Literary Allusion in the Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills and Mama DayGloria Naylor has strived to overcome the obstacles that come with being a writer African American. In her first three novels, The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills and Mama Day, Naylor not only succeeds in blurring the line between ethnic writing and classical writing, but she aims to incorporate the lives of Afro -Americans in an art form with universal appeal. Gloria Naylor explains this struggle by saying, “The writers I was taught to love were either male or white. And who was I to say that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, the Brontës, Baldwin and Faulkner were not masters? But inside, there was still a faint whisper: Was no one telling my story? (quoted in Erickson 232). Naylor, in his quest to make the Western canon more universal, readapts the classics. Using allusions to the themes and structures of Shakespeare and Dante in his first three novels, Naylor revises the classics to include African Americans. In The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor's allusions to Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream reinterpret the bard to depict the plight of African-American women. Naylor weaves the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream into the life of Cora Lee, a resident of the Brewster Place housing project. Cora Lee, whose life is dominated by the responsibilities and demands of raising her children, escapes into the void of television soap operas. However, Cora Lee's lifestyle is temporarily altered when she is invited to attend a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. According to Peter Erickson, the play "... inspires Cora Lee...... middle of paper ...... evils. New York: Penguin, 1985._____. Mama Day. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1993. _____. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin, 1980. Perry, Donna. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out in New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers, 1993. Saunders, James Robert. "Hollins Critic 27 (1990). Rpt. in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford, 1981._____. The Tempest. Eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine New York: Washington Square, 1994. Ward, Catherine C. “Linden Hills: A Modern Hell.” Rpt. in Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present New York: Amistad., 1993.