcription of the violator's story. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. They teach you to minutely dissect texts and (I thought) `How could I ever just cut that off from myself and go on to do what I have to do?' Following the abortion, Ciel is already struggling emotionally when young Serena dies in a freak accident. The screams tried to break through her corneas out into the air, but the tough rubbery flesh sent them vibrating back into her brain, first shaking lifeless the cells that nurtured her memory. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. Cora Lee loves making and having babies, even though she does not really like men. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane Results Focused Influencer Marketing. 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. 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. The last that were screamed to death were those that supplied her with the ability to loveor hate. 918-22. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. As an adult, she continues to prefer the smell and feel of her new babies to the trials and hassles of her growing children. She also gave her introverted first-born child a journal in which to record her thoughts. "Does it really matter?" She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. "It was like a door opening for me when I discovered that there has been a history of black writers in this country since the 1800s," she says. WebIn ''The Women of Brewster Place,'' for example, we saw Eugene in the background, brawling with his wife, Ceil, forgetting to help look out for his baby daughter, who was about to stick . Even as she looks out her window at the wall that separates Brewster Place from the heart of the city, she is daydreaming: "she placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up." 29), edited by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, Greenwood, 1997. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. 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. Naylor tells the women's stories within the framework of the street's lifebetween its birth and its death. The author captures the faces, voices, feelings, words, and stories of an African-American family in the neighborhood and town where she grew up. Since the book was first published in 1982, critics have praised Gloria Naylor's characters. 37-70. He murders a man and goes to jail. It's everything you've read and everything you hope to read. Referring to Mattie' s dream of tearing the wall down together with the women of Brewster Place, Linda Labin contends in Masterpieces of Women's Literature: "It is this remarkable, hope-filled ending that impresses the majority of scholars." It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. Brewster is a place for women who have no realistic expectations of revising their marginality, most of whom have "come down" in the world. One night after an argument with Teresa, Lorraine decides to go visit Ben. WebMattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. Yet the substance of the dream itself and the significance of the dreamer raise some further questions. While Mattie has accepted the loss of her house at the hands of Basil, and has accepted her fate in Brewster Place, she refuses to discuss the circumstances that have It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. Although eventually she did mend physically, there were signs that she had not come to terms with her feelings about the abortion. This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. The party seems joyful and successful, and Ciel even returns to see Mattie. After high school graduation in 1968, Naylor's solution to the shock and confusion she experienced in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination that same spring was to postpone college and become a Jehovah's Witness missionary. She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. 55982. Her life revolves around her relationship with her husband and her desperate attempts to please him. The violation of her personhood that is initiated with the rapist's objectifying look becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy borne out by the literal destruction of her body; rape reduces its victim to the status of an animal and then flaunts as authorization the very body that it has mutilated. Naylor captures the strength of ties among women. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. TITLE COMMENTARY She also encourages Mattie to save her money. He associates with the wrong people. 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. 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. 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. 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? " WebBrewster Place. While much of her prose soars lyrically, her poetry, she says, tends to be "stark and linear. The novel begins with a flashback to Mattie's life as a typical young woman. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. The rape scene in The Women of Brewster Place occurs in "The Two," one of the seven short stories that make up the novel. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. Feeling rejected both by her neighbors and by Teresa, Lorraine finds comfort in talking to Ben, the old alcoholic handyman of Brewster Place. Women and people of color comprise the majority of Jehovah's Witnesses, perhaps because, according to Harrison in Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, "Their religion allows their voices to emerge People listen to them; they are valuable, bearers of a life-giving message." They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. "Power and violence," in Hannah Arendt's words, "are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent" [On Violence, 1970]. 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. At first there is no explanation given for the girl's death. In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live There are also a greedy minister, a street gang member who murders his own brother, a playwright and community activist and a mentally handicapped boy who is a genius at playing blues piano. Gloria Naylor's novel, The Women of Brewster Place, is, as its subtitle suggests, "a novel in seven stories"; but these stories are unified by more than the street on which the characters live. In the following essay, she discusses how the dream motif in The Women of Brewster Place connects the seven stories, forming them into a coherent novel. In Bonetti's, An Interview with Gloria Naylor, Naylor said "one character, one female protagonist, could not even attempt to represent the riches and diversity of the black female experience." 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. They say roughly one-third of black men have been jailed or had brushes with the law, but two-thirds are trying to hold their homes together, trying to keep their jobs, trying to keep their sanity, under the conditions in which they have to live. And so today I still have a dream. What happened to Ciel in Brewster Place? 571-73. While Naylor's characters are fictional, they immortalize the spirit of her own grandmother, great aunt, and mother.
