Gloria Naylor's Fiction: Contemporary Explorations of Class and Capitalism by Sharon A. Lewis, Ama S. Wattley

Abstract

CLA JOURNAL 245 Book Reviews Lewis,SharonA.andAma S.Wattley,eds. Gloria Naylor’s Fiction: Contemporary Explorations of Class and Capitalism. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 142pp. ISBN-13: 978-1-4438-9591-0 $59.86 Hardcover. Gloria Naylor lived only 66 years, but she left a valuable literary legacy. She gave the keynote address for the College Language Association banquet at the 2006 convention hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Naylor’s prose is celebrated for its poetic quality, its powerful imagery, and its memorable characters. Her debut novel, The Women of Brewster Place, won the National Book Award and was adapted into both a musical and a 1989 television mini-series starring Oprah Winfrey. Her work has been the subject of several book-length studies, many interviews, and dozens of essays. This collection of six essays and the editors’ introduction adds an important perspective to the existing body of critical work discussing five of Gloria Naylor’s six novels. (Her 2005 novel/ fictionalized memoir entitled 1996 is not the subject of anyof theessaysinthiscollectionandisnotmentionedintheeditors’introduction.) The specific focus on class and capitalism distinguishes these essays from other critical sources about Naylor’s works. In their introduction to this volume, editors Sharon A. Lewis and Ama S. Wattley carefully distinguish social class from social status. Concentration on socioeconomic conditions and attitudes within the Black community guides a specifically focused examination of these novels. The primary interpretive tool for this collection is Marxist literary criticism with an additional lens of womanist/feminist theory. The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Mama Day (1988), Bailey’s Café (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998) are all the central focus of one essay apiece in this collection. Given the socioeconomic theme of the volume, it is quite appropriate that Linden Hills (1985)—which dwells upon the upper class—is analyzed in two of the essays. Anita August brings her experience as a novelist and scholar of visual culture to bear in her essay, “I Need a Prince to Watch Over Me. Really?! Re-Visioning ‘Happily Ever After’ in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place.” Her focus on paternalism as it impacts women’s financial success brings a gendered lens to the economic analysis. Given the discussions of class, Kiswana Browne and her naïve interactions with Cora Lee illustrate the distinctions in values and priorities, since Kiswana is “the only resident to choose Brewster Place,” as August notes (31). Naylor’s emphasis on woman-centered support rather than the fairy tale Prince is emphasized. The homoerotic relationship between Mattie Michael and Etta Mae Johnson is discussed and is contrasted to the “taboo lesbian relationship” between Lorraine and Theresa, or “The Two,” as their chapter in Naylor’s novel is entitled 246 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews (39). In every instance, August details the ways that the “happily ever after” of traditional fairy tales falls short with the women in Naylor’s first novel. ShamikaAnn Mitchell contributes“KeepYour Check: Commodity,Capitalism and Commerce in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.” Gentrification and predatory development in the novel’s fictional Willow Springs are compared to similar situations in the real-life Sea Islands. Ownership of ancestral lands and a mutual respect and collective responsibility for what happens on those lands become the focus of Mitchell’s essay. Maxine Lavon Montgomery is the editor of Conversations with Gloria Naylor (2004) and author of The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance (2010) and numerous other essays on Naylor. For this volume, she wrote “Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Café: Selling Sex in the Cultural Marketplace.” She identifies Bailey’s Café as “the last text in a tetralogy” and asserts that it “represents the culmination of a narrative mediation on constructions of the sexual self within the context of a hierarchal socio-economic system” (62). Indeed, Montgomery claims that “capitalism, along with the commodity status ascribed to the female body, persists as a fundamental issue”(62). Her essay also makes excellent use of Trimiko Melancon’s CLA Book Award winning Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality and Representation. One of the most arresting essays for admirers of popular culture comes from Terrence Tucker...