The Women of Brewster Place (Criticism)

Criticism

Donna Woodford

Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. 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.

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. The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. Of these unifying elements, the most notable is the dream motif, for though these women are living a nightmarish existence, they are united by their common dreams.

The novel begins with Langston Hughes's poem, "Harlem," which asks "what happens to a dream deferred?" And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. Each woman in the book has her own dream.

As a young, single mother, Mattie places all of her dreams on her son. She leaves her boarding house room after a rat bites him because she cannot stay "another night in that place without nightmares about things that would creep out of the walls to attack her child." She continues to protect him from harm and nightmares until he jumps bail and abandons her to her own nightmare.

Etta Mae dreams of a man who can "move her off of Brewster Place for good," but she, too, has her dream deferred each time that a man disappoints her.

Kiswana, an outsider on Brewster Place, is constantly dreaming of ways in which she can organize the residents and enact social reform. 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." But just as the pigeon she watches fails to ascend gracefully and instead lands on a fire escape "with awkward, frantic movements," so Kiswana's dreams of a revolution will be frustrated by the grim realities of Brewster Place and the awkward, frantic movements of people who are busy merely trying to survive.

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. She is left dreaming only of death, a suicidal nightmare from which only Mattie's nurturing love can awaken her.

Lorraine dreams of acceptance and a place where she doesn't "feel any different from anybody else in the world." She finds this place, temporarily, with Ben, and he finds in her a reminder of the lost daughter who haunts his own dreams. 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. But perhaps the most revealing stories about dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party."

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." The quotation is appropriate to Cora Lee's story not only because Cora and her children will attend the play but also because Cora's chapter will explore the connection between the begetting of children and the begetting of dreams. It will also examine the point at which dreams become "vain fantasy."

As a child Cora dreams of new baby dolls. When her parents refuse to give her another for her thirteenth Christmas, she is heartbroken. Her mother tries to console her by telling her that she still has all her old dolls, but Cora plaintively says, "But they don't smell and feel the same as the new ones." As an adult, she continues to prefer the smell and feel of her new babies to the trials and hassles of her growing children. Her babies "just seemed to keep coming — always welcome until they changed, and then she just didn't understand them." Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. They no longer fit into her dream of a sweet, dependent baby who needs no one but her.

Kiswana finds one of these wild children eating out of a dumpster, and soon Kiswana and Cora become friends. Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. Excitedly she tells Cora, "if we really pull together, we can put pressure on [the landlord] to start fixing this place up." She is similarly convinced that it will be easy to change Cora's relationship with her children, and she eagerly invites them to her boyfriend's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cora is skeptical, but to pacify Kiswana she agrees to go.

It is at the performance of Shakespeare's play where the dreams of the two women temporarily merge. The production, sponsored by a grant from the city, does indeed inspire Cora to dream for her older children. She imagines that her daughter Maybelline "could be doing something like this some day — standing on a stage, wearing pretty clothes and saying fine things . Maybelline could go to college — she liked school." When she remembers with guilt that her children no longer like school and are often truant, she resolves to change her behavior in order to ensure them brighter futures:

"Junior high; high school; college — none of them stayed little forever. And then on to good jobs in insurance companies and the post office, even doctors and lawyers. Yes, that's what would happen to her babies."

Her new dream of maternal devotion continues as they arrive home and prepare for bed. She tucks them in and the children do not question her unusual attention because it has been "a night for wonders."

At this point it seems that Cora's story is out of place in the novel, a mistake by an otherwise meticulous author. 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."

In the last paragraph of Cora's story, however, we find that the fantasy has been Cora's. 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. She will not change her actions and become a devoted mother, and her dreams for her children will be deferred. They were, after all, only fantasies, and real dreams take more than one night to achieve.

"The Block Party" tells the story of another deferred dream, this one literally dreamt by Mattie the night before the real Block Party. 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. They will not talk about these dreams; only a few of them will even admit to having them, but every one of them dreams of Lorraine, finally recognizing the bond they share with the woman they had shunned as "different." 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.

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."

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 or somebody's friend or even somebody's enemy." 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.

Mattie's dream presents an empowering response to this nightmare of disempowerment. When she dreams of the women joining together to tear down the wall that has separated them from the rest of the city, she is dreaming of a way for all of them to achieve Lorraine's dream of acceptance. They will tear down that which has separated them and made them "different" from the other inhabitants of the city. They will tear down the wall which is stained with blood, and which has come to symbolize their dead end existence on Brewster Place. As Jill Matus notes in "Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place," "Tearing at the very bricks of Brewster's walls is an act of resistance against the conditions that prevail within it."

But the group effort at tearing down the wall is only a dream — Mattie's dream-and just as the rain is pouring down, baptizing the women and their dream work, the dream ends. Mattie awakes to discover that it is still morning, the wall is still standing, and the block party still looms in the future.

Nevertheless, this is not the same sort of disappointing deferral as in Cora Lee's story. Though Mattie's dream has not yet been fulfilled, there are hints that it will be. She awakes to find the sun shining for the first time in a week, just like in her dream. 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." 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."

The book ends with one final mention of dreams. 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. They get up and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry, they're mixed with a pinch of salt and thrown into pots of soup, and they're diapered around babies.

Brewster Place lives on because the women whose dreams it has been a part of live on and continue to dream. Their dreams, even those that are continually deferred, are what keep them alive, continuing to sleep, cook, and care for their children. Dreams keep the street alive as well, if only in the minds of its former inhabitants whose stories the dream motif unites into a coherent novel.

Source: Donna Woodford, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Naylor's second novel, Linden Hills, takes place in Linden Hills, a wealthy and privileged neighborhood; it is familiar because it is the place Kiswana Browne — a character from The Women of Brewster Place — left. Published by Ticknor in 1985, Linden Hills reminds some critics of Dante's Inferno. The story revolves around two young men and their observations of the effects of black aspirations in contemporary America.
• Mama Day is Naylor's third novel. The setting is far removed from those in the first two stories. Willow Springs, an all-black island community off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, is home to Cocoa and Mama Day, characters that appeared briefly in Linden Hills. Descendants of an African slave and sorceress, Cocoa and Mama Day lead disparate lives until Cocoa becomes desperately ill. Ticknor published Mama Day in 1988.
• Naylor depicts the lives of 1940s blacks living in New York City in her next novel, Bailey's Cafe, published by Harcourt in 1992. Set in a Brooklyn diner, the story relates the lives of the diner's varied and interesting patrons who overcome hardship to survive.
• The focus on the relationships among women in The Women of Brewster Place presents feminist ideals similar to those about which Amy Tan writes in The Joy Luck Club. Published by G. Putnam's Sons in 1989, The Joy Luck Club features the bonds between mothers and daughters and the strength that women share in good times and in bad.
• While love and politics link the lives of the two women in Blood Sisters: An Examination of Conscience, the stronger tie between them is the bond joining grandmother, mothers, and daughters. Published by St. Martin's Press, and written by Valerie Miner, this story portrays three generations of an Irish clan and the struggles among its men and women.
• Critics have compared the theme of familial and African-American women in The Women of Brewster Place to the same theme in The Color Purple, published in 1992 by Harcourt and Brace. Author Alice Walker writes a story of two sisters that vividly portrays the bonds between black women.