Selfhood by means of Sisterhood in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place

Ghada Suleiman Sasa

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.11n.6p.48

Abstract

This paper maintains that The Women of Brewster Place is a novel that celebrates women’s communion and its impact on the fulfillment of their quest of selfhood. It explains the way the novel rejects the restrictive sense of selfhood and calls for a more inclusive selfhood merged in collective experience. Despite the fact that the seven main female characters are totally different, they have shared memories and dreams. The latter plays a central role in women’s unity and fulfillment of selfhood. Shared memories and dreams function as a healing device and a mechanism that activates their collective consciousness and enable them to challenge pain, accomplish communal alliance, and fulfill their quest of selfhood and emancipation.. The women of the novel come to understand the power of their communion stemming initially from their shared memories and dreams. They also come to understand that only a selfhood born within a communal frame can survive and challenge the cycle of abuse they are subject to. As a result, the paper concludes with asserting that the women in the novel collectively break the wall that stands for their seclusion and misery.

Highlights

The Women of Brewster Place is a novel that celebrates women’s communion and its impact on the fulfillment of their quest of selfhood
It explains the way the novel rejects the restrictive sense of selfhood and calls for a more inclusive selfhood merged in collective experience
Shared memories and dreams function as a healing device and a mechanism that activates their collective consciousness and enable them to challenge pain, accomplish communal alliance, and fulfill their quest of selfhood and emancipation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The Women of Brewster Place is a novel that celebrates women’s communion and its impact on the fulfillment of their quest of selfhood. Instead of finding stability and a permanent place with a man, Mattie helps Etta in finding a home in Brewster Place as a community of black women asserting their “...humanity, specialness, and right to exist” (Collins, Black Feminist 102). Kiswana had high expectation and thought that her goals would be achieved, but at one moment her mother seemed right and the conditions once in Brewster Place proved to be very challenging In her “Autonomous, but Not Alone: The Reappropriation of Female Community in The Women of Brewster Place and Housekeeping”, Karen Walker explains that “Kiswana comes to Brewster Place with good intentions of uniting the community in a campaign to improve living conditions there, but her efforts instead highlight the alienation of the women in the community, as well as the cycle of male oppression that forces that position” (64). Baker replies: “Man, how she gonna prove it? Your dick ain’t got no fingerprints” (171)

A Shared Dream and Shared Memories

CONCLUSION