Brewster Place is a dead-end street in fact and in symbol, for the women who move there are trapped by their hopes and fears. For them, Brewster Place is both the birth and the death of their dreams. The brick wall that separates Brewster Place from the nicer neighborhoods represents the wall of prejudice and shame, racism and sexism that must be smashed by the residents. They alone can effect change in this climate of hostility and mistrust. The garbage in the alley symbolizes the character of the street toughs who run drugs, rape, and kill here. No one can stop them until the women on Brewster Place join forces and souls to fight back courageously against the human trash terrorizing their neighborhood.

Despite the violence in these women’s lives, the language that Naylor uses is as potent and engaging as poetry—colorful and provocative, realistic but not bitter. Thus critics praise Naylor’s style, even as some suggest that hers is not a new story. Her characters are as archetypal as the characters of Porgy and Bess in George Gershwin’s 1935 black opera, as William Bradley Hooper claims, but they are also convincing and vivid, according to Anne Gottlieb.

Some suggest that Naylor’s characters are too stereotypical or flat. For example, many male critics have complained about the totally negative images of black men in The Women of Brewster Place, the same complaint made about Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982). Still others comment that Kiswana, the young activist, and the two lesbians, Lorraine and Tee, are undeveloped characters. Since early in the novel these are the only women who have not been the victims of heterosexual affairs, Naylor has been accused of failing to present black women in successful love relationships. The climactic gang rape of Lorraine reflects Naylor’s theme of male violence directed at women, and the women’s response—their togetherness in tearing down the wall of Brewster Place (in Mattie’s dream, anyway)—underscores the difference between the sexes in terms of reactions to their environment. It is this remarkable, hope-filled ending that impresses the majority of scholars.

The book is to a certain extent a political treatise on the effects of poverty, ignorance, and violence, but it is also a love story. Yet it is not a love story in the traditional sense: There is no romance between men and women except that which ends in disappointment or tragedy, such as Ciel’s love for her husband and the needless death of their only child. Maternal love is also thwarted. Mattie’s sacrifice for her son, her thirty years of drudgery to give him a decent home and the opportunity that she was denied, means no more to him than a quick drink or a senseless bar fight. In Cora Lee, one sees the other end of despair, for she deserts her children emotionally, which is as devastating as Ciel’s or Mattie’s losses.

Yet despite poverty, fatigue, desperation, and suspicion, the women of Brewster Place hold one another in heartfelt love and care. It is not eros (romantic love) but the selfless philia (friendship love), described by fifth century b.c. Greek philosopher Plato and recommended by feminist writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that these women experience and in which they revel. Their friendship teaches them to survive. One cannot live without loss; it is the human condition. Naylor shows, however, that for women—and black women in particular—survival comes from the courage and support of those who share pain and anguish and yet also share the triumph of the human spirit, from families created not by genes and blood and law but by the heart and soul.