The Fiction of Gloria Naylor: Houses and Spaces of Resistance by Maxine Lavon Montgomery (review)

The Fiction of Gloria Naylor, by Maxine Lavon Montgomery, explores Naylor's four major novels, often regarded as a tetralogy, for their treatment of the concept of home insofar as it relates specifically to the lives of the African American women characters portrayed therein. Understanding that home and domesticity are especially vexed terms for a people haunted by the specters of the middle passage and slavery, and continually oppressed by a multifaceted racism that would sunder them from community, Montgomery reads Naylor's inscription of geography and domesticity as significantly different from their treatment by white female authors. She argues that in Naylor, lived spaces can be read as sites of resistance to white authority even as they become liminal spaces that enable the formation of a healthy subjectivity.

Montgomery's introductory chapter grounds her work in the theoretical investigation of writers such as Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, whose postcolonial emphasis on migration and hybridity destabilize fixed notions of race and ethnicity. Reading through the work of bell hooks, Montgomery maintains that Naylor uses the concept of the "border region" as an empowering locus for the formation of identity that is fluid and multiple, effectively able to negotiate the dominant discourse while remaining distinct from it. Home, for the African American subject, is tied less to a geographical space than to a cultural memory; hence, Montgomery insists, Naylor disrupts predictable Western articulations of home to inscribe an alternative conception of a sanctuary that enables the individual to thrive. Each of Naylor's four major novels challenges white, Western understandings of "home" in a different way, even as each identifies forms of resistance that emerged as a result of historically specific forms of racial oppression.

Beginning with The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor's first novel in the tetralogy, set in a deteriorating apartment building in an unnamed city during the civil rights years of the 1960s, Montgomery identifies Naylor's agenda in this work as addressing the "struggle for self-determination on the part of blacks in late-twentieth-century America" (1). Faced with poverty, apathetic bureaucrats, and a bleak future, Naylor presents a community of displaced women who unite to form a functioning extended family that can provide for one another's needs. Montgomery calls attention to the migration from the rural South to the urban North made by many of the residents of Brewster Place. However, unlike naturalist writers such as Ann Petry in The Street, whose main character Lutie Johnson can find no escape from her dilemmas, Naylor provides her female characters with a fierce and resilient maternal figure in the character of Mattie Michael. Fashioning sororal bonds as well as mother-child relationships, the women of Brewster Place unite as a whole in what Montgomery rightly calls a "utopian" project of tearing down the brick wall that isolates them from the city as a whole. However, Montgomery's insistence on limitations imposed by the white patriarchy overlooks the fact that Naylor's women are equally victimized and brutalized by their African American fathers, sons, husbands, and lovers. Additionally, Montgomery only briefly treats the novel's most vexing and horrific scene, the brutal rape and murder of Lorraine, a lesbian who has been, for the most part, shunned by the female community of Brewster Place, and who is tortured not in the urban community at large, but in the alleys of Brewster Place.

Montgomery begins her chapter on Naylor's next novel, Linden Hills, by pointing out the author's shift in class focus. Whereas The Women of Brewster Place treated the lives of the urban poor, Linden Hills moves across (the same, unnamed) town to an upper-middle class suburb populated by the African American elite. The kinds of female community developed out of necessary by the women who live in Brewster Place are less available to the more affluent women across town, primarily because the latter are women who...