The Women of Brewster Place represents motherhood as vitally important, but it also shows the devastating results of motherhood gone awry. The novel represents the importance of motherhood in the relationship between Mattie and Ciel. Though Mattie is not Ciel’s biological mother, she lives in the same house as Ciel and Ciel’s grandmother Eva Turner and ultimately steps into a maternal role for Ciel. When, years later, Ciel’s baby daughter Serena dies in an accident with an electrical socket, Ciel numbly plans to starve herself to death until Mattie, realizing Ciel’s plan, grabs her and rocks her like a baby until she cathartically allows herself to experience grief and begins to cry. In this way, Mattie’s maternal love for Ciel saves Ciel’s life. Yet not all mother-child relationships in the novel are so positive. The novel implies that Mattie’s excessive tenderness toward her son Basil, whom she selfishly encouraged to depend on her past the age that it was developmentally appropriate, made him grow up into an immature, weak, and egocentric man. Similarly, a Brewster Place resident named Cora Lee keeps getting pregnant because she loves mothering babies but grows alienated from her children once they are no longer so cute and cuddly; her selfish neglect of her older children pushes them toward truancy from school, bad behavior, and low self-esteem. Thus the novel suggests that a good mother is a wonderful, life-giving thing, but a selfish mother—especially one who mothers in a smothering or self-involved way— can prevent children from becoming functional adults.
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Motherhood Quotes in The Women of Brewster Place
“Ya know, ya can’t keep him runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes, you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go through the bad and good of whatever comes.”
“You sure it’s Basil who don’t want to sleep alone?”
The gentle pity in the faded blue eyes robbed Mattie of the angry accusations she wanted to fling at the old woman for making her feel ashamed. Shame for what? For loving her son, wanting to protect him from his invisible phantoms that lay crouching in the dark? No, those pitying eyes had slid into her unconscious like a blue laser and exposed secrets that Mattie had buried from her own self.
Whatever was lacking within him that made it impossible to confront the difficulties of life could not be supplied with words. She saw it now. There was a void in his being that had been padded and cushioned over the years, and now that covering had grown impregnable. She bit on her bottom lip and swallowed back a sob. God had given her what she prayed for—a little boy who would always need her.
She rocked her on and on, past Dachau, where soul-gutted Jewish mothers swept their children’s entrails off laboratory floors. They flew past the spilled brains of Senegalese infants whose mothers had dashed them on the wooden sides of slave ships. And she rocked on.
He silently turned from the anger that his seeming unreasonableness fixed on his wife’s face, because there were no words for the shudder that went through his mind at the memory of the dead brown plastic resting on his daughter’s protruding breasts.
“Mama,” Sammy pulled on her arm, “Shakespeare’s black?”
“Not yet,” she said softly, remembering she had beaten him for writing the rhymes on her bathroom walls.
[S]he turned and firmly folded her evening like gold and lavender gauze deep within the creases of her dreams, and let her clothes drop to the floor.
