why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter?

For a week after Ben's death it rains continuously, and although they will not admit it to each other, all the women dream of Lorraine that week. It seems destined As she is thinking this, they hear a scream from Serena, who had stuck a fork in an electrical outlet. Instead, that gaze, like Lorraine's, is directed outward; it is the violator upon whom the reader focuses, the violator's body that becomes detached and objectified before the reader's eyes as it is reduced to "a pair of suede sneakers," a "face" with "decomposing food in its teeth." The Women of Brewster Place portrays a close-knit community of women, bound in sisterhood as a defense against a corrupt world. She drops her clothes and goes to bed with Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. slammed his kneecap into her spine and her body arched up, causing his nails to cut into the side of her mouth to stifle her cry. Lorraine's body was twisting in convulsions of fear that they mistook for resistance, and C.C. As the object of the reader's gaze is suddenly shifted, that reader is thrust into an understanding of the way in which his or her own look may perpetuate the violence of rape. As the rain comes down, hopes for a community effort are scotched and frustration reaches an intolerable level. Biographical and critical study. Kiswana is In Brewster Place there is no upward mobility; and by conventional evaluation there are no stable family structures. Explores interracial relationships, bi-and gay sexuality in the black community, and black women's lives through a study of the roles played by both black and white families. Why does she have these mixed feelings? Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. 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. The close of the novel turns away from the intensity of the dream, and the satisfaction of violent protest, insisting rather on prolonged yearning and dreaming amid conditions which do not magically transform. Men stay away from home, become aggressive, and drink too much. The inconclusive last chapter opens into an epilogue that too teases the reader with the sense of an ending by appearing to be talking about the death of the street, Brewster Place. She is confronted by a group of THE LITERARY WORK The interactions of the characters and the similar struggles they live through connect the stories, as do the recurring themes and motifs. Mattie decides to find a new home. survives for decades, offering a home to one new wave of migrants after another. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. 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. 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. When Mattie moves to Brewster Place, Ciel has grown up and has a child of her own. While just about everyone else at the complex rejects Lorraine because of her sexuality, Ben is kind and sympathetic. They ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear." why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? Mattie leaves her parents home because she is pregnant by a 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. Demonic imagery, which accompanies the venting of desire that exceeds known limits, becomes apocalyptic. Dont have an account? However, Ben is actually an incredibly compassionate and giving man whose death proves to be an important and tragic loss to the community. dreams are those told in "Cora Lee" and "The Block Party. The oldest of three girls, Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950. 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." why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? - crownxmas.com theres a nameless man waiting for her. 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. To see Lorraine scraping at the air in her bloody garment is to see not only the horror of what happened to her but the horror that is her. After a rat bites her child, he cheated on her what did john and lorraine confess to the pigman, and what did he admit to them in return they weren't charity; his wife is dead what change did lorraine notice in the pigman as he got to know his young friends better? 1, spring, 1990, pp. 3 years ago. 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 displacement of reality into dream defers closure, even though the chapter appears shaped to make an end. 2023 . Basil and Eugene are forever on the run; other men in the stories (Kiswana's boyfriend Abshu, Cora Lee's shadowy lovers) are narrative ciphers. Situated within the margins of the violator's story of rape, the reader is able to read beneath the bodily configurations that make up its text, to experience the world-destroying violence required to appropriate the victim's body as a sign of the violator's power. The sixth boy took a dirty paper bag lying on the ground and stuffed it into her mouth. The stories within the novel When Cora Lee turned thirteen, however, her parents felt that she was too old for baby dolls and gave her a Barbie. realizes it was all just a fantasy and that he wanted only sex. Why does Lorraine kill Ben in the Women of Brewster Place? 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." Bellinelli, director, RTSJ-Swiss Television, producer, A Conversation with Gloria Naylor on In Black and White: Six Profiles of African American Authors, (videotape), California Newsreel, 1992. http://www.newsreel.org/films/inblack.htm. Mattie takes her to church, where Etta meets Reverend Woods. why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter? - uniskip.com "The Block Party" tells the story of another deferred dream, this one literally dreamt by Mattie the night before the real Block Party. 20% She does not share her opinion, she keeps it inside. You'll also receive an email with the link. Criticism child after another, almost all with different men. As Naylor disentangles the reader from the victim's consciousness at the end of her representation, the radical dynamics of a female-gendered reader are thrown into relief by the momentary reintroduction of a distanced perspective on violence: "Lorraine lay pushed up against the wall on the cold ground with her eyes staring straight up into the sky. It squeezed through her paralyzed vocal cords and fell lifelessly at their feet.

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why does lorraine remind ben of his daughter?