A Study On Female Characters In The Women Of Brewster Place From The Perspective Of Existentialist Feminism

Gloria Naylor is an outstanding African-American black woman writer.Due to her prominent literary achievements,she is listed as a contemporary African-American novelist named after Toni Morrison and Alice Walker by the American academic community.Her novels have won many awards for her.The Women of Brewster Place is her first novel,which depicts the current state of black women in the black community.Once the novel was published,it has attracted the attention of readers and critics and won the National Book Award.Although scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of researches on the novel,few scholars analyze the novel from the perspective of existentialist feminism.The thesis is a more in-depth analysis of this work from the perspective of Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism.This is an important contribution and value of this thesis.The thesis first analyzes respectively three main female characters in the novel from the perspective of Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism,and explores their immanence and free choices they make.After Mattie is caught in the predicaments of the wrong love for her lover Butch and the irresponsibility of her son Basil,she makes a choice of pursuit of freedom by achieving her financial independence and becoming the spiritual guide of the community.Suffering the loss of her daughter and an unhappy marriage,Lucielia makes a choice to pursue new life by finding a job and starting a new marriage.In face of the indifference of community and her lover’s abnormal love,Lorraine makes a choice to pursue self-independence by having a true friend and becoming her own master.Finally,a conclusion can be drawn that in the work The Women of Brewster Place,several black female characters who Naylor has created are caught in the immanence and then make free choices.Their choices to pursue freedom and independence and to start a new life have created a positive image for all women.It is concluded that women have the ability to get rid of dependence and immanence and become thesubject of freedom and independence in the face of patriarchal oppression.