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Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past And Present
In the history of the African-American literary tradition, perhaps no author has been immersed in the formal history of that tradition than Gloria Naylor. As an undergraduate student of Afro-American literature at Brooklyn College and a graduate student of Afro-American studies at Yale, Naylor has analyzed the works of her male and female antecedents in a manner that was impossible before the late seventies. And, while she is a citizen of the republic of literature in the broadest and most cosmopolitan sense, her work suggest formal linkage to that of Ann Petry, James Baldwin, and, more recently, Toni Morrison.
-- from the Preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
-- from the Preface by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
336 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1999
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About the author
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
292 books866 followersHenry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. is a Professor of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He is well-known as a literary critic, an editor of literature, and a proponent of black literature and black cultural studies.
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October 15, 2020
Gloria Naylor is everything. She is literally my favorite author. She really did it all. Mama Day is my favorite novel and it will forever hold a special place in my heart. The Women of Brewster Place is such an important book and as time goes on, I start to appreciate and understand the magnitude of its scope even more. Like, she really did that. In the 80s. I'm shook! Linden Hills is hella iconic and probably her most "clever" work, as it is a rewriting of Dante's Inferno and you can tell how much thought went into it. And Bailey's Cafe is probably the hardest read, but also incredibly healing.
And as I've read her entire body of work (with the exception of her last novel, which I refuse to read) I started seeking out other books, like Conversations with Gloria Naylor, to gain a better understanding of her work. When I saw that there was a book in the Amistad Literary Series on her, I immediately ordered it.
Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah, is a compilation of 13 reviews and 15 literary essays on Gloria Naylor's work. The themes of the essays range from unity versus disunity, rape, the myth of the Black matriarchy, community, class and patriarchy, deferred dreams to gothic and intertextual constructions, Black sisterhood and reconstructing history. As you can see it's a pretty diverse array of topics and I was even happier to see that its essayists were as diverse, and we didn't just get to hear from the perspective of white scholars.
All in all, I was very satisfied with the quality of the essays and learned a heck of a lot. My only "gripe" with this book is the fact that the analysis focuses in the large part on The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, and there are only a couple of essays on Mama Day, and none on Bailey's Cafe. That was pretty sad since the last two are my favorites when it comes to Naylor's work but oh well! what can you do.
In this review, I wanna highlight some of the things that I learned and that made me reconsider my interpretation of Naylor's books. If you haven't read her work, you can stop reading here as a) you won't understand the references and b) there will be spoilers. Just a heads up.
❀ THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE ❀
In the novel, Mattie’s rocking allows Ciel to connect the pain of her own maternal losses with an apparently timeless—and, in a sense, equally gainless—history of maternal pain. I never really considered the fact that Mattie, having lost her son as well, projected her own pain onto Ciel (who had just lost her daughter) in order to assist Ciel in her healing. By rocking Ciel, Mattie also rocked herself (in a way).
One of my favorite essay was "Reading Rape" by Laura E. Tanner, in which she compared the depiction of rape in William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place. Apart from solidifying me in my decision to never read a book on rape that was written by a man, I also finally understood why the rape scene in Naylor's book was so powerful:
In Naylor’s representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader’s gaze. 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.” As the look of the audience ceases to perpetuate the victimising stance of the rapists, the subject/object locations of violator and victim are reversed. Naylor’s graphic depiction of this attack denies the rape any connection with sexuality. She thus starkly negates the potential for prurient pleasure in the reader and for the rationalisation of violence in the mythology of Black male sexuality.
I also appreciated how Tanner pointed out that Naylor, by describing Ben’s drunken movements near the wall after Lorraine is raped, “Side to side. Side to side. Almost in perfect unison with the sawing pain that kept moving inside of her,” insists that the reader view Ben as part of a continuum of male violence against women of which the actions of the gang are the reprehensible extreme. Ben, who we have thus far seen as a loving father figure to Lorraine, is, as a man, as much part of the problem and ultimately, he isn't able to help Lorraine.
She also pointed out how the gang rape signifies an attempt to force Lorraine and Theresa (two lesbians) back into a patriarchal power structure. Lorraine becomes an “accessible scapegoat” for the racism and powerlessness in the community as experienced by “the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.” Those six feet, reminiscent of a grave, dramatise the closed economy of oppression within the wall around “Black America,” literalised as the wall at the dead end of Brewster Place.
At the end of the novel, when Cora Lee asks Theresa to join the rest of the women with the words “Please, please,” Theresa demands: “Now, you go back up there and bring some more [bricks], but don’t ever say that again—to anyone!” In throwing the bricks, Theresa throws away the world “please” and discards the script of submission imposed upon African-American women. I never thought of it that way but damn, that's powerful!
There were also quite a few essays that analysed the role of Cora Lee, and how her character was partly inspired by Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. What I found particular interesting though, is the fact that in her chapter, Naylor plays on the convention in Shakespearean comedy: a romp into the forest temporarily topples conventions in order to expose social hierarchies, but these hierarchies remain in place within the society beyond the forest, to which the characters must return.
❀ LINDEN HILLS ❀
Simply stated, Gloria Naylor’s version of the Inferno suggests that Black people who aspire to the white world and material success are pawns of the Devil and will experience the torments of hell. Naylor’s Linden Hills, like Dante’s Hell, represents not so much a place as a state: the consequences of man’s choices. Linden Hills residents invert the normal rules of order governing social mobility, to move up in the world is to move down toward Nedeed, to rise socially is to fall spiritually toward dehumanisation, self-extinction and spiritual death. The closer down to Nedeed people live, the more soulless and spiritually dead they are, til they literalise that condition in Nedeed’s mortuary and graveyard.
One thing I didn't know was that Naylor derived the name Nedeed from an inversion of “de eden”. She felt the name was appropriate because the Nedeeds are the Satanic rulers of this paradise. That makes so much sense and I can't believe I didn't see that before.
I also liked how one of the essayists pointed out that Willie and Lester embody the best of the oral and literate traditions in Afro-American experience, as Willie is an oral poet who has committed over 600 poems to memory. Lesterfield Tilson is a writer in the more formal sense.
A lot of the essays also focused on the link/ bond between Willie and Willa. When Willie first hears Willa’s howl in Lester’s room, he shuts the window, refusing to respond. By shutting out Willa’s howl, Willie represses the female voice, much like Luther and Braithwaite. At this point, Willie is not ready to face the rupture which will destroy his reality, so he shuts the window and turns on the light to make sure that “the world he understood was still intact.” But at the end, it is Willie who accidentally knocks open the bolt to the cellar door just as Willa is heading up the cellar steps, and unwittingly triggers the final collapse of the Nedeed family and Linden Hills. I also found the reading of Willie as a "female" character very interesting and plausible.
Naylor has said that the treatment of the Nedeed women symbolises the way that men have regarded women throughout history—as means of generation that have no value in themselves. As far as men are concerned, women have no history because they do not really exist. Now Naylor calls attention to that history. She implies that the history of women is not found in books and official archives but in the oral wisdom of a Roberta Johnson are Grandma Wilson and in the mundane records of women’s daily lives.
One of the essayists also pointed out that the three Tilson women show a gradual degeneration of spirit. Grandma Tilson was her own woman, free and defiant. Lester’s mother craves entrance into lower Linden Hills, but never gets there. Roxanne has not made her move yet, but she is clearly “headed on down.”
Moreover, recalling the conspicuous infertility of the Aeneid, the narrative details the childlessness, through accident or choice, of each family or individual in Linden Hills.
Maxwell Smyth, the only character who is as much at home in Linden Hills as Luther Nedeed, finds the accusation that “he was trying to be white totally bizarre. Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all.” What he does not realize is that in the world of corporate America, the absence of color is whiteness, because neutrality is impossible where hierarchical thinking prevails.
❀ MAMA DAY ❀
Like I stated in the beginning, there weren't that many essays on Mama Day included, however, I found it fascinating that those that were didn't primarily focus on the link between that work and Shakespeare's Tempest but rather on how former Black female writers allowed/ helped Naylor to write that book in the first place. She was inspired by the African-American literary tradition more so than she was by Shakespeare. In a way, Mama Day can be seen as a lyrical rewriting of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Naylor also acknowledges Hurston’s influence when she came to write the crucial storm scene in Mama Day. She gained confidence in the ability of the communal voice to carry the narrative through her reading of the flood scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Naylor intends this hurricane to serve as the central metaphor of the Middle Passage.
And on one of Ophelia’s visits she and Miranda go both literally and figuratively “in search of their mother’s gardens,” as Alice Walker describes in her famous essay the process of discovering black women’s artistic traditions. Miranda begins to pass on more of the sisterly bond from the past by telling Ophelia about her own family tragedy. Such passing on of the oral tradition with its elements of genealogy, magic, and naming, is a particularly female tradition that empowers the women who inherit it.
The last thing I wanna point, though, is how the names were influenced by Shakespeare: Miranda is also the name of Prospero’s daughter and Cocoa is named Ophelia after her great grandmother, whose death by water recalls the destiny of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in the male-dominated world of Hamlet.
And what I didn't know was that Willa Needed is Cocoa’s cousin. (=> Abigail’s Hope was the mother of Willa Prescott Nedeed. Hope died shortly after Willa married Luther.)
And as I've read her entire body of work (with the exception of her last novel, which I refuse to read) I started seeking out other books, like Conversations with Gloria Naylor, to gain a better understanding of her work. When I saw that there was a book in the Amistad Literary Series on her, I immediately ordered it.
Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K.A. Appiah, is a compilation of 13 reviews and 15 literary essays on Gloria Naylor's work. The themes of the essays range from unity versus disunity, rape, the myth of the Black matriarchy, community, class and patriarchy, deferred dreams to gothic and intertextual constructions, Black sisterhood and reconstructing history. As you can see it's a pretty diverse array of topics and I was even happier to see that its essayists were as diverse, and we didn't just get to hear from the perspective of white scholars.
All in all, I was very satisfied with the quality of the essays and learned a heck of a lot. My only "gripe" with this book is the fact that the analysis focuses in the large part on The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, and there are only a couple of essays on Mama Day, and none on Bailey's Cafe. That was pretty sad since the last two are my favorites when it comes to Naylor's work but oh well! what can you do.
In this review, I wanna highlight some of the things that I learned and that made me reconsider my interpretation of Naylor's books. If you haven't read her work, you can stop reading here as a) you won't understand the references and b) there will be spoilers. Just a heads up.
❀ THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE ❀
In the novel, Mattie’s rocking allows Ciel to connect the pain of her own maternal losses with an apparently timeless—and, in a sense, equally gainless—history of maternal pain. I never really considered the fact that Mattie, having lost her son as well, projected her own pain onto Ciel (who had just lost her daughter) in order to assist Ciel in her healing. By rocking Ciel, Mattie also rocked herself (in a way).
One of my favorite essay was "Reading Rape" by Laura E. Tanner, in which she compared the depiction of rape in William Faulkner's Sanctuary and Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place. Apart from solidifying me in my decision to never read a book on rape that was written by a man, I also finally understood why the rape scene in Naylor's book was so powerful:
In Naylor’s representation of rape, the victim ceases to be an erotic object subjected to the control of the reader’s gaze. 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.” As the look of the audience ceases to perpetuate the victimising stance of the rapists, the subject/object locations of violator and victim are reversed. Naylor’s graphic depiction of this attack denies the rape any connection with sexuality. She thus starkly negates the potential for prurient pleasure in the reader and for the rationalisation of violence in the mythology of Black male sexuality.
I also appreciated how Tanner pointed out that Naylor, by describing Ben’s drunken movements near the wall after Lorraine is raped, “Side to side. Side to side. Almost in perfect unison with the sawing pain that kept moving inside of her,” insists that the reader view Ben as part of a continuum of male violence against women of which the actions of the gang are the reprehensible extreme. Ben, who we have thus far seen as a loving father figure to Lorraine, is, as a man, as much part of the problem and ultimately, he isn't able to help Lorraine.
She also pointed out how the gang rape signifies an attempt to force Lorraine and Theresa (two lesbians) back into a patriarchal power structure. Lorraine becomes an “accessible scapegoat” for the racism and powerlessness in the community as experienced by “the most dangerous species in existence—human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.” Those six feet, reminiscent of a grave, dramatise the closed economy of oppression within the wall around “Black America,” literalised as the wall at the dead end of Brewster Place.
At the end of the novel, when Cora Lee asks Theresa to join the rest of the women with the words “Please, please,” Theresa demands: “Now, you go back up there and bring some more [bricks], but don’t ever say that again—to anyone!” In throwing the bricks, Theresa throws away the world “please” and discards the script of submission imposed upon African-American women. I never thought of it that way but damn, that's powerful!
There were also quite a few essays that analysed the role of Cora Lee, and how her character was partly inspired by Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. What I found particular interesting though, is the fact that in her chapter, Naylor plays on the convention in Shakespearean comedy: a romp into the forest temporarily topples conventions in order to expose social hierarchies, but these hierarchies remain in place within the society beyond the forest, to which the characters must return.
❀ LINDEN HILLS ❀
Simply stated, Gloria Naylor’s version of the Inferno suggests that Black people who aspire to the white world and material success are pawns of the Devil and will experience the torments of hell. Naylor’s Linden Hills, like Dante’s Hell, represents not so much a place as a state: the consequences of man’s choices. Linden Hills residents invert the normal rules of order governing social mobility, to move up in the world is to move down toward Nedeed, to rise socially is to fall spiritually toward dehumanisation, self-extinction and spiritual death. The closer down to Nedeed people live, the more soulless and spiritually dead they are, til they literalise that condition in Nedeed’s mortuary and graveyard.
One thing I didn't know was that Naylor derived the name Nedeed from an inversion of “de eden”. She felt the name was appropriate because the Nedeeds are the Satanic rulers of this paradise. That makes so much sense and I can't believe I didn't see that before.
I also liked how one of the essayists pointed out that Willie and Lester embody the best of the oral and literate traditions in Afro-American experience, as Willie is an oral poet who has committed over 600 poems to memory. Lesterfield Tilson is a writer in the more formal sense.
A lot of the essays also focused on the link/ bond between Willie and Willa. When Willie first hears Willa’s howl in Lester’s room, he shuts the window, refusing to respond. By shutting out Willa’s howl, Willie represses the female voice, much like Luther and Braithwaite. At this point, Willie is not ready to face the rupture which will destroy his reality, so he shuts the window and turns on the light to make sure that “the world he understood was still intact.” But at the end, it is Willie who accidentally knocks open the bolt to the cellar door just as Willa is heading up the cellar steps, and unwittingly triggers the final collapse of the Nedeed family and Linden Hills. I also found the reading of Willie as a "female" character very interesting and plausible.
Naylor has said that the treatment of the Nedeed women symbolises the way that men have regarded women throughout history—as means of generation that have no value in themselves. As far as men are concerned, women have no history because they do not really exist. Now Naylor calls attention to that history. She implies that the history of women is not found in books and official archives but in the oral wisdom of a Roberta Johnson are Grandma Wilson and in the mundane records of women’s daily lives.
One of the essayists also pointed out that the three Tilson women show a gradual degeneration of spirit. Grandma Tilson was her own woman, free and defiant. Lester’s mother craves entrance into lower Linden Hills, but never gets there. Roxanne has not made her move yet, but she is clearly “headed on down.”
Moreover, recalling the conspicuous infertility of the Aeneid, the narrative details the childlessness, through accident or choice, of each family or individual in Linden Hills.
Maxwell Smyth, the only character who is as much at home in Linden Hills as Luther Nedeed, finds the accusation that “he was trying to be white totally bizarre. Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all.” What he does not realize is that in the world of corporate America, the absence of color is whiteness, because neutrality is impossible where hierarchical thinking prevails.
❀ MAMA DAY ❀
Like I stated in the beginning, there weren't that many essays on Mama Day included, however, I found it fascinating that those that were didn't primarily focus on the link between that work and Shakespeare's Tempest but rather on how former Black female writers allowed/ helped Naylor to write that book in the first place. She was inspired by the African-American literary tradition more so than she was by Shakespeare. In a way, Mama Day can be seen as a lyrical rewriting of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.
Naylor also acknowledges Hurston’s influence when she came to write the crucial storm scene in Mama Day. She gained confidence in the ability of the communal voice to carry the narrative through her reading of the flood scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Naylor intends this hurricane to serve as the central metaphor of the Middle Passage.
And on one of Ophelia’s visits she and Miranda go both literally and figuratively “in search of their mother’s gardens,” as Alice Walker describes in her famous essay the process of discovering black women’s artistic traditions. Miranda begins to pass on more of the sisterly bond from the past by telling Ophelia about her own family tragedy. Such passing on of the oral tradition with its elements of genealogy, magic, and naming, is a particularly female tradition that empowers the women who inherit it.
The last thing I wanna point, though, is how the names were influenced by Shakespeare: Miranda is also the name of Prospero’s daughter and Cocoa is named Ophelia after her great grandmother, whose death by water recalls the destiny of Shakespeare’s Ophelia in the male-dominated world of Hamlet.
And what I didn't know was that Willa Needed is Cocoa’s cousin. (=> Abigail’s Hope was the mother of Willa Prescott Nedeed. Hope died shortly after Willa married Luther.)
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