The Women of Brewster Place

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Interlude 1-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-4

Chapters 5-6

Chapter 7-Interlude 2

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Wall

The wall that makes Brewster Place a dead-end street is a key symbol in the novel, representing the obstacles that the women face in society. Located right next to a major avenue, Brewster Place once had the opportunity to become a bustling thoroughfare. However, the wall cut off “the lifeblood” of the community, causing the neighborhood to deteriorate. Brewster Place is therefore close to the city center and almost within view of those who enjoy full wealth and success, but such views are simultaneously impossible to reach. This setting is designed to parallel the women’s experience in life, for although they can glimpse the evidence of opportunities around them, they are separated from advancement by invisible social barriers. Only Kiswana, an educated young woman with a middle-class upbringing, can see over the wall from her apartment, and the physical position of her apartment therefore symbolizes a possibility for greater social mobility in her case.

At the end of the novel, Mattie dreams that the women come together to tear down the wall, representing the symbolic destruction of the social barriers that confine them to Brewster Place. The women are under the impression that the wall’s bricks are stained with blood from Lorriane’s assault, representing the violence that the metaphorical walls in their lives have inflicted on them. However, when Mattie wakes up, the wall is still intact. Tearing it down is yet another of the women’s unrealized dreams.

Water

Water appears as a form of symbolic cleansing several times throughout the novel. One such instance is the symbolic bath that Mattie gives Lucielia after the death of baby Serena. She washes Ciel’s entire body with her bare hands, touching every part of Ciel with love and care and cleansing her with soap and water. After the ritual, Lucielia is “baptized” and can start healing. At the end of the novel, it rains on Brewster Place for a week after Ben’s death. However, the rain cannot cleanse the block of the horrible events that occurred and remains “clogged [in] gutters under sulfurous street lights like a thick dark liquid” (175). Only in Mattie’s final dream does the purification of the rain start to take effect. As the rain starts to fall on the block party, the women see bloodstains on the wall and begin to tear it down. The rain reveals the violence that this and other barriers have inflicted on the women, and the downpour as they fling the bricks away suggests the purifying process of breaking through this obstacle.

Color

Throughout the novel, color represents the diversity of the African American experience. On the one hand, the “colored daughters” of Brewster Place are united by their skin color, for they are perceived by the white outside world as “Black.” However, the nuances of their “nutmeg arms,” “ebony legs,” and “saffron hands” (4) represent the complexities of their lives and experiences. This focus on color also represents the strong life force that the women living in Brewster Place hold onto. Their children “bloom” on the street, beautiful and colorful enough to “[rival] the geraniums and ivy found on the manicured boulevard downtown” (56). The residents of Brewster Place refuse to be dulled by the “ashen buildings” of the apartment block, and color becomes a symbol of their resilience and a celebration of their lives.