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By manipulating the reader's placement within the scene of violence, Naylor subverts the objectifying power of the gaze; as the gaze is trapped within the erotic object, the necessary distance between the voyeur and the object of voyeuristic pleasure is collapsed. For example, Deirdre Donahue, a reviewer for the Washington Post, says of Naylor, "Naylor is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. He befriends Lorraine when no one else will. After Lorraine and John discover that Mr. Pignati's wife is dead, Lorraine feels very sad. 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. Place is very different. Provide detailed support for your answer drawing from various perspectives, including historical or sociological. Lucielia grew up with Mattie and her son, Basil. Eva invites Mattie in for dinner and offers her a place to stay. for a group? As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. The children gather around the car, and the adults wait to see who will step out of it. Driving an apple-green Cadillac with a white vinyl top and Florida plates, Etta Mae causes quite a commotion when she arrives at Brewster Place. 55982. home in the South. And just as the poem suggests many answers to that question, so the novel explores many stories of deferred dreams. Once they grow beyond infancy she finds them "wild and disgusting" and she makes little attempt to understand or parent them. Then suddenly Mattie awakes. Ciel is present in Mattie's dream because she herself has dreamed about the ghastly rape and mutilation with such identification and urgency that she obeys the impulse to return to Brewster Place: " 'And she had on a green dress with like black trimming, and there were red designs or red flowers or something on the front.' Like the street, the novel hovers, moving toward the end of its line, but deferring. Kiswana grew up in Linden Hills, a "rich" neighborhood not far from Brewster Place. Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbian residents of Brewster Place. Research the era to discover what the movement was, who was involved, and what the goals and achievements were. As she watches the actors on stage and her children in the audience she is filled with remorse for not having been a more responsible parent. The dismal, incessant rain becomes cleansing, and the water is described as beating down in unison with the beating of the women's hearts. Wed love to have you back! After she aborts the child she knows Eugene does not want, she feels remorse and begins to understand the kind of person Eugene really is. How does Lorraine explain the reason for her mother's attitude - eNotes Later in the novel, a street gang rapes Lorraine, and she kills Ben, mistaking him for her attackers. Among the women there is both commonality and difference: "Like an ebony phoenix, each in her own time and with her own season had a story. In her representation of violence, the victim's pain is defined only through negation, her agony experienced only in the reader's imagination: Lorraine was no longer conscious of the pain in her spine or stomach. She disappoints no one in her tight willow-green sundress and her large two-toned sunglasses. Loyle Hairston, a review in Freedomways, Vol. Mattie names her son, Basil, for the pleasant memory of the afternoon he was conceived in a fragrant basil patch. The final act of violence, the gang rape of Lorraine, underscores men's violent tendencies, emphasizing the differences between the sexes. In Magill's Literary Annual, Rae Stoll concurs: "Ultimately then, The Women of Brewster Place is an optimistic work, offering the hope for a redemptive community of love as a counterforce to isolation and violence.".