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

To escape her father, Mattie leaves Tennessee to stay with her friend, Etta Mae Johnson, in Asheville, North Carolina. Empowered by the distanced dynamics of a gaze that authorizes not only scopophilia but its inevitable culmination in violence, the reader who responds uncritically to the violator's story of rape comes to see the victim not as a human being, not as an object of violence, but as the object itself. WebBrewster Place is an American drama series which aired on ABC in May 1990. "Although I had been writing since I was 12 years old, the so-called serious writing happened when I was at Brooklyn College." Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. She stresses that African Americans must maintain their identity in a world dominated by whites. The remainder of the sermon goes on to celebrate the resurrection of the dream"I still have a dream" is repeated some eight times in the next paragraph. 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. Following the abortion, Ciel is already struggling emotionally when young Serena dies in a freak accident. it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. 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? " WebBasil grows into a spoiled, irresponsible young man due to Mattie's overbearing parenting. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. | Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. 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. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. Kiswana finds one of these wild children eating out of a dumpster, and soon Kiswana and Cora become friends. Her chapter begins with the return of the boyfriend who had left her eleven months before when their baby, Serena, was only a month old. WebLife. 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. Poking at a blood-stained brick with a popsicle stick, Cora says, " 'Blood ain't got no right still being here'." Fannie Michael is Mattie's mother. ", Her new dream of maternal devotion continues as they arrive home and prepare for bed. The nicety of the polite word of social discourse that Lorraine frantically attempts to articulate"please"emphasizes the brute terrorism of the boys' act of rape and exposes the desperate means by which they rule. Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. When she discovers that sex produces babies, she starts to have sex in order to get pregnant. In dreaming of Lorraine the women acknowledge that she represents every one of them: she is their daughter, their friend, their enemy, and her brutal rape is the fulfillment of their own nightmares. As a result, Mattie uses her house for collateral, which Basil forfeits once he disappears. 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. 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. 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. So why not a last word on how it died? 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. The street continues to exist marginally, on the edge of death; it is the "end of the line" for most of its inhabitants. After Ciel underwent an abortion, she had difficulty returning to the daily routine of her life. Etta Mae Johnson and Mattie Michael grew up together in Rock Vale, Tennessee. I came there with one novel under my belt and a second one under way, and there was something wrong about it. He is the estranged husband of Elvira and father of an unnamed Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. 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 the look of the audience ceases to perpetuate the victimizing stance of the rapists, the subject/object locations of violator and victim are reversed. 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. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. The author captures the faces, voices, feelings, words, and stories of an African-American family in the neighborhood and town where she grew up. 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. 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. Menu. 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. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. Especially poignant is Lorraine's relationship with Ben. She did not believe in being submissive to whites, and she did not want to marry, be a mother, and remain with the same man for the rest of her life. 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." Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. 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. 282-85. a body that is, in Mulvey's terms, "stylised and fragmented by close-ups," the body that is dissected by that gaze is the body of the violator and not his victim. Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live 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. In 1989, Baker 2 episodes aired. by Neera But when she finds another "shadow" in her bedroom, she sighs, and lets her cloths drop to the floor. Novels for Students. "The Women of Brewster Place . | The story's seven main characters speak to one another with undisguised affection through their humor and even their insults. Later in the decade, Martin Luther King was assassinated, the culmination of ten years of violence against blacks. Light-skinned, with smooth hair, Kiswana wants desperately to feel a part of the black community and to help her fellow African Americans better their lives. She joins Mattie on Brewster Place after leaving the last in a long series of men. Release Dates She comes home that night filled with good intentions. ", 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." Ciel loves her husband, Eugene, even though he abuses her verbally and threatens physical harm. It also stands for the oppression the women have endured in the forms of prejudice, violence, racism, shame, and sexism. As this chapter opens, people are gathering for Serena's funeral. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. Naylor was baptized into the Jehovah's Witnesses when she was eighteen years old. He complains that he will never be able to get ahead with her and two babies to care for, and although she does not want to do it, she gets an abortion. But even Ciel, who doesn't know what has happened by the wall, reports that she has been dreaming of Ben and Lorraine. One night Basil is arrested and thrown in jail for killing a man during a bar fight. Critics agree that one of Naylor's strongest accomplishments in The Women of Brewster Place is her use of the setting to frame the structure of the novel, and often compare it to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. ", "I want to communicate in as many different ways as I can," she says. Later in the novel, a street gang rapes Lorraine, and she kills Ben, mistaking him for her attackers. Ben is killed with a brick from the dead-end wall of Brewster Place. It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. ." But perhaps the mode of the party about to take place will be neither demonic nor apocalyptic. She renews ties here with both Etta Mae and Ciel. It is essentially a psychologica, Cane Lorraine feels the women's hostility and longs to be accepted. All that the dream has promised is undercut, it seems. 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." Explores interracial relationships, bi-and gay sexuality in the black community, and black women's lives through a study of the roles played by both black and white families. 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. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. When Naylor graduated from high school in 1968, she became a minister for the Jehovah's Witnesses. [C.C.] Mattie's journey to Brewster Place begins in rural Tennessee, but when she becomes pregnant she leaves town to avoid her father's wrath. Boyd offers guidelines for growth in a difficult world. 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.