did basil die in brewster place did basil die in brewster place

She wasnt a young woman, but I am still haunted by a sense that she left work undone. He is beyond hope, and Mattie does not dream of his return. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." 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? Joel Hughes, "Naylor Discusses Race Myths and Life," Yale Daily News, March 2, 1995. http://www.cis.yale.edu/ydn/paper. She couldn't feel the skin that was rubbing off of her arms. She couldn't tell when they changed places. She didn't feel her split rectum or the patches in her skull where her hair had been torn off." For Further Study All of the women, like the street, fully experience life with its high and low points. Give reasons. 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.". Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. "Dawn" (the prologue) is coupled neither with death nor darkness, but with "dusk," a condition whose half-light underscores the half-life of the street. As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. The idea that I could have what I really dreamed of, a writing career, seemed overwhelming. The residents of Brewster Place outside are sitting on stoops or playing in the street because of the heat. "She told me she hadn't read things like mine since James Baldwin. "(The challenges) were mostly inside myself, because I was under a lot of duress when I wrote the book," she says. Sources With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. ", At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. 21-58. 62, No. Lurking beneath the image of woman as passive signifier is the fact of a body turned traitor against the consciousness that no longer rules "The Women" was a stunning debut for Naylor. Only when Kiswana says that "babies grow up" does Cora Lee begin to question her life; she realizes that while she does like babies, she does not know what to do with children when they grow up. What does Brewster Place symbolize? PRINCIPAL WORKS Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. The displacement of reality into dream defers closure, even though the chapter appears shaped to make an end. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Eugene, whose young daughter stuck a Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. When Samuel discovers that Mattie is pregnant by Fuller, he goes into a rage and beats her. "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. 4, 1983, pp. Rather, it is an enactment of the novel's revision of Hughes's poem. They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. When he jumps bail, she loses the house she had worked thirty years to own, and her long journey from Tennessee finally ends in a small apartment on Brewster Place. He bothered no one and was noticed only when he sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.". 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. This story explores the relationship between Theresa and Lorraine, two lesbians who move into the run-down complex of apartments that make up "Brewster Place." Baker and his friends, the teenage boys who terrorize Brewster Place. 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. Although the idea of miraculous transformation associated with the phoenix is undercut by the starkness of slum and the perpetuation of poverty, the notion of regeneration also associated with the phoenix is supported by the quiet persistence of women who continue to dream on. In 1974, Naylor moved first to North Carolina and then to Florida to practice full-time ministry, but had to work in fast-food restaurants and as a telephone operator to help support her religious work. It squeezed through her paralyzed vocal cords and fell lifelessly at their feet. While critics may have differing opinions regarding Naylor's intentions for her characters' future circumstances, they agree that Naylor successfully presents the themes of The Women of Brewster Place. The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." In Magill's Literary Annual, Rae Stoll concurs: "Ultimately then, The Women of Brewster Place is an optimistic work, offering the hope for a redemptive community of love as a counterforce to isolation and violence.". 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. The limitations of narrative render any disruption of the violator/spectator affiliation difficult to achieve; while sadism, in Mulvey's words, "demands a story," pain destroys narrative, shatters referential realities, and challenges the very power of language. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith, 1930. While the rest of her friends attended church, dated, and married the kinds of men they were expected to, Etta Mae kept Rock Vale in an uproar. She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Ciel keeps taking Eugene back, even though he is verbally abusive and threatens her with physical abuse. 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). Etta Mae spends her life moving from one man to the next, searching for acceptance. Because of the wall, Brewster Place is economically and culturally isolated from the rest of the city. As the dream ends, we are left to wonder what sort of register the "actual" block party would occupy. For example, Deirdre Donahue, a reviewer for the Washington Post, says of Naylor, "Naylor is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. 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. 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." Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. The scene evokes a sense of healing and rebirth, and reinforces the sense of community among the women. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. She assures Mattie that carrying a baby is nothing to be ashamed about. Naylor uses each woman's sexuality to help define her character. better discord message logger v2. A comprehensive compilation of critical responses to Naylor's works, including: sections devoted to her novels, essays and seminal articles relating feminist perspectives, and comparisons of Naylor's novels to classical authors. Naylor represents Lorraine's silence not as a passive absence of speech but as a desperate struggle to regain the voice stolen from her through violence. The women again pull together, overcoming their outrage over the destruction of one of their own. But her first published work was a short story that was accepted by Marcia Gillespie, then editor of Essence magazine. Fannie speaks her mind and often stands up to her husband, Samuel. Provide detailed support for your answer drawing from various perspectives, including historical or sociological. , Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Twayne, 1996. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? After the child's death, Ciel nearly dies from grief. As the reader's gaze is centered within the victim's body, the reader, is stripped of the safety of aesthetic distance and the freedom of artistic response. WebLife. 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. Appiah, Amistad Press, 1993, pp. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. Loyle Hairston, a review in Freedomways, Vol. Mattie is the matriarch of Brewster Place; throughout the novel, she plays a motherly role for all of the characters. Now the two are Lorraine and Mattie. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. "Linden Hills," which has parallels to Dante's "Inferno," is concerned with life in a suburb populated with well-to-do blacks. She resents her conservative parents and their middle-class values and feels that her family has rejected their black heritage. 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. After dropping out of college, Kiswana moves to Brewster Place to be a part of a predominantly African-American community. But soon the neighbors start to notice the loving looks that pass between the two women, and soon the other women in the neighborhood reject Lorraine's gestures of friendship. In addition to planning her next novel, which may turn out to be a historical story involving two characters from her third novel, "Mama Day," Naylor also is involved in other art forms. In his Freedomways review, he says of The Women of Brewster Place: "Naylor's first effort seems to fall in with most of the fiction being published today, which bypasses provocative social themes to play, instead, in the shallower waters of isolated personal relationships.". To provide an "external" perspective on rape is to represent the story that the violator has created, to ignore the resistance of the victim whose body has been appropriated within the rapist's rhythms and whose enforced silence disguises the enormity of her pain. Kiswana cannot see the blood; there is only rain. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her. Like the blood that runs down the palace walls in Blake's "London," this reminder of Ben and Lorrin e blights the block party. Mattie's journey to Brewster Place begins in rural Tennessee, but when she becomes pregnant she leaves town to avoid her father's wrath. Brewster Place is born, in Naylor's words, a "bastard child," mothers three generations, and "waits to die," having "watched its last generation of children torn away from it by court orders and eviction notices too tired and sick to help them." He believes that Butch is worthless and warns Mattie to stay away from him. 3, edited by David Peck and Eric Howard, Salem Press, 1997, pp. Having recognized Lorraine as a human being who becomes a victim of violence, the reader recoils from the unfamiliar picture of a creature who seems less human than animal, less subject than object. Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. It is morning and the sun is still shining; the wall is still standing, and everyone is getting ready for the block party. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. Naylor earned a Master of Arts degree in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. Their dreams, even those that are continually deferred, are what keep them alive, continuing to sleep, cook, and care for their children. 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. ", "Americans fear black men, individually and collectively," Naylor says. Her babies "just seemed to keep comingalways welcome until they changed, and then she just didn't understand them." The changing ethnicity of the neighborhood reflects the changing demographics of society. It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. WebThe Women of Brewster Place: With Oprah Winfrey, Mary Alice, Olivia Cole, Robin Givens. ." Although they come to it by very different routes, Brewster is a reality that they are "obliged to share" [as Smith States in "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Conditions, 1977.] Two years later, she read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye; it was the first time she had read a novel written by a black woman. 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." " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. "The Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. 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. 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. To see Lorraine scraping at the air in her bloody garment is to see not only the horror of what happened to her but the horror that is her. Abshu Ben-Jamal is Kiswana Browne's boyfriend as well as the man behind the black production of A Midsummer's Night Dream performed in the park and attended by Cora Lee and her children. I'm challenging myself because it's important that you do not get stale. One night Basil is arrested and thrown in jail for killing a man during a bar fight. The women have different reasons, each her own story, but they unite in hurling bricks and breaking down boundaries. Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. Jill Matus, "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place." 'And something bad had happened to me by the wallI mean hersomething bad had happened to her'." And so today I still have a dream. "Most of my teachers didn't know about black writers, because I think if they had, they probably would have turned me on to them. | What was left of her mind was centered around the pounding motion that was ripping her insides apart. Cane, Gaiman, Neil 1960- As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. In her interview with Carabi, Naylor maintains that community influences one's identity. Webclimax Lorraines brutal gang rape in Brewster Places alley by C. C. Baker and his friends is the climax of the novel. Gloria Naylor died in 2016, at the age of 66. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Ciel, for example, is not unwilling to cast the first brick and urges the rational Kiswana to join this "destruction of the temple." The men Naylor depicts in her novel are mean, cowardly, and lawless. WebBasil grows into a spoiled, irresponsible young man due to Mattie's overbearing parenting. Her family moved several times during her childhood, living at different times in a housing project in upper Bronx, a Harlem apartment building, and in Queens. She believes she must have a man to be happy. 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. ". Influenced by Roots Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. ", "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. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. 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. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. Idealistic and yearning to help others, she dropped out of college and moved onto Brewster Place to live amongst other African-American people. Explored Male Violence and Sexism TITLE COMMENTARY 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.". Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Naiad, 1989. To fund her work as a minister, she lived with her parents and worked as a switchboard operator. Her little girls Then she opened her eyes and they screamed and screamed into the face above hersthe face that was pushing this tearing pain inside of her body. Of these unifying elements, the most notable is the dream motif, for though these women are living a nightmarish existence, they are united by their common dreams. Lorraine's inability to express her own pain forces her to absorb not only the shock of bodily violation but the sudden rupture of her mental and psychological autonomy. As it begins to rain, the women continue desperately to solicit community involvement. (February 22, 2023). Her thighs and stomach had become so slimy from her blood and their semen that the last two boys didn't want to touch her, so they turned her over, propped her head and shoulders against the wall, and took her from behind. According to Fowler in Gloria Naylor: In Search of Sanctuary, Naylor believes that "individual identity is shaped within the matrix of a community." Style Lorraine's horrifying murder of Ben serves only to deepen the chasm of hopelessness felt at different times by all the characters in the story. But just as the pigeon she watches fails to ascend gracefully and instead lands on a fire escape "with awkward, frantic movements," so Kiswana's dreams of a revolution will be frustrated by the grim realities of Brewster Place and the awkward, frantic movements of people who are busy merely trying to survive. 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. 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. When he jumps bail, Mattie loses her house. 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. 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. It wasn't easy to write about men. ", Cora Lee's story opens with a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:'True, I talk of dreams, / Which are the children of an idle brain / begot of nothing but vain fantasy." 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. Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it. But I worried about whether or not the problems that were being caused by the men in the women's lives would be interpreted as some bitter statement I had to make about black men. Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. "Does it matter?" Why are there now more books written by black females about black females than there were twenty years ago? 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. Theresa wants Lorraine to toughen upto accept who she is and not try to please other people. As black families move onto the street, Ben remains on Brewster Place. Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions Naylor's potency wells up from her language. Characters The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. Brewster Place, carries it within her, and shares its tragedies., Everyone in the community knows that this block party is significant and important because it is a way of moving forward after the terrible tragedy of Lorraine and Ben. She also encourages Mattie to save her money. 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. The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, No. "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. Ciel, the grandchild of Eva Turner, also ends up on Brewster Place.