J.Michael
Raj
Assistant
Professor of English
SRM
Institute of Science and Technology
ABSTRACT
Brown Girl, Brownstones’ is about the story
of the coming of age of Selina Boyce, growing up in a small black immigrant
community. Her mother Silla Boyce’s only desire is to own a brownstone house in
the Brooklyn street. Though she doesn’t have the source to buy it, she keeps on
trying to own and so she feels that she gets recognized. This paper focuses on how
Silla and Selina struggle to fulfill their desire due to environmental influence.
Key Words: desire, brownstone,
house, land, unfair, sell, dilemma, community, buying
Desire is a sense of selfishness or lust
that people experience when there is a darkness in their mind due to repression
or resistance oneself. The mind desires to have something that is not to be
reached easily. It is motivated mainly by the circumstance and society. Desire
is what we must manifest in the world and in our lives. It is rooted with deep knowledge
understanding ourselves especially where our passion lies. In Brown Girl,
Brownstones, Silla has a strong desire to own a house in the Brooklyn street as
a status symbol for which she struggles and uses all strategies she knows.
Brown Girl, Brownstones is, first and
foremost novel of a family life with highly individual characters, who are the
products of environmental influences. Brownstone houses were very famous in
Brooklyn Street because of its beauty and comfort. It brings the status symbol to one who owns
it. These houses were built by Dutch-English and Scotish Irish. But The White people owned these houses for a
long time generation after generation.
The white people started selling and moving these houses in 1939. When they go away, the West Indians come
in. Barbarian never owns anything except
a piece of land. They love these houses
very much. Selina a ten year old girl
lives in the Brownstone house that she feels as it belongs to her family. The Barbadian women are teased for their
blackness. When white children are on
the way to school, seeing the blacks with their working dress, they laugh and
shout at them calling nigger. But they
never give any response to this criticism and suck their teeth dismissing
them. Their only expectation is “few raw
–amount pennies” for their job as salary. Deighton is a day dreamer who is
always fond of having well dressed.
Silla becomes the representative of all
Bajan women in her community. In her
family, there has been a continuous question raised by her to sell the
land. Listening all these, in day and
night, Selina gets irritated. The novel
focuses on having a Brownstone house in Silla’s life. Selina as a child enthusiastically involves
in her family and community for the betterment.
She also seems to be older and wiser. The very title of the novel
signals the life of Selina is irretrievably engulfed by three inevitable contexts. Barbara Christian observes “By emphasizing
brown and girl in the novels name, Marshall signaled to us her primary focus,
that this work is about both the racial,cultural and gender elements of her
protagonist. And by placing brownstone directly next to brown girl, she
reiterated the importance of content, of environment. . . . In giving her first
novel its title, Marshall reminds us that personal human development is
inseparable from history, culture and environment” (35)
Selina's growth, therefore, constitutes
challenging confrontations with each new wave of external influences.Her hard
and manipulating mother, whose only dream is to buy a home of her own, rather
than running a boarding house in which the Boyce family lives. Silla, on the
contrary, begins to maneuver to get him to sell the land so that the money can
be used for advance payment for the brownstones in which they presently live.
Selina attempts to keep her mother from forcing her father to sell the
property.
Brown Girl, Brownstones presents a clash
of cultures not only for the young protagonist Selina Boyce, who struggles
between her father's love for Barbados and her mother's desire to succeed in
achieving the American dream. This strong, bitter, frustrated, disappointed
woman, who keeps striving in the face of all disappointments, is certainly one
of the most complex black women characters in the contemporary American
literature. She makes constant attempts to blend into the mainstream of
American society as quick as possible, but her long felt American dream ends
with a fiasco. She feels not only estranged from her family but also from the
society. She has valid reasons for believing so. Certainly, the aftermath of
the Great Depression has intractably played a role in the construction of Silla's
self and identity. Adam Clayton Powell probes
with a subtle observation “Her lined along the walls each morning she finds
dejected, tattered young and old Negro women, many of them mothers, begging to
be employed. Garrulous, mercenary females haggle with them over the price per
hour, driving their bargains as shrewdly as slave traders of old, often luring
these women for 12 and 15 cents an hour” (160).
The Black culture is a bit aversion for
Silla and her family. In a way, Silla's status as an immigrant does not find a
place among the whites. The blacks
always look at her as different and strange, but Silla believes that she is so
much greater than the Blacks around her. Although Silla sees herself as apart
from the Blacks, her day to day frustrated existence can be explored in a form
that is peculiar to the black culture. She lives with worries, which epitomizes
the condition of the American Blacks. For instance, Silla's relationship with
her husband, Deighton is not smooth. She blames Deighton for taking their young
son out for a ride in his automobile. Further, it aggravates the weak heart and
kills him. So, she withdraws her affection from her husband. For years, they
are only the married parents of children.
They are not lovers with mutual understanding. They do not share the
same bed. She thus lives in a state of perpetual loneliness, losing love
underneath her roof. Therefore, she lives with a sense of frustration and she
never experiences an emotional or physical release. Even when she is alone, she
is the picture of frustration. When she comes to know that Deighton's sister in
Barbados has left him almost two acres of land which she will try to get him to
sell to get money for a down payment on a brownstone in Brooklyn.
She does not stop to consider the
possibility of a happy resolution to the problem of selling the land. That
begins Silla's long worrying which makes it impossible for her to escape her
frustration. Through scheming, she does manage to get Deighton's property sold.
He spends more than nine hundred dollars, playing the big man in all the shops
on Fifth Avenue, buying gifts for his family. Later, an accident at work causes
him to leave his family and join a cult, an action which leads Silla to have
him deported. He dies on the way to Barbados. At night, she tries, again and
again, to exorcise her demons always unsuccessfully; she desires to experience
a psychological comfort in what she does. But it remains a question. She sleeps
out of exhaustion but with not from peace. Moreover, Selina's life is mainly
formed by her parents, Deighton and Silla Boyce. With herself at the centers,
she struggles against intricate dynamics to reconcile the conflict between her
parents. It is this family conflict that is directly related to her emerging
identity. Therefore, her individual identity is cornered by the family
conflict.
The opening pages of Brown Girl,
Brownstones reveal that Selina, a ten-year-old daughter of Deighton and Silla
Boyce, is a divided self. Selina shows a person who strikes a total discord and
disharmony with herself and her surroundings. She feels alienated and estranged
from the very beginning of the novel. For Selina and the Barbadian - American
community the brownstones are not merely the geographical locales but a real metaphor
of self. She holds a fractured story of her life about her place and her
community. Selina, growing black and female, feels as if she "carried the
weight of winter in her body. Having
such a state of mind, Marshall examines the sickness of the female psyche
damaged by the society.
Selina's relationship to her father
greatly influences a strong oedipal attachment. It is a fundamental importance
that the phase of the parents' greatest antagonism towards each other occurs
the state of her adolescence. The first stirring sexual feelings are directly
towards her father, and her mother is considered as an inconvenient, even
sinister and malevolent rival. Throughout the novel, Selina exhibits a strong
inclination to see her father as a heroic figure, while her mother damages her
possession of her husband. In the midst of this inferno, Silla appears
competent and deft. Just as she connects with a machine, Silla represents the
antithesis of nature and sexuality. Finally, in wanting to buy her brownstone,
Silla resembles many other Barbadians who are content with an all but faceless
group identity and purely material values. Buying a house for Silla means
confirming one's membership and dignity in a hard, narrow, intolerant and
immigrant ethnic group.
Selina lives in two worlds and travels
back and forth between them in a literal sense. The first one is the old and
familiar one of her Barbadian neighborhood, the Association of Barbadian
Homeowners and Businessmen. She has
always felt contempt and pity for the younger Barbadians who fail to rebel, or
to rebel successfully against the narrowness and materialism of the older
generation. The conventional and cultural confines always disrupt the growth of
her personality and make herself be relentless all the time. In this regard,
Troester makes an appropriate observation “Other mothers provide a safety valve
and sounding board and release the teenage girl from the confines of a single
role model. They can be gentle and affectionate where the blood mother must be
the stem and demanding thus showing the diversity available to Black womanhood”.(97)
Selina is not a marginal figure at the
center of the stage when she performs her dance at her college. She feels that
she has a sense of communion, of being truly part of a community at last. So, the context of this dance is particularly
significant for Selina's development. It is a typical cycle of life that she
enacts. She is not primarily a child of immigrants, or Barbadians, or black, or
female, but a human being. Eugenia Collier sums up the point more succinctly “The
gesture, then assets a synthesis-Selina is Barbadian, American African: she is
one with the people stolen from their homeland and with those remained, one
with the survivors of the dread ships, Selina is all of these. Selina has
traversed a rugged path from alienation to oneness with her people and the
flying bangle goes to testify that wisdom of hers”. (19)
The development of a black girl child
growing black and female must take place not only in psychological terms but
also in the race and hostile social environments. For a black girl child, sense
of identity or self-fulfillment means an identity and fulfillment drawn not in
isolation but the context of her culture and community. Selina must resolve the
crisis of simplicity of vision, through accurate understanding and knowledge and
address the dilemmas arising out of flawed perceptions about her mother and the
community she lives. She must abandon the world of illusion and embrace the
world of reality, no matter how painful and agonizing they are and must emerge
as her woman, neither Deighton's nor Silla's but a capable young woman
conscious of her Bajan heritage, her Afro - American status and her bitterly
contested independence. She must, in brief, create a world of coherence, unity,
wholeness, and harmony and the world that allows her whole being to come into
free play. However, being too immature and innocent at this age, Selina cannot
achieve such an achievement.
In Selina's eyes, her father is nothing
less than a tragic hero fallen too disdainful enemy and this image play a
significant role in Selina's bitter internal struggle. She loves her father's
passion and imagination. As her father, she loves his vision of home in
Barbados. However, she also sees those dreams die. Moreover, she hates her
mother's crimes of forgery and deception, yet she cannot help admiring her
practicalities. They see it as a risk. This resistance against opening the
group to African - Americans denotes not only their fear of losing the power
they believe they now possess but also their fear of losing the value system
that differentiates them from other ethnic configurations in New York..
The conflict between Deighton and Silla is
not over to own a house at all, but over what sort of house to own. It is the
type of home that ordinary brown skinned people in Brooklyn own. As a fictional
character, Silla Boyce bears little resemblance to Nora in Ibsen's feminist
classic, A Doll's House. Even at the end of Brown Girl, Brownstones Selina has
not lost her sympathy with her father's dreams. However, she places the most
favorable interpretation of his behavior, identifying his male fantasies with
the spirit of human endeavor in general.
REFERENCES
Marshall,
Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones,
Newyork:The Feminist P, 1981.
Christian
Barbara, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives
on Black Women Writer. Newyork:
Pergamon P,1985.
Clayton
Powell, Adam. The Quest for identity in the Depression : An American Response to
Prejudice and Privation.
Journal of African American Studies , P,1971.
Troster,
Rosalie. Turbulence and Tenderness : Mother,
Daughter and Othermothers in Paule
Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones. Sage
1-2, Fall1989.
