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Dream Deferral And Closure In The Women Of Brewster Place

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Unfulfilled Dreams and Deferring Closure
In her critical essay, “Dream, Deferral and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place” Jill Matus writes about the theme of unfulfilled dreams as it is portrayed in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place. Matus’s main argument about this theme can be summarized as her belief that Naylor uses the dream described at the end of the novel as an out— an end that allows her to not commit to one conclusion or other; a deferral of closure, if you will. A reader might ask what the purpose of such a noncommittal ending is as it relates to the novel as a whole. Matus offers some answers to this question by claiming that the text and, more symbolically, the lives of the characters and setting of the novel are prolonged by the deferred ending because of the presentation of dream and in turn the dream “affirms and perpetuates” the life of the street and characters. In other words, Matus’ argument could be interpreted as the belief that the dream as it is presented in the end of the novel leaves a sense of hope for an otherwise decaying setting and lives.
Personally, I agree with Matus’s conclusions about how the ending works for the novel even though it is not really an ending at all. I was convinced of this argument based on how she uses Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” about deferred dreams to illustrate how the end of the novel is Naylor’s way of reimagining the same message of the poem. In the poem, Hughes writes about the fate of dreams that are deferred or unfulfilled. He writes that these dreams dry up like raisins in the sun, fester like sores, stink like rotten meat, crust over like a syrupy sweet. Matus writes that she is interested in looking at “the way in which Naylor rethinks the poem in her novel’s attention to dreams and desires and deferral, and then to consider the implications of her vision in terms of the novel’s sensitivity to history and social context” (50). The unfulfillment of dreams and desires are two major recurring themes in the novel and what makes the ending of the novel so interesting is that it is a narrative illustration of these themes. The unassuming reader is actually left unfulfilled because the seeming conclusion to the novel is taken away

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