Bailey's Cafe Critical Analysis

Anyone is welcome to Bailey’s Café. Whether you are a man or woman, an alcoholic or a prostitute, Bailey and his wife Nadine will not discriminate you. They treat all customers with the utmost respect and provide them quality service. Told from primarily Bailey and Nadine’s point of view, the novel Bailey’s Café is a recollection of moving personal stories of each customer. However, amidst these astonishing stories lies a clear distinction between the characterization of men and women of the café. Through a selective omniscient point of view from Bailey and Nadine, author Gloria Naylor seems to depict the women to be weaker than the men. While Bailey, and at times his wife, provides the readers impartial, non-judgmental insight to each customer’s lives, the women have experienced extreme amounts of trauma, prejudice, inner battles, and prostitution while the main male customer faced less extreme hardships. Bailey’s Café is a place to find one’s …show more content…
Bailey and Nadine know their costumers very well. While narrating each of their stories, Bailey and Nadine believe that educating the readers about their precious customers “calls for telling straight out, the way it was. Pure, simple, and clean” (Naylor 40). With the exception of Miss Maple, these narrators hardly dive into as much detail about the male characters as they do with the women. In spite of the greater emphasis on the women, such as describing Jesse Bell’s miserable life with the arrogant Kings or Esther’s sad sexualized life, men are ironically the dominant figures of every story. it is an inevitable process because society value the wealth and labor of men more since they are evidently stronger and less emotionally incapable like the