Gloria Naylor, "The Women of Brewster Place"

The novel “The Women of Brewster Place” opens with location; it is location that ties these individuals together, location that symbolizes their plight and trials, location that defines their existence. Most significantly, the wall of Brewster Place serves a deeper significance in the context of the novel, illustrating the structural and social alienation the characters have from greater society.

We are introduced to the women of Brewster Place first through their location, suggesting the immobility of both. The neighborhood, “the bastard child of several clandestine meetings” (1) between an alderman and a managing director, was created for exploitation; one used it to remove a police chief and the other wanted to build a new shopping center. Again, the significance of the parallel between the location and the residents become clear—a sense of being undesired, used to get ahead, exploited.

The wall, shortly thereafter, is constructed, a physical manifestation of Brewster Place’s disconnect from larger society. As immigrants, minorities, and poor families shuffle into the neighborhood, the pressing need to drive them away results in the formation of the wall: “so the wall came up and Brewster Place became a dead-end street” (2). Dead-end. Cut off, excluded, immobile. The connotations of a “dead end” imply that there is no progress, no advancement, no forward movement. As the street became “cut off from the central activities of the city” (2), it had less to offer the second generation of inhabitants and fostered a community of its own—one defined by a sense of loss and of hopelessness. Like the wall, it “soon appeared foolish to question the existence” (4) of this atmosphere and the despair.

Brewster Place as a location therefore serves as a microcosm of the worlds in which the residents live, a world shaped by exclusion, lack, and loss. The isolation of the neighborhood parallels to the alienation the women feel from dominant culture, greater society, and—occasionally—themselves. Just as Brewster Place is a dead-end street, these women have reached a “dead-end” of sorts in their lives, subject to different forms of oppression and realizing the opportunities that failed to present themselves. The women, like Brewster Place, are walled in and prevented from achieving the dreams to which they aspired.