Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Éva Miklódy: Redefining the "Other ": Race, Gender, Class, and Violence in Gloria Nay lor's Bailey's Café
that can serve as asylums for social outcasts, people marginalized in a variety of ways. In her first award-winning novel, for example, The Women of Brewster Place (1983), Brewster Place, a ghettoized neighborhood offers temporaiy shelter for a bunch of colored women whose lives have gone awry and there is no other place for them to go. Bailey's Café, located on an indiscriminate street of New York City, functions in a similar way since it is, as Naylor describes it, "the last place before the end of the world for some[...]" (68) and is "sit[ting] right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility[...]" (76). The same applies to Eve's boardinghouse, and Gabe, the Russian Jew's, pawnshop, which are similar "waystations" for recuperation in the vicinity of the Café. Bailey's Café, though not in the position to grant perfect salvation to its refugees, offers the possibility of a remedy of some sort. As Bailey, the narrator of the book, points out in the novel, "We do nothing here but freeze time; we give no answers —and get no answers —for ourselves or the next man" (219). "If life is truly a song, then what we've got here is just snatches of a few melodies. All these folks are in transition; they come midway in their stories and go on" (219). This also explains that Bailey's is not an ordinary café in the traditional sense of the word. People go there not to eat or drink but, as Bailey explains, to "[hang] onto to the edge," —the edge which is the Café itself —and, to "take a breather for a while" (28). This novel, by assembling people who belong to various race, gender, class, as well as social and cultural background offers a chance to reconsider the notion of the "other." My aim, then, in this paper is to look at the dispossessed and marginalized frequenters of Bailey's Café, and to examine the conceptual basis that allows the use of the notion of the "other" to define them. I will, however, also put forth the idea that Naylor's book revises and extends her previous assumption of the "other" as represented in The Women of Brewster Place and that she thus reconceptualizes this notion in a significant way. Since a major component of these narratives is violence, I will also examine the types and functions of violence and point out how violence can define these characters as the "other." In The Women of Brewster Place , Naylor brings together a small body of women who share a unique form of oppression because they are victims at once of sexism, racism, and, by extension, of classism. This is, 58
