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A single philosophy on life is like white light: the only way to understand its complexities is to pass it through a prism. Once the light passes through the prism, it splits into different patterns and groups that are completely unheard of or unrecognizable if one looks only at the surface. This is the only way to even begin to understand anyone’s philosophies, anyone’s personality, not to mention the author Gloria Naylor. Naylor believes that while human society may be flawed, people cannot allow the obstacles of the modern world cause them to become discouraged or lose sight of life’s larger picture. A deep bitterness and sometimes contempt for the American Dream is one of the key points to Naylor’s slightly cynical outlook on life. She regards the safety and security through hard work and perseverance connected with the American Dream to be a myth: something that works on paper, yet cannot survive the real world. Naylor even seems to suggest that one can never really be safe, no matter how hard one works there will always be someone out there trying to bring you down. Naylor incarnates this belief in the character Jesse Bell-King in her novel Bailey’s Café. Jesse achieves all that the American Dream promises, yet her husband’s Uncle Eli immediately begins to try and dislodge her from her hard-earned place in the sun. Uncle Eli is a parallel to the American caricature of Uncle Sam, someone who takes and takes, yet hardly ever gives back. Uncle Eli even drops to an extreme that no Uncle Sam would ever condone: he steals away her Jesse’s child. When her son is born, Eli remarks on what a gift “Jesse Bell had given them”, not what she had given herself, but them. Her son turns his back on his mother’s family of longshoremen, regarding his mother’s family as not up to his standards and claiming to have “nothing in common with those people”(Naylor 128). Jesse’s fall is completed when she turns to heroin for solace, and has her face mercilessly plastered over the tabloids when her habit is discovered. Naylor also reveals her mistrust in the promises of the American Dream in her setting of Brewster Place. There is no denying that the people of Brewster Place work hard, yet their stories are dominated by unrelenting strife and hardship. The inhabitants of Brewster Place dream of life beyond the wall blocking in their street, but with each page it becomes more and more apparent that the prospect of life elsewhere will remain just that, a dream. Meanwhile, across the wall, the inhabitants of the ritzy Lindin Hills are less hardworking than their poorer counterparts. Yet Naylor never directly calls the people of Lindin Hills undeserving, after all, as Naylor often suggests, life isn’t fair. Even in her novel’s lighter moments, the biased and unfair nature of American is always present. Therefore, Naylor creates small havens for her characters, places where they can escape the true nature of the world in order to recover. Naylor constantly provides references to her mistrust of the American Dream, yet like all other shards of her life’s philosophy, she stresses not allowing the complications of the American Dream to distract or deter someone from what really matters in life. Personal choices and fate also play a large role in Gloria Naylor’s life philosophies. First of all, she believes that will power is the most important thing involving change. Naylor places an immense amount of trust in the power of the individual. In an interview, Naylor once stated, “you are indeed able each day to decide how you will live that day. You can decide whether or not your dreams die,” not your friends or your family, but you. (FIND) Change, Naylor suggests throughout her novels, takes work. She believes that if you want to change, you have to not only want it, but also be willing to sacrifice and work towards that change Yet many people in today’s society are unwilling or unable to work towards change, and the hardworking path to change is slowly becoming the road less traveled. Naylor feels both pity and contempt for people who will not work towards change, and personifies these feelings in Cora Lee, a character who represents the average person in response to needed change. Cora , after attending a Shakespearean play with her children is “inspired to revitalize herself and her family”, but she is only inspired. Others push her into the right direction, but only Cora can decide whether or not she wishes to turn around her and her children’s lives or go back to lounging on the couch watching soap operas. She almost chooses what Naylor would consider the right path, almost but not quite. Cora, like so many others, chose the easier path, and it is clear that until she decides to get up and work towards change, her life will continue on its dead end spiral. As soon as she climbs into bed with her current shadow lover, Naylor makes it clear that Cora “will not change her actions and become a devoted mother...real dreams take more than one night to achieve”(Woodford 361). Naylor uses Cora as an example in hopes of clearly portraying the evils that come from ignoring one’s dreams so that all who hear Cora’s story will understand. Also, Naylor deals heavily in personal choices concerning the past. She seems to have at least a small degree of faith in pre-destination, as some things in her novels are simply meant to be. All of her characters have problems, big ones, small ones, and some that seem larger than life. Yet Naylor condemns dwelling on the past. The way she sees it, it’s important to live it, learn from it, but don’t let the past take over your future seems to be her motto in that department. For example, many of her characters bear illegitimate children, or give themselves abortions to stop the birth of those illegitimate children. Much of society would consider these unforgivable sins, but it is a sin Naylor seems capable of pardoning. She makes this clear through the character Fannie, who assures her unmarried daughter that having an illegitimate baby “[a]in’t nothing to be shamed of . . .there ain’t no place in that Bible of His that say babies is sinful. The sin is the fornicatin’, and that’s over and done with. God done forgave you of that a long time ago”(Naylor 20). Also, it is part of Bailey’s Cafe’s Eve’s rehabilitation routine to help her boarders conquer their pasts and their demons to help them out into their futures. Also, Naylor salutes those people who suffer for their beliefs and make the choice to face the full consequences of their actions. Heritage is also a very important piece of Naylor’s philosophy. There are many ups and downs in her character’s lives, but heritage is the safety net that always pulls them back from the edge. Her theme concerning heritage is especially prevalent in those works concerning Lindin Hills and Brewster Place. Brewster Place is, essentially, a slum. Here, “[w]ith no heat or electricity, the water pipes froze in the winter, and arthritic cold [that will] not leave the building until well into the spring”, Brewster Place, despite its best efforts, creates nothing but discomfort and misery for its poor inhabitants. Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall shutting Brewster off from the city, lies Lindin Hills, a middle class suburb. Lindin hills is full to the brim with mansions and well manicured lawns, and seems the epitome of success and the embodiment of the wistful daydreams of Brewster Place’s inhabitants. The main difference between the two developments is not in the quality of the homes or the wealth of the residents, but in the heritage that those residents possess. Brewster Place, which is no less a living entity than any of its characters, embraces all of its children; from the World War Two veterans, to the Mediterraneans, to its recent African children, the tenement is happy to have them all. The mena nd women of Brewster Place are driven there because they want only to be themselves, and have been chased away from their original homes because of this. In trouble, something that is common in Brewster Place, they bind together, creating a unified front against he cold winds that whip up out of the real world and onto Brewster Place’s dead end street. Lindin Hills, on the other hand, has a “terminal case of middle class amnesia”(Naylor, 85). Those who live in the mansions of Lindin Hills have rejected their heritage in exchange for the realization of a hollow American Dream, for the wealth and prosperity that so many long for. This exchange, heritage for prosperity, is seen by Gloria Naylor as the original unforgivable sin. he reveals the consequences of a loss of heritage in two of her novels. In Naylor’s eyes, the rich of Lindin Hills are no more than husks, without feeling, without souls, and most importantly without roots. The people of Lindin Hills “denounce [their] ancestors” yet also “mock [their] wealthy fami[lies], they are beholden to no one and nothing but themselves, a situation that Naylor has little faith in (Kakutani 321). Thus, Naylor suggests that though Brewster Place may be cracked and breaking, it is still stronger and more of a haven tahn the false Eden of Lindin Hills will ever be. Also, Naylor stresses the importance of cultural identity as an empowering force. All of her character’s faults can be traced back to a single instance of their going against their cultural heritage. When this infraction occurs, the character falls into a rut and are stuck until they wake up and wise up. Even Naylor herself admits that sometimes her characters, and people in general, needed to be “brought back to base” so that they may work with what they have to do good in the world. Also, Naylor reiterates in her novels the importance of being who one is, not matter what. For example, one of Naylor’s characters in Brewster Place wants to inspire change and reform in the tenement. As noble as her goals may be, the character Kiswana, who has changed everything from her hair to her name, which was originally Melanie, in order to appear more black, hits a figurative brick wall in her ventures. In an interview, Naylor once explained Kiswana as having “every right to change her name”, yet it is a denial of her heritage not to recognize “the type of Melanie she was named after–a woman that stood her ground–[Kiswana] should actually be very proud of having such a name”(Carabi 701). It is not until Kiswana realizes this truth about her heritage and embraces both her Cherokee and her African roots that she is able to begin doing any good for the community. Above all, Naylor champions the idea that one can never really do any good by oneself or by the world identity and heritage is embraced. The walls in Gloria Naylor’s novels are by far her most foreboding element. Used to portray her feelings on the open and closed mind, walls appear everywhere: blocking in dead-ended streets, around children, and in people’s hearts and minds. The variation concerning children is most frequently used. Again and again Naylor speaks of young girls with larger than live fathers who rule the roost at home. The fathers, the bricklayer being “building [The Wall] around [their] house[s]” and their daughters, an action that even the girls, eventually women, recognize as “already too late” (Naylor 103). They try to shelter their children from harm, yet all these fathers end up doing is setting themselves and their daughters up for a tragic fall from grace that would have made Aristotle proud. Another important symbol in Naylor’s novels is the famous wall at the end of the Brewster Place tenement. This wall is a double edged sword: it has severed all of Brewster’s ties with the commerce of the outside world and doomed its buildings to descend into dereliction, yet it has enabled the tenement to “[develop] a personality of its own” (Naylor 2) and literally become its own little world. The wall and the tenement it represents, once a jumping off point into the suburbs, becomes a permanent home and anchor in the otherwise turbulent lives of its “[beloved] colored daughters”(Naylor 4). Naylor also uses walls to represent control. More specifically, she uses the destruction of the Brewster Place wall to symbolize the loss of control on the part of her characters when they give in to the biases and the often incorrect prevailing ideas of the outside world. Once this control is lost, the characters flail around until, as Naylor often reiterates, life kicks back and forces in a new perspective. For the women of Brewster, the instance of life kicking back, if you will, occurs during the rape of Lorraine. At once after the addition of the lesbian couple, “[the people of Brewster Place] could not reach over that difference. . . they put a wall between thmselves and Lourraince and Theresa”(Carabi 702) This mental wall, the psychological rift created by the addition of Lorraine and her partner to Brewster Place could be healed only by a communal dream involving all of the novel’s main female characters. Under the cover of a cleansing, baptismal rain, the women violently pull down the wall “washing away the blood on the bricks,” which symbolizes their guilt being taken away, “[and] presaging perhaps a fresh start, a redemption of sorts” for the sins they have committed by giving in to outside pressures and homophobia. All of these walls are pulled together by Naylor’s belief that a person must be open minded. Finally, Naylor stresses again and again that it is never too late to hope and to change. She feels so strongly about this particular shard of her life’s philosophy that she devotes the better part of her novels to instances of healing and the healers who help bring them about. The entire setting of her novel Bailey’s Café concerns healing. Located on a street deep in despair and at the edge of the universe, The Café itself as well as Eve’s boarding house serve as halfway houses for those depressed and disillusioned with the modern world. Those people who are not too terribly bad off come in to the Café just “to take a breather for a while”, but others, those whose problems won’t be solved merely by a few moments rest and one of Bailey’s burgers head over to Eve’s (Naylor 28). Part boarding house, part bordello, Eve’s place down the street from Bailey’s Café is Naylor’s reinventing of the Biblical Garden of Eden. Time at Eve’s place can provide “a reason to go on l iving, a sanctuary and a place for physical and psychological health” where women are reminded of their own worth. Despite their ability to re-inspire and recuperate, the street at the end of the universe has remained for no one knows how long a destination for deferred dreams, a place where nothing truly new or hopeful ever occurs. That is, until at the last minute Gloria Naylor introduces the character Mariam. Mariam is the first to have ever give birth to a child while on the street at the edge of the universe, a place where “[a] child isn’t supposed to be born. . .[since] there isn’t much of a prayer for life itself if a baby has to be born [on the street]”(Naylor 160). In addition to the baby’s life, it is also feared that this child of a modern Virgin Mary will “be like an explosion of new hope or something, and we’ll all just fade away” (Naylor 160). Nothing quite so drastic occurs, however just a glimmer of hope in a small package. Naylor includes this to give form to her ideas on how change is always possible, even for a place as set in its ways as Bailey’s Café, and that one should never fear what the future may bring. Gloria Naylor is also careful never to victimize her characters. Their dreams are often deferred, but she never allows them to fall into the self pity that she so abhors. Naylor once said that “you cripple yourself when you think of yourself as a victim. . .you can be victimized, yet still go on with your life”, she claims, so long as you never allow yourself to give up or give in and always keep an eye out for redemption. A constantly open mind to change and hope is one of the fundamental principles of Gloria Naylor’s life’s philosophy.
