They refers initially to the "colored daughters" but thereafter repeatedly to the dreams. When Lorraine and Teresa first move onto Brewster street, the other women are relieved that they seem like nice girls who will not be after their husbands. How does Lorraine remind Ben of his daughter? 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. By denying the reader the freedom to observe the victim of violence from behind the wall of aesthetic convention, to manipulate that victim as an object of imaginative play, Naylor disrupts the connection between violator and viewer that Mulvey emphasizes in her discussion of cinematic convention. Inviting the viewer to enter the world of violence that lurks just beyond the wall of art, Naylor traps the reader behind that wall. bard college music faculty. The brick wall symbolizes the differences between the residents of Brewster Place and their rich neighbors on the other side of the wall. He loves Mattie very much and blames himself for her pregnancy, until she tells him that the baby is not Fred Watson'sthe man he had chosen for her. In order to capture the victim's pain in words, to contain it within a narrative unable to account for its intangibility, Naylor turns referentiality against itself. it, a body made, by sheer virtue of physiology, to encircle and in a sense embrace its violator. The first black on Brewster Place, he arrived in 1953, just prior to the Supreme Court's Brown vs. Topeka decision. 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. They will tear down that which has separated them and made them "different" from the other inhabitants of the city. The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, The English Language Institute of America, 1975. Confiding to Cora, Kiswana talks about her dreams of reform and revolution. She reminds him of his daughter, and this friendship assuages the guilt he feels over his daughter's fate. However, Ben is actually an incredibly compassionate and giving man whose death proves to be an important and tragic loss to the community. Naylor's temporary restoration of the objectifying gaze only emphasizes the extent to which her representation of violence subverts the conventional dynamics of the reading and viewing processes. 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.". According to Stoll in Magill's Literary Annual, "Gloria Naylor is already numbered among the freshest and most vital voices in contemporary American literature.".
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