did basil die in brewster place

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. 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. 4964. Unfortunately, he causes Mattie nothing but heartache. Lurking beneath the image of woman as passive signifier is the fact of a body turned traitor against the consciousness that no longer rules WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. The "community among women" stands out as the book's most obvious theme. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? Each woman in the book has her own dream. It also was turned into a television mini-series in 1989, produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. There were particular challenges for Naylor in writing "The Men of Brewster Place.". 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. 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? The end of the novel raises questions about the relation of dreams to the persistence of life, since the capacity of Brewster's women to dream on is identified as their capacity to live on. The year the Naylors moved into their home in Queens stands as a significant year in the memories of most Americans. complete opposites, they have remained friends throughout the years, providing comfort to one another at difficult times in their lives. WebLucielia Louise Turner is the mother of a young girl, Serena. The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." 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. Ciel first appears in the story as Eva Turner's granddaughter. She says realizing that black writers were in the ranks of great American writers made her feel confident "to tell my own story.". In Naylor's representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader's gaze. Despite the fact that in the epilogue Brewster Place is abandoned, its daughters still get up elsewhere and go about their daily activities. Company Credits [C.C.] 23, No. Observes that Naylor's "knowing portrayal" of Mattie unites the seven stories that form the novel. "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. They have to face the stigma created by the (errant) one-third and also the fact that they live as archetypes in the mind of Americans -- something dark and shadowy and unknown.". They agree that Naylor's clear, yet often brash, language creates images both believable and consistent. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Cape and Smith, 1930. Cora Lee has several young children when Kiswana discovers her and decides to help Cora Lee change her life. Angels Carabi, in an interview with Gloria Naylor, Belles Lettres 7, spring, 1992, pp. Discusses Naylor's literary heritage and her use of and divergence from her literary roots. WebBasil turns out to be a spoiled young boy, and grows into a selfish man. 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. Naylor uses Brewster Place to provide one commonality among the women who live there. For example, when Mattie leaves her home after her father beats her, she never again sees her parents. 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. Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. 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. 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. 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. Source: Laura E. Tanner, "Reading Rape: Sanctuary and The Women of Brewster Place" in American Literature, Vol. AUTHOR COMMENTARY 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. 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. Then her son, for whom she gave up her life, leaves without saying goodbye. WebC.C. It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. Naylor depicts the lives of 1940s blacks living in New York City in her next novel, The focus on the relationships among women in, While love and politics link the lives of the two women in, Critics have compared the theme of familial and African-American women in. Ciel's eyes began to cloud. 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. 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. He convinced his mama to put her house on the line to keep him out of jail and then skipped town, forcing Mattie names her son, Basil, for the pleasant memory of the afternoon he was conceived in a fragrant basil patch. to in the novelthe making of soup, the hanging of laundry, the diapering of babies, Brewster's death is forestalled and postponed. Mattie's dream has not been fulfilled yet, but neither is it folded and put away like Cora's; a storm is heading toward Brewster Place, and the women are "gonna have a party.". Since the book was first published in 1982, critics have praised Gloria Naylor's characters. 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. 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. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. The women all share the experience of living on the dead end street that the rest of the world has forgotten. 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. Mattie's father, Samuel, despises him. Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place is made up of seven stories of the women who live She imagines that her daughter Maybelline "could be doing something like this some daystanding on a stage, wearing pretty clothes and saying fine things . Maybelline could go to collegeshe liked school." The most important character in As she is thinking this, they hear a scream from Serena, who had stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. ", The situation of black men, she says, is one that "still needs work. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. Brewster Place lives on because the women whose dreams it has been a part of live on and continue to dream. A nonfiction theoretical work concerning the rights of black women and the need to work for change relating to the issues of racism, sexism, and societal oppression. Later in the novel, a street gang rapes Lorraine, and she kills Ben, mistaking him for her attackers. Ciel is present in Mattie's dream because she herself has dreamed about the ghastly rape and mutilation with such identification and urgency that she obeys the impulse to return to Brewster Place: " 'And she had on a green dress with like black trimming, and there were red designs or red flowers or something on the front.' Miss Eva warns Mattie to be stricter with Basil, believing that he will take advantage of her. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. Images of shriveling, putrefaction, and hardening dominate the poem. She provides shelter and a sense of freedom to her old friend, Etta Mae; also, she comes to the aid of Ciel when Ciel loses her desire to live. Many immigrants and Southern blacks arrived in New York after the War, searching for jobs. 1004-5. She comes home that night filled with good intentions. 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. And Naylor takes artistic license to resurrect Ben, the gentle janitor killed by a distraught rape victim, who functions as the novel's narrator. Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. One critic has said that her character may be modeled after adherents of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. There are many readers who feel cheated and betrayed to discover that the apocalyptic destruction of Brewster's wall never takes place. York would provide their children with better opportunities than they had had as children growing up in a still-segregated South. Sources Place is very different. Whatever happened to Basil, that errant son of Mattie Micheal? 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. Their ability to transform their lives and to stand strong against the difficulties that face them in their new environment and circumstances rings true with the spirit of black women in American today. 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." The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. Butch succeeds in seducing Mattie and, unbeknownst to him, is the father of the baby she carries when she leaves Rock Vale, Tennessee. As the Jehovah's Witnesses preach destruction of the evil world, so, too, does Naylor with vivid portrayals of apocalyptic events. 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. INTRODUCTION 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. But perhaps the most revealing stories about Lorraine clamped her eyes shut and, using all of the strength left within her, willed it to rise again. It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. 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. Thus, living in Brewster Place partly defines who the women are and becomes an important part of each woman's personal history. . Mattie's entire life changes when she allows her desire to overcome her better judgement, resulting in pregnancy. Based on women Naylor has known in her life, the characters convincingly portray the struggle for survival that black women have shared throughout history. 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. Despite the inclination toward overwriting here, Naylor captures the cathartic and purgative aspects of resistance and aggression. 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. The "imagised, eroticized concept of the world that makes a mockery of empirical objectivity" is here replaced by the discomforting proximity of two human faces locked in violent struggle and defined not by eroticism but by the pain inflicted by one and borne by the other: 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. 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. "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. After a frightening episode with a rat in her apartment, Mattie looks for new housing. She stops even trying to keep any one man around; she prefers the "shadows" who come in the night. Alice Walker 1944 The sun comes out for the block party that Kiswana has been organizing to raise money to take the landlord to court. Huge hunks of those novels have male characters that helped me carry the drama. Through prose and poetry, the author addresses issues of family violence, urban decay, spiritual renewal, and others, yet rises above the grim realism to find hope and inspiration. Etta Mae Mattie puts (Full name Neil Richard Gaiman), Teresa In this case, Brewster Place undergoes life processes. Historical Context It is the bond among the women that supports the continuity of life on Brewster Place. "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.". 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. Critic Jill Matus, in Black American Literature Forum, describes Mattie as "the community's best voice and sharpest eye.". ." The impact of his fist forced air into her constricted throat, and she worked her sore mouth, trying to form the one word that had been clawing inside of her "Please." This is a story that depicts a family's struggle with grieving and community as they prepare to bury their dead mother. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. Mattie Michael. FURTHER READING This selfless love carries the women through betrayal, loss, and violence. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Release Dates "Does it really matter?" 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. When Cora Lee turned thirteen, however, her parents felt that she was too old for baby dolls and gave her a Barbie. Why were Lorraine and Theresa, "The Two," such a threat to the women who resided at Brewster Place? Ciel, the grandchild of Eva Turner, also ends up on Brewster Place. She dies, and Theresa regrets her final words to her. ", Most critics consider Naylor one of America's most talented contemporary African-American authors. 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. 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. By the end of the evening Etta realizes that Mattie was right, and she walks up Brewster Street with a broken spirit. Basil 2 episodes, 1989 Bebe Drake Cleo Based on the novel by Gloria Naylor, which deals with several strong-willed women who live The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. She awakes to find the sun shining for the first time in a week, just like in her dream. 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.

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