SOURCE: Matus, Jill L. “Dream, Deferral, and Closure in The Women of Brewster Place.” Black American Literature Forum 24, no. 1 (spring 1990): 49–64.

In the following essay, Matus discusses the role of dreams in The Women of Brewster Place and considers why Naylor chose to end the novel with a dream.

After presenting a loose community of six stories [in The Women of Brewster Place] each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to “round off” the collection. As its name suggests, “The Block Party” is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. We discover after a first reading, however, that the narrative of the party is in fact Mattie's dream vision, from which she awakens perspiring in her bed. The “real” party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how...