The Women of Brewster Place

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Interlude 1-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7-Interlude 2

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Themes

Community and Sisterhood Amidst Adversity

The Women of Brewster Place is a novel about sisterhood and the healing power of female friendship. Throughout the novel, women come together despite their differences to support and nurture one another, healing the wounds inflicted by a racist, patriarchal society. Faced with abuse and violence at the hands of men, the various women of Brewster Place forge relationships that become a spiritual antidote to the perpetual assault of the outside world. The love of another woman is often lifesaving, and the women who lack this support, like Lorraine, fail to flourish.

Within the novel’s tight-knit community of women, Mattie is the central figure in the execution of this theme. Because Eva Turner helps Mattie when she is a young single mother struggling to survive, Mattie finds many different ways to show other young women the same “unexplained kindness” (34) that she experienced, and in her old age, she finds herself playing a matriarchal role and offering much-needed support to those around her. Her closest relationships can be found in her best friend Etta and her surrogate daughter Lucielia, and the most dramatic representation of Mattie’s healing power occurs when she pulls Ciel back from the brink of depression when the younger woman is near death after the loss of her baby daughter. Just by looking at her, Mattie knows that Ciel is “dying […] right in front of [their] faces” (102). She holds the younger woman tight and rocks her until she finds a metaphorical “splinter” under Ciel’s skin, one with “deep, gigantic, ragged” roots (103), and yanks it out. Just with her touch and presence, Mattie tears out the source of Ciel’s pain, and while the bereft mother’s inner wound remains, it is now one that will heal.

However, not all the women in the novel have the same support system. Throughout the novel, the characters usually overcome their differences and find ways to connect with one another. For example, Kiswana befriends Cora despite their many differences, and Etta and Mattie are best friends despite their opposite natures. However, some differences are portrayed as being too great for the women to fully overcome, and Theresa and Lorraine’s experiences illustrate what happens to women who experience a breakdown of community. Lorraine, in particular, longs for connection and a sense of belonging and is devastated by the repeated rejection she experiences because of her sexuality. She has no one to turn to but Theresa, and the strain of the “them and us” mentality wears on their relationship. While Lorraine’s violent assault is motivated by anti-gay bias, it also symbolically represents the deaths that many of the other characters would have come to without the support of their communities.

After Lorraine’s attack, however, the women’s shared dreams suggest that Lorraine is not so different from the rest of them, and they can all imagine themselves in her place. Within the context of Mattie’s dream, even Theresa participates in the shared work of tearing down the wall, suggesting that the ability to put aside differences and work as a community is essential if the women are to overcome the systemic barriers set against them.

“Deferred” Dreams and the Search for Belonging

In the novel’s epigraph, Naylor uses a Langston Hughes poem to introduce the concept of a dream “deferred,” or postponed indefinitely. Each chapter of The Women of Brewster Place tells the story of an individual woman and her dream. Without fail, each of these dreams is broken, yet the women must go on with their lives, and each finds a different way of coping with the loss of her dream. For example, Mattie dreams of a home and a beautiful life for her son and finds herself bereft of both. Etta dreams of settling down with a respectable man but ends up used and abandoned. Kiswana dreams of revolution and equality but must learn to implement a more mundane form of resistance. Lucielia dreams of love and a happy family but loses her children. Cora Lee dreams of babies that never grow up. Lorraine dreams of acceptance and community but finds only rejection and trauma. Over the course of their lives, each woman is robbed of her dreams. Some, like Mattie, refuse to let their loss get the best of them. Although she has lost her son and “the home she had exchanged thirty years of her life to pay for” (7), she appears content throughout the novel. She refuses to dwell in the past and instead throws her energy into supporting the women around her. Others, like Ciel, are nearly killed by the loss of their dream, and women like Lorraine are completely destroyed.

For most women, their dream boils down to a desire to belong in their family, in their community, and in their society. Many of the women find healing from the pain of their broken dreams by finding a new sense of belonging with one another and the community they build in Brewster Place. Ultimately, the strength of a woman’s personal connections often dictates her ability to survive her “murdered dreams.” Ciel’s strong connection with Mattie saves her after the loss of her daughter, while Lorraine’s lack of personal connections leaves her with no recourse after her assault.

Dreams also appear symbolically throughout The Women of Brewster Place, the most significant being Mattie’s lengthy dream of the block party at the end of the novel. Throughout the text, the wall that makes Brewster Place a dead-end street represents the characters’ isolation and exclusion from society based on race, gender, and socio-economic status. In Maddie’s dream, the women come together to tear the wall down, illustrating their shared fantasy of breaking down the barriers that oppress them. However, the fact that this occurs only in Mattie’s dream suggests the impossibility of breaking down such systemic barriers in real life. Nevertheless, the women never let go of their aspirations. Even after Brewster Place is condemned and the women move away, they “wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn […] and pin those dreams to wet laundry hung out to dry” (192), suggesting hope and resilience if not the actual realization of their dreams.

The Impact of Systemic Racism and Sexism

Brewster Place’s very existence is a testament to the impact of systemic racism. Shortly after its construction, Brewster Place felt “hopeful” about its future, but it was soon populated by “with people who had no political influence” (2), Mediterranean people who “offended” their neighbors with “the pungent smells of strong cheeses and smoked meats” (2). The city builds a wall that turned Brewster Place into a dead-end street and creates an active act of exclusion that closes off the “dark haired and mellow-skinned” (2) residents of Brewster Place from the city center. Without access to the main boulevard, the block is an undesirable place to live, and the landlord, “a post office box in another city” (3), lets the place fall into disrepair. It becomes populated by African Americans who “came because they had no choice and would remain for the same reason” (4).

Although the novel focuses on the women of Brewster Place, Naylor also shows how systemic racism and sexism affect and impact some of the male characters. Ben, for example, faces pressure from his wife and from society to fulfill certain masculine stereotypes such as providing for his family. His identity as a Black man limits his opportunities to do this; however, his wife blames the family’s poverty on Ben personally, claiming that their situation would be different if he were “even quarter a man” (153). As a result, he fails to speak up and protect his daughter from her white employer’s abuses, creating guilt and shame that he struggles with for the rest of his life.

Perhaps the most poignant example of how systemic racism and sexism beget more violence is Lorraine’s rape at the end of the novel. The men who assault her have been born into a patriarchal, misogynistic society; however, as Black men, they have no outlet for their frustrations and will never be given the chance that white men have to “scatter their iron seed from a B-52 into the wound of the earth, point a finger to move a nation, or stick a pole into the moon” (169-70). Society has told them that men must dominate but has taken that ability away from them. In retribution, these men with “an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide” (170) seek that validation by assaulting a person with less power than themselves, a Black woman.

Although racism and sexism are prevalent in the lives of the characters, the focus of the novel is on the characters’ ability to survive and resist despite these barriers. Community thrives in Brewster Place, and within this community, more often than not, characters overcome their differences to create strong bonds that undermine the discrimination present in the outside world.