PROGRESSION AND NARRATIVE DESIGNIN “MATTIE … 03 65.pdf · Iulian Boldea (Coord.) Globalization...

Iulian Boldea (Coord.) Globalization and National Identity. Studies on the Strategies of Intercultural Dialogue

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754 Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, ISBN: 978-606-8624-03-7

754

PROGRESSION AND NARRATIVE DESIGNIN “MATTIE MICHAEL” BY GLORIA NAYLOR

Corina Lirca

Lecturer, PhD, ”Petru Maior” University of Tîrgu-Mureş

Abstract: The analysis of Gloria Naylorřs story can greatly benefit from a rhetorical approach to it which

reveals the artistic method and design, the authorial intention and the correct way in which readers and

viewers should understand and react to the way in which the events are narrated and the title character is

depicted.

Key words: Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, the rhetorical approach to narrative,

progression, characters attributes and functions

―Mattie Michael‖ is Gloria Naylor's first story in the 1982 short-story cycle titled The

Women of Brewster Place. The cycle celebrates the black female experience, by depicting in

seven short stories the lives of seven women striving to survive in an impoverished and male-

dominated environment. In order to ensure unity, to link the stories, the author creates two short

texts, ―Dawn‖ and ―Dusk‖ (one is the prologue, the other the epilogue), describing the tenement

neighborhood, called Brewster Place, where these women live – ―Dawn‖points to the emergence

of the residential area, whereas ―Dusk‖refers to this neighborhood waiting to die.

In the analysis that follows, I shall pursue the rhetorical view to narrative689

, which

foregrounds the text as communication between author and reader. In order to account for such

689The analysis method and working theory I apply is James Phelan‘s framework for a rhetorical approach to

character in connection with the progression of the story.


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communication, I will study the principles upon which Gloria Naylor chooses to construct the

narrative, the resulting structure and effects of the text, trying to make my judgments according

to the conventions under which the author is operating. The method of analysis focuses on

technique but emphasizes the affective quality of the text, showing how technique influences the

emotional/psychological/ethical experience of reading.

When one sets out to write about the stories in this cycle, one becomes immediately

aware that the creation of characters is the focal point of Naylor‘s text. According to one reading

convention called the rule of notice, as it was pointed out by Peter J. Rabinowits in his seminal

study titled Before Reading. Narrative Conventions, titles tell the readers what to concentrate on,

and provide ―a core around which to concentrate an interpretation‖ (61). Six short stories in the

cycle are titled so as to focus the reader‘s attention on their female main characters: ―Mattie

Michael‖, ―Etta Mae Johnson‖, ―Kiswana Browne‖, ―Lucielia Louise Turner‖, ―Cora Lee‖, and

―The Two‖ – clearly highlighting them in contrast with the rest of the community.

Having established that I am supposed to do a study of character and bearing in mind that

character is, in the words of Henry James, the determination of incidents and incidents are

illustrations of a character, it becomes clear that my analysis of “Mattie Michael”must

necessarily combine discussions of action or progression with discussion of character

construction; I must adopt a double focus: character and progression. Also, because I choose to

read the first story in Naylor‘s The Women of Brewster Place as rhetoric, I should not forget that

to approach Naylor‘s telling (and the narrator‘s telling), the voice, the audience, and the purpose:

all the elements that help determine the shape and effect of the story.

In the prologue to the volume, Naylor by means of a heterodiegetic narrator provides her

audience with a code to ease their production of a cognitive explanation, consisting of categories

that organize the numerous signals in the language of the text into fewer more general units: the

dead-end street, the dead-end lives, ―hard-edged, soft-centred, brutally demanding, and easily

pleased‖ (5) women.

Symbolically the audience‘s familiarization/first contact with the fictional world of the

Brewster Place is marked by the arrival of a key character in the quarter, who like the readers is

fairly ignorant of what the place is truly like. When the audience gets to discover and understand

Mattie‘s destiny and the circumstances that have brought her in the slum, they also witness the

first demonstration that the Brewster Place is inhabited by ―hard-edged, soft-centred, brutally


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demanding, and easily pleased‖ (idem) women who have all ended up living in a blind alley

feeding into a dead end.

A rhetorical analysis of the character Mattie Michael must be developed through an

examination of the range of relations among the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components of

the character. Because progression and character are so closely interrelated, observing how the

narrative progresses will also illuminate the relationship between Mattie's mimetic and thematic

dimensions. The synthetic component of Mattie remains in the background of the work.

If we examine the story-discourse or progression (a narrative is a dynamic event which

moves in both its telling and its reception through time) of ―Mattie Michael‖ in order to determine

how the author generates, sustains, develops, and resolves readers' interests in the narrative, we

realize that the movement of this tale is generated solely by means of creating a tension of

unequal knowledge between the narrator and the audience. The movement of this tale is one

stratagem serving the purpose of the whole story-cycle, being a movement toward the disclosure

of an individual character, not a movement toward the disclosure of events involving other

characters.

Interestingly, the story basically refers to events that unfold over the course of a few

minutes – representing Mattie Michael‘s arrival in Brewster Place, from the moment her taxi

enters the alley to the moment she enters the apartment building – but by means of Mattie‘s

associative memory the narrator discloses (what is going to be the most part of the text)

information about the major events of Mattie‘s life between her early twenties and the event that

forced her to move to this neighborhood. The story introduces and complicated no instability.

Despite the introduction to the book that places Mattie's actions into a broad thematic

context, Naylor's initial treatment of Mattie is directed toward emphasizing her mimetic function.

Naylor relies greatly upon the manipulation of point of view to establish Mattie's mimetic

function. Mattie is consistently the focalizer in the narration; we see things as Mattie sees them,

though frequently the voice used to express Mattie's vision is the narrator's.

Naylor sees no need to shift the main principle of movement from the resolution of

tension to the complication of instabilities. Having established the overarching thematic

background in the introduction, Naylor here designs the trajectory of the main action around our

mimetic interest in Mattie and her struggle. And as Naylor confines us to Mattie's vision through

the point of view, she has us participate in the trajectory of Mattie's own emotions in the main


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action. For example, like Mattie, we take pleasure in her having succeeded on her own, or when

Basil is arrested we share her feeling that such an event was inevitable, but our knowledge offers

no solace for the disappointment we feel.

The large parenthesis the narrator makes in between Mattie‘s getting out of the taxi and

her getting into the apartment building is the core of the tale and it serves to disclose information

about the events that led to Mattie‘s current situation, information that is necessary for the

authorial audience's understanding of why she acts with so much weariness and resignation as

she does in the focused narrative of related events. Her attitude and arrival in this place at the

beginning of the narrative is brought into a coherent relationship as we draw upon the past events

to infer the motives behind her ending up living in Brewster Place. This arrangement makes the

lack of instability in the story have little importance. Naylor chooses to propel the reader forward

by relieving tension between them and the narrator and what emerges from the tension and the

reader‘s interest in Mattie is her clear mimetic portrait. According to this technique, the author

and the narrator know all about this character and plunge into the narrative. The narration begins

in ultimas res, i.e. the point of attack occurs after the climax and near the end. Consequently, our

reading is driven only by a desire to reduce this tension and find out the causes of the effects.

This orients us toward the acquisition of information that will influence our judgments,

expectations, desires, and attitudes about the protagonist.

The audience learns that Mattie Michael is a middle aged woman who moves to the gray,

cold and decaying Brewster Place. The first person she meets on arrival is the janitor, then the

odor of cooking resembling for an instant the smell of freshly cut sugar cane triggers an extended

flashback of the circumstances and the events that brought her there. (This development by

means of flashbacks is a sign of Naylor's characteristic narrative economy, which helps fulfil our

expectations about the progression of the whole narrative. She has Mattie by some smell-

memory association device immediately recall events in chronological order. The disclosures

about Mattie‘s world and life reduce most of the tension and lead to closure.) Thus the audience

learns that her childhood was dominated by the father figure, a strict, fair, somber, spiritual and

overprotecting parent, who stifled her development as a woman. After a trip to the cane fields

with Butch Fuller who determined her to yield to long-repressed desires, Mattie became

pregnant. Four months into her pregnancy, Mattie suffered a savage beating by her father, which

determined her to leave home for good and go to Ashville, North Carolina. At the end of several


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terrible months there in dilapidated accommodation, she and her son Basil end up sheltered into

the home of Miss Eva Turner, where they would live for almost three decades. Mattie invested

heart and soul in her son, to compensate the lack of love in her life, but this overwhelming care

and love turned Basil into an indolent, ungrateful, unreliable, jobless man. When Basil, at the age

of thirty, accidentally killed a man, he chose to run away from being prosecuted and caused his

mother to lose their house (put as collateral for his bond). Thus, Mattie and her belongings (her

precious houseplants) end up in the cramped walk-up apartment in Brewster Place, the last place

her destiny will ever bring her.

As mentioned before, there are no instabilities to resolve in this story; there is also no

tracing of the Mattie‘s ordeal (once Basil vanished) into her total defeat. Although such a

resolution of the progression‘s tension has been implicit in the narrative from early on, Naylor is

able to maximize its power by suddenly showing us that the tension between her knowledge of

Basil‘s intention to run away and ours. In consistently restricting us to Mattie's vision Naylor can

legitimately ―surprise‖ us with the truth about Basil.

The last paragraph signals both closure and completeness. The tension has been

completely relieved, the audience having understood the circumstances that brought Mattie to

Brewster Place as well as the fact that this is the place Mattie will live in for the rest of her life.

Closure is achieved by describing her making for the building entrance and completeness by

describing a snowflake melt into a shape resembling a tear, an image meant to reinforce the

feeling of defeat: ―Mattie grasped the cold metal key in one hand and put the other on the cold

iron railing and climbed the stoop to the front entrance. As she opened the door and entered the

dingy hallway, a snowflake caught in her collar melted and rolled down her back like a frozen

tear‖ (54).

The return to the current circumstances of Mattie contributes further to the unsettling,

chilling experience of the narrative, especially the way its ending causes the authorial audience

to reconsider its understanding of Mattie, and the place in which she is going live from now on.

It also effects the emphasis of Mattie's thematic dimension, the progression giving new

importance to the thematic sphere in the story as a whole. Mattie is the first female representative

(to be depicted) of this dead-end street and thus of a dead-end destiny. Her destiny further

identifies Mattie as a representative Afro-American female—she is a woman who has created a

world for herself and her offspring so as to live as far as possible from the dominance and the


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negative influence of men of her ethnicity, but her destiny is nevertheless always strongly

determined by men‘s influence.

By the end of the large parenthesis in the progression, our knowledge of Mattie's world is

complete, and the tension between the narrator and the authorial audience is greatly diminished:

we know the kind of world we are reading about, we come to understand why she came to live in

Brewster Place, and this knowledge has significant consequences for our understanding of

Mattie's personality, as through representing Mattie in numerous contexts, Naylor also reveals

most of Mattie's major attributes. By the end of the story, the most salient attributes of Mattie's

character to emerge are: her hard-edged nature, her soft and caring heart, her determination to

improve other people‘s lives, and her eventual resignation – exactly what the narrator anticipates

in ―Dawn.‖ The central issues of the whole volume have been confirmed for the first time: a

complex woman defeated by life circumstances has resorted to moving to Brewster Place as her

last solution. There was no need to set up an instability in the story. The woman has surrendered.

The progression leads us to read Mattie thematically: she comes to represent the

individual female who after a lifetime of hard work and struggle, accepts defeat at the hand of

men in her life. So far, Mattie is a character with thematic attributes, but no thematic function.

The narrative progression of the entire The Women of Brewster Place will convert her

dimensions into functions, willeventually give the greatest weight to the thematic functions of

the character Mattie Michael; the effects of those functions depend crucially on Naylor's ability

to make Mattie function initially as an effective mimetic character.

The conclusion to be drawn is that Naylor's representation of Mattie as a consistently

mimetic character is fused with her use of that character in exploring and exemplifying thematic

issues. Mattie is the first representation in the book of the idea of African-American women

defeated by external forces. Naylor uses only one type of movement in this short story:

progression by tension, because at this point in the volume her main purpose is to provide the

mimetic portrait of Mattie. For that reason, Naylor's handling of Mattie's character follows this

pattern: she emphasizes Mattie 's mimetic function, increases our involvement with her

progression toward her fate as itself an emotionally affecting experience,and then ultimately

subordinates that function and our involvement to her communication of the larger thematic

point. The success of the volume depends very much on the accomplishment of Mattie Michael‘s

portrait, as in later stories her thematic dimension will turn into function and she will become the


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emotional center of the book,the dominant presence of the community, the woman who puts her

wisdom at the service of the other women in the block, the mentor, the mother, the healer and the

confidante.

Bibliografie

1. Naylor, Gloria: The Women of Brewster Place. A Novel in Seven Stories. New York:

Penguin Books, 1985

2. Phelan, James. Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the

Interpretation of Narrative. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

3. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of

Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

PROGRESSION AND NARRATIVE DESIGNIN “MATTIE … 03 65.pdf · Iulian Boldea (Coord.) Globalization...

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