The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
"The Women of Brewster Place" is Gloria Naylor's acclaimed debut novel, which won the American Book Award for First Fiction in 1983. This work comprises seven interconnected stories that portray the lives of seven African American women living on Brewster Place, a ghetto street characterized by a metaphorical brick wall that symbolizes their struggles with economic and racial oppression. Each woman's story explores themes of violence against women and the healing power of community, creating a microcosm of the black female experience in America.
The characters range in age, background, and sexuality, showcasing a diverse tapestry of experiences. Key figures include Mattie Michael, a mother whose sacrifices shape her resilience, and Kiswana Browne, a young woman grappling with her identity and heritage. The novel also addresses complex relationships, such as those of Cora Lee, a single mother, and the couple Lorraine and Theresa, who face societal rejection due to their love. The narrative culminates in a powerful climax that highlights the pervasive impact of trauma, yet concludes with a hopeful vision of community and resilience, underscoring the ongoing struggle for empowerment and self-identity among these women.
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Subject Terms
The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
First published: 1982
The Work
Gloria Naylor’s first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the American Book Award for First Fiction in 1983 and was made into a film. Actually a novel in seven stories, it presents a series of interconnected tales about seven women who struggle to make peace with their pasts. The allegorical setting is Brewster Place, a dead-end ghetto street whose distinctive feature is the brick wall that bottles economic and racial frustration inside. Two interdependent themes bind the stories together: the violence that men enact on women is counteracted by the healing power of community. The novel’s innovative structure is key to Naylor’s purpose. Exploring the lives of different women on Brewster Place, Naylor attempts to create a microcosm of the black female experience in America.
The microcosm consists of seven African American women representing a range of ages, backgrounds, and sexualities. The first character introduced is Mattie Michael, whose fierce love for her son twice costs her the security and pride of a happy home. Her hard-won strength becomes the force that helps other women, such as Mattie’s oldest friend, Etta Mae Johnson, and Lucielia Louise Turner (Ciel), whom Mattie helped raise. One of the most powerful scenes of the novel is the one in which Mattie saves Ciel, who loses her desire to live after the tragic deaths of her two children. Kiswana Browne is a would-be revolutionary who attempts to reclaim her African heritage and to improve Brewster Place by renouncing her parents’ elite Linden Hills lifestyle. Cora Lee, her opposite, is a single mother of seven who wants babies but not children. Last are Lorraine and Theresa, the couple whom Brewster Place cruelly rejects when they seek a haven that will tolerate their love for each other. Women’s dual identity as mother and daughter is a highlighted conflict throughout.
The symbolism of Brewster Place’s brick wall contributes to the horrific climax when Lorraine is gang raped in the alley formed by the wall, her blood spattering the bricks. Her effort to fight back, delayed by the trauma, causes her to attack Ben, the janitor who treats her like a daughter. She murders him with a brick. The novel appears to end triumphantly when the women tear down the wall, brick by brick, at a block party that celebrates the power of community. This is a deceptive resolution, however, because the block party has happened only in Mattie’s dream. The ambiguity of the ending gives the story a mythic quality by stressing the continual possibility of dreams and the results of their deferral.
Bibliography
Christian, Barbara. “Gloria Naylor’s Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills. ” In New Black Feminist Criticism, 1975-2000, edited by Gloria Bowles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Contrasts the two worlds of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, regards Kiswana as the link between the novels, and places Naylor in a literary context.
Fraser, Celeste. “Stealing B(l)ack Voices: The Myth of the Black Matriarchy and The Women of Brewster Place. ” Critical Matrix 5 (Fall/Winter, 1989): 65-88. Reads Naylor’s novel as a refutation of conservative political theory that calls for breaking the power of the black matriarchy. Cites Naylor’s refusal to depict a single uniform image of black women or black families in opposition to the monolithic image white politicians describe. Considers the novel to be an attack on patriarchy.
Kelly, Lori Duin. “The Dream Sequence in The Women of Brewster Place. ” Notes on Contemporary Literature 21 (September, 1991): 8-10. Focuses on the blood on the brick wall, finding the blood to be a symbol of female experience (birth, menstruation, loss of virginity). Sees the dismantling of the wall as an expression of rage at women’s collective experience with males.
Matus, Jill L. “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place. ” Black American Literature Forum 24 (Spring, 1990): 49-64. Relates the novel to Hughes’s prefatory poem about the “dream deferred,” seeing the marginalized women in the last story as experiencing a cathartic dream of resistance followed by an affirmation of personal dreams.
Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” The Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 567-593. Naylor maintains that she “bent over backwards not to have a negative image come through about the men” and that she focused on telling women’s stories that had not been told enough in literature.
Pearlman, Mickey. “An Interview with Gloria Naylor.” High Plains Literary Review 5 (Spring, 1990): 98-107. Concerns space and memory in Naylor’s novels. Discusses her graduate work at Yale and the conflict between writing and attending school.
Saunders, James Robert. “The Ornamentation of Old Ideas: Gloria Naylor’s First Three Novels.” The Hollins Critic 27 (April, 1990): 1-11. Compares The Women of Brewster Place to Ann Petry’s The Street and notes that in both novels three generations of men fail the protagonist. Observes that the two novels differ in their treatment of “sisterly love.” Naylor’s is the more optimistic portrait.
Wells, Linda, Sandra E. Bowen, and Suzanne Stutman. “’What Shall I Give My Children?’ The Role of Mentor in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow. ” Explorations in Ethnic Studies 13 (July, 1990): 41-60. Asserts that Naylor uses a series of mentors who are linked to other mentors by healing communal experiences. Sees Mattie Michael as the central consciousness and the moral agent in the novel. The negative image of men is seen as a product of their selfishness.