Gender and Sexuality in Gloria Naylor's "The Women of Brewster Place"

From the anonymity of Brewster Place's location in an unnamed city to the authorial use of stereotypes in the novel, Gloria Naylor constructs a vision of gendered subordination, racial discrimination, and class-based difficulties in a way that is metonymic of the struggles many women, blacks, and impoverished face in the US.  One of these metonymic constructs that Naylor interrogates is sexuality: residents Lorraine and Theresa are the only lesbians on Brewster Place, and through them, Naylor examines not only the difficulties and alienation the two women face in their community for their sexual choice, but how these difficulties are often the result of same-sex discrimination.

In the novel, all of the [predominantly female] characters face profound hardship; from social and familial exclusion and economic impoverishment to psychological shortcomings and maternal sufferings, Naylor's characters are linked by the commonality of pain.  Yet this common link is not necessarily a point of solidarity between the characters, and for Lorraine and Theresa, their sexual preference becomes a source of scrutiny and exclusion rather than acceptance and mutual understanding.  The other residents, and in particular, Sophie, instead see the two women as an opportunity to release their frustrated malice and hardened contempt.  In this way, Naylor shows how, in the repression and apathy for the other women of Brewster Place, these women ultimately turn on each other in ways that is not only counter-productive but fatally damaging as well.  The female-on-female violence we see in the novel works to suggest that the negation of society's marginalia only breeds needless violence.  The women of Brewster Place, who in their tangibly plausible stories come to stand for many women, show the essential nature of a female solidarity and the futility of misdirected rage