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

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. I was totally freaked out when that happened and I didn't write for another seven or eight months. Because the victim's story cannot be told in the representation itself, it is told first; in the representation that follows, that story lingers in the viewer's mind, qualifying the victim's inability to express herself and providing, in essence, a counter-text to the story of violation that the camera provides. Essays, poetry, and prose on the black feminist experience. The son of Macrina the Elder, Basil is said to have moved with his family to the shores of the Black Sea during the persecution of Christians under Galerius. Explored Male Violence and Sexism "I like Faulkner's work," Naylor says. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. and the boys] had been hiding up on the wall, watching her come up that back street, and they had waited. 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.". 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. The book ends with one final mention of dreams. 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. In a ironic turn, Kiswana believes that her mother denies her heritage; during a confrontation, she is surprised when she learns that the two share a great deal. | But the group effort at tearing down the wall is only a dreamMattie's dream-and just as the rain is pouring down, baptizing the women and their dream work, the dream ends. As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. Graduate school was a problem, she says, because Yale was "the home base of all nationally known Structuralist critics. 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. Then Cora Lee notices that there is still blood on the bricks. She says that she finally was spurred to tell their stories by the death of her father in 1993 and the Million Man March two years later. 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. They refers initially to the "colored daughters" but thereafter repeatedly to the dreams. 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. 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. Critics say that Naylor may have fashioned Kiswana's character after activists from the 60s, particularly those associated with the Black Power Movement. The Mediterranean families knew him as the man who would quietly do repairs with alcohol on his breath. WebHow did Ben die in The Women of Brewster Place? or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. ', "I was afraid that if I stayed it would be like killing the goose that laid the golden egg. 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. Throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the women support one another, counteracting the violence of their fathers, boyfriends, husbands, and sons. This is a story that depicts a family's struggle with grieving and community as they prepare to bury their dead mother. 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.". Linda Labin asserts in Masterpieces of Women's Literature, "In many ways, The Women of Brewster Place may prove to be as significant in its way as Southern writer William Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County or Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. The women again pull together, overcoming their outrage over the destruction of one of their own. It provides a realistic vision of black urban women's lives and inspires readers with the courage and spirit of black women in America.". That year also marked the August March on Washington as well as the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Naylor's novel is not exhortatory or rousing in the same way; her response to the fracture of the collective dream is an affirmation of persistence rather than a song of culmination and apocalypse. She felt a weight drop on her spread body. WebSo Mattie runs away to the city (not yet Brewster though! Teresa, the bolder of the two, doesn't care what the neighbors think of them, and she doesn't understand why Lorraine does care. 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. The exception is Kiswana, from Linden Hills, who is deliberately downwardly mobile.. Research the psychological effects of abortion, and relate the evidence from the story to the information you have discovered. The poem suggests that to defer one's dreams, desires, hopes is life-denying. For example, while Mattie Michael loses her home as a result of her son's irresponsibility, the strength she gains enables her to care for the women whom she has known either since childhood and early adulthood or through her connection to Brewster Place. She continues to protect him from harm and nightmares until he jumps bail and abandons her to her own nightmare. "Woman," Mulvey observes, "stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic control by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." Early on, she lives with Turner and Mattie in North Carolina. Victims of ignorance, violence, and prejudice, all of the women in the novel are alienated from their families, other people, and God. "My horizons have broadened. INTRODUCTION As she is thinking this, they hear a scream from Serena, who had stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. It would be simple to make a case for the unflattering portrayal of men in this novel; in fact Naylor was concerned that her work would be seen as deliberately slighting of men: there was something that I was very self-conscious about with my first novel; I bent over backwards not to have a negative message come through about the men. Basil leaves Mattie without saying goodbye. 29), edited by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, Greenwood, 1997. The residents of Brewster Place outside are sitting on stoops or playing in the street because of the heat. , Not only does Langston Hughes's poem speak generally about the nature of deferral and dreams unsatisfied, but in the historical context that Naylor evokes it also calls attention implicitly to the sixties' dream of racial equality and the "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.. 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. Critical Overview Mattie allows herself to be seduced by Butch Fuller, whom Samuel thinks is worthless. Despair and destruction are the alternatives to decay. She resents her conservative parents and their middle-class values and feels that her family has rejected their black heritage. Yes, that's what would happen to her babies. Fannie speaks her mind and often stands up to her husband, Samuel. It's important that when (people) turn to what they consider the portals of knowledge, they be taught all of American literature. Now, clearly Mattie did not intend for this to happen. " This sudden shift of perspective unveils the connection between the scopophilic gaze and the objectifying force of violence. His wife, Mary, had AUTHOR COMMENTARY WebBasil the Physician (died c.1111 or c.1118) was the Bogomil leader condemned as a heretic by Patriarch Nicholas III of Constantinople and burned at the stake by Byzantine Emperor "It took me a little time, but after I got over the writer's block, I never looked back.". Two examples from The Women of Brewster Place are Lorraine's rape and the rains that come after it. After presenting a loose community of six stories, each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to "round off" the collection. Mattie's dream expresses the communal guilt, complicity, and anger that the women of Brewster Place feel about Lorraine. 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. 3642. Both literally and figuratively, Brewster Place is a dead end streetthat is, the street itself leads nowhere and the women who live there are trapped by their histories, hopes, and dreams. As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. Julia Boyd, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self Esteem, Plume, 1997. Miss Eva opens her home to Mattie and her infant son, Basil. The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "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. She shares her wisdom with Mattie, resulting from years of experience with men and children. Kiswana is a young woman from a middle-class black family. She completed The Women of Brewster Place in 1981, the same year she received her Bachelor of Arts degree. The rain begins to fall again and Kiswana tries to get people to pack up, but they seem desperate to continue the party. More importantly, the narrator emphasizes that the dreams of Brewster's inhabitants are what keep them alive. Another play she wrote premiered at the Hartford Stage Company. GENERAL COMMENTARY As she climbs the stairs to the apartment, however, she hears Mattie playing Etta's "loose life" records. 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. People know each other in Brewster Place, and as imperfect and damaging as their involvement with each other may be, they still represent a community. The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. With pleasure she realizes that someone is waiting up for her. Yet, when she returns to her apartment, she climbs into bed with another man. The brick wall symbolizes the differences between the residents of Brewster Place and their rich neighbors on the other side of the wall. Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. The extended comparison between the street's "life" and the women's lives make the work an "allegory." Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. The epilogue itself is not unexpected, since the novel opens with a prologue describing the birth of the street. 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. "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. Naylor uses many symbols in The Women of Brewster Place. Naylor places her characters in situations that evoke strong feelings, and she succeeds in making her characters come alive with realistic emotions, actions, and words. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, Naiad, 1989. York would provide their children with better opportunities than they had had as children growing up in a still-segregated South. Mattie, after thirty years, is forced to give up her home and move to Brewster Place. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. 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. 4964. Years later when the old woman dies, Mattie has saved enough money to buy the house. 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. In Brewster Place, who played Basil? 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. I had been the person behind `The Women of Brewster Place. 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. Ben is Brewster Place's first black resident and its gentle-natured, alcoholic building superintendent. 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. 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. 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.