why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter?

27 Apr. She awakes to find the sun shining for the first time in a week, just like in her dream. 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. She felt a weight drop on her spread body. Christine King, Identities and Issues in Literature, Vol. why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? $18.74/subscription + tax, Save 25% on 50-99 accounts. Warning: "continue" targeting switch is equivalent to "break".Did you mean to use "continue 2"? SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. We're sorry, SparkNotes Plus isn't available in your country. 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. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. She kisses them all goodnight. Dorothy Wickenden, a review in The New Republic, September 6, 1982, p. 37. A man who is going to buy a sandwich turns away; it is more important that he stay and eat the sandwich than that he pay for it. Novels for Students. Unable to stop him in any other way, Fannie cocks the shotgun against her husband's chest. Representing the drug-dealing street gangs who rape and kill without remorse, garbage litters the alley. 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." By considering the nature of personal and collective dreams within a context of specific social, political, and economic determinants, Naylor inscribes an ideology that affirms deferral; the capacity to defer and to dream is endorsed as life-availing. Amid Naylor's painfully accurate depictions of real women and their real struggles, Cora's instant transformation into a devoted and responsible mother seems a "vain fantasy.". the origin of Kiswanas real name, Melanie, and the pride she has in her heritage. If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? In a novel full of unfulfilled and constantly deferred dreams, the only the dream that is fully realized is Lorraine's dream of being recognized as "a lousy human being who's somebody's daughter Eva invites Mattie in for dinner and offers her a place to stay. Tanner examines the reader as voyeur and participant in the rape scene at the end of The Women of Brewster Place. In Naylor's representation of rape, the power of the gaze is turned against itself; the aesthetic observer is forced to watch powerlessly as the violator steps up to the wall to stare with detached pleasure at an exhibit in which the reader, as well as the victim of violence, is on display. Brewster Place lives on because the women whose dreams it has been a part of live on and continue to dream. Praises Naylor's treatment of women and relationships. She feels a terrible chill run though her, because she had had a suspicion that the Pigman's wife was dead. The "objective" picture of a battered woman scraping at the air in a bloody green and black dress is shocking exactly because it seems to have so little to do with the woman whose pain the reader has just experienced. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. Etta Mae soon departs for New York, leaving Mattie to fend for herself. Theresa, on the other hand, makes no apologies for her lifestyle and gets angry with Lorraine for wanting to fit in with the women. to be an unfortunate place since the people linked to its creation are all corrupt. My interest here is to look at the way in which Naylor rethinks the poem in her novel's attention to dreams and desires and deferral., The dream of the last chapter is a way of deferring closure, but this deferral is not evidence of the author's self-indulgent reluctance to make an end. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. What do their feelings suggest about each of them? The other women do not view Theresa and Lorraine as separate individuals, but refer to them as "The Two." Ciel hesitantly acknowledges that he is not black. In this one sentence, Naylor pushes the reader back into the safety of a world of artistic mediation and restores the reader's freedom to navigate safely through the details of the text. Subscribe now. Share. "The Two" are unique amongst the Brewster Place women because of their sexual relationship, as well as their relationship with their female neighbors. (one code per order). community changes with each new historical shift. She is taken by his looks, wealth, and status, but after sleeping with him, she Barbara Harrison, Visions of Glory: A History and a Memory of Jehovah's Witnesses, Simon & Schuster, 1975. 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. 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. bard college music faculty. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. The more strongly each woman feels about her past in Brewster Place, the more determinedly the bricks are hurled. The story traces the development of the civil rights movement, from a time when segregation was the norm through the beginnings of integration. As the rain comes down, hopes for a community effort are scotched and frustration reaches an intolerable level. 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. According to Webster, in The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, the word "community" means "the state of being held in common; common possession, enjoyment, liability, etc." Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). The first climax occurs when Mattie succeeds in her struggle to bring Ciel back to life after the death of her daughter. Sadly, Lorraine's dream of not being "any different from anybody else in the world" is only fulfilled when her rape forces the other women to recognize the victimization and vulnerability that they share with her. Co-opted by the rapist's story, the victim's bodyviolated, damaged and discarded is introduced as authorization for the very brutality that has destroyed it. Before leaving, she secretly gives Kiswana enough money to have a phone line Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. INTRODUCTION And then on to good jobs in insurance companies and the post office, even doctors and lawyers. They are still "gonna have a party," and the rain in Mattie's dream foreshadows the "the stormy clouds that had formed on the horizon and were silently moving toward Brewster Place." As she is thinking this, they hear a scream from Serena, who had stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. 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. She uses the community of women she has created in The Women of Brewster Place to demonstrate the love, trust, and hope that have always been the strong spirit of African-American women. For many years now, Lorraine has been taught to fear, hate, and despise men. The chapter begins with a mention of the troubling dreams that haunt all the women and girls of Brewster Place during the week after Ben's death and Lorraine's rape. how does lorraine explain the reason for her mother's attitude toward men? It is essentially a psychologica, Cane As she climbs the stairs to the apartment, however, she hears Mattie playing Etta's "loose life" records. Like them, her books sing of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America. As lesbians, Lorraine and Theresa represent everything foreign to the other women. Their aggression, part-time presence, avoidance of commitment, and sense of dislocation renders them alien and other in the community of Brewster Place. Within the Cite this article tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. An obedient child, Cora Lee made good grades in school and loved playing with baby dolls. The second theme, violence that men enact on women, connects with and strengthens the first. When Mattie moves to Brewster Place, Ciel has grown up and has a child of her own. [C.C.] For example, in a review published in Freedomways, Loyle Hairston says that the characters " throb with vitality amid the shattering of their hopes and dreams." 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." 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." This bond is complex and lasting; for example, when Kiswana Browne and her mother specifically discuss their heritage, they find that while they may demonstrate their beliefs differently, they share the same pride in their race. In Naylor's representation, Lorraine's pain and not the rapist's body becomes the agent of violation, the force of her own destruction: "The screams tried to break through her corneas out into the air, but the tough rubbery flesh sent them vibrating back into her brain, first shaking lifeless the cells that nurtured her memory." In Mattie's dream of the block party, even Ciel, who knows nothing of Lorraine, admits that she has dreamed of "a woman who was supposed to be me She didn't look exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me.". The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (Critical Responses in Arts and Letters, No. Just as she is about to give up, she meets Eva Turner, an old woman who lives with her granddaughter, Ciel. Alice Walker 1944 How does Lorraine remind Ben of his daughter? it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End, 1981. Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbian residents of Brewster Place. Beginning in her sophomore year of high school, she has one it. There are countless slum streets like Brewster; streets will continue to be condemned and to die, but there will be other streets to whose decay the women of Brewster will cling. 4, 1983, pp. fight with Theresa, Lorraine goes to a party on her own. Naylor created seven female characters with seven individual voices. As she passes through the alley near the wall, she is attacked by C.C. Kay Bonetti, "An Interview with Gloria Naylor" (audiotape), American Prose Library, 1988. She continues to protect him from harm and nightmares until he jumps bail and abandons her to her own nightmare. Renew your subscription to regain access to all of our exclusive, ad-free study tools. You can use this space to go into a little more detail about your company. After Ciel underwent an abortion, she had difficulty returning to the daily routine of her life. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her. Hairston, however, believes Naylor sidesteps the real racial issues. Their dreams, even those that are continually deferred, are what keep them alive, continuing to sleep, cook, and care for their children.

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