SOURCE: Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. “Toward a New Order: Shakespeare, Morrison, and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day.” MELUS 19, no. 3 (fall 1994): 75–91.

[In the following essay, Kubitschek explores the connections between Naylor's Mama Day and the works of Toni Morrison and William Shakespeare.]

In 1987, Barbara Christian asserted that important African-American literature is suffering critical neglect by an academy preoccupied with developing literary theory; her specific examples included the works of Frances Harper, Alice Walker (with the exception of The Color Purple), and Gloria Naylor. Since then, Hazel Carby's excellent The Reconstruction of Womanhood has discussed Harper, but no major work has emerged to engage Naylor's novels. To some degree, the problem may lie in the precursor to extended critical interpretation, reviews.

The major reviews of Naylor's 1988 novel, Mama Day, refuse in crucial ways to grant the novel's donnée, even when they are generally positive. To some extent, these judgments stem from the critics's classification of the novel in one or another overly exclusive tradition. Thus, Rosellen Brown situates the novel as part of “a preoccupation of black writers in general, and black women in particular, with the gains and losses that have come with the move from rural to urban, from intuitive to rational, life” (74). But the equation of rural and intuitive greatly oversimplifies the functioning of the novel's Sea Islander characters, and besides, omits another clear part of the novel's parentage, what Bharati Mukherjee calls “its roots in The Tempest.” She, in turn, overemphasizes the Euro-American sources so that she distorts the plot, saying inaccurately, for example, that the book shows the title character's “acquisition, exercise, and relinquishment” of magic.

The review commentary repeatedly singles out for criticism the novel's “strident parallels” with earlier texts (Mukherhjee), its “need to elevate by making symbolic, or by fitting everything into a larger scheme” (Brown). Linda Simon's article in Women's Review of Books extends the implications of these arguments and incorporates them in a vitriolic attack on Naylor's artistic choices. In her view, the novel's theme could evidently develop beautifully and unproblematically if Naylor could only adopt the proper mode of development:

What interests Naylor is her heroine's identity as a rural Black woman and her confrontation with urban America. … Through work, marriage, and eventually motherhood, she could no doubt learn … what from her personal and racial history could help in her urban experience. From a sassy, street-smart, insecure and cynical young woman she might develop into someone more trusting, tolerant and self-assured, if Naylor allowed that. … The changes in her have not unfolded in the course of daily events. Rather, they are magical transformations worked by the extravagant tragedy Naylor has fashioned here. The questions set out in the beginning are never resolved [in] … the tale of terror and suspense that Mama Day becomes. … Tempted to forget her rural southern past, to reject her ancestors' sustaining superstition and belief in magic, she incurs a wrathful punishment—one that has nothing to do with the changes that could have taken place in her if Naylor had decided to opt for character development in a more realistic setting.

(11)

Now exactly why Naylor, or any other writer, should be obligated to write a naturalistic novel—and that is what this review demands—remains unclear. In many ways, this commentary revoices the narrow contemporary critiques of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, which angrily condemned it for not depicting the depression and urban experience. Somehow one might have hoped that in the fifty years between the publications of Hurston's novel and Naylor's Mama Day, the African American woman writer would be permitted access to more genres than the sociological or the naturalistic.

Further, Simon's assumptions about “reality,” no matter what her heritages, bespeak a profoundly Euro-American perspective. The symbolic levels of Naylor's novel are not layered, sedimentary-style, on top of the literal plot. Mama Day testifies to two fundamental characteristics of African-American culture: the past's persistence in the present, the present's participation in myth and archetype. For example, the devastating hurricane in Mama Day travels a naturalistically accurate route from Africa west to Willow Springs over the Sea Islands to the mainland United States—that is, the route of the Middle Passage. The storms are the heritage of slavery, periodically ravishing the land; the novel's perspective recognizes no division between their literal physical being and their symbolic meaning.

The review's dissatisfaction with the handling of symbolic resonance echo many of the comments which greeted Naylor's earlier work, Linden Hills. Brown in fact refers directly to this second novel, noting that it “used nothing less than the Inferno as armature” (74). While they might testify simply to the reviewers's belief that the realistic level is not sufficiently realized, in context the Brown and Mukherjee complaints about omnipresent larger frames seem aimed at classifying the novel's genre as well as discussing its technique or mode. Simon calls the novel a failed “tragedy”; Brown implies that it's an allegory; Faith Pullin refers to “a tale of melodrama and intrigue.” No wonder, then, that Naylor's mode in Mama Day disappoints Simon, Mukherjee, and Brown, because they've mistaken its genre and defined its originating traditions too narrowly. Mama Day belongs not to the tradition of the realistic novel but to the tradition of the romance.¹

As a romance, Mama Day beckons toward a liberating social/sexual order by revoicing phrases from both Euro-American and Afro-American tradition. While examining individual character's growth within a stable but evolving community, the novel simultaneously appropriates and signifies on earlier texts to create its own idea of order. Mama Day stresses the original nature of this order by using as its progenitors two personalities who become mythic through the passage of time, Bascombe Wade and Sapphira. The novel is at pains to specify that the slave owner Bascombe is not American but European; the bill of sale describing Sapphira indicates that she is “Pure African stock.” Mama Day images, therefore, not merely a particular stage or progression of Afro-American culture, but its very creation. Bascombe and Sapphira's descendants constitute most of the population of Willow Springs, a sea island. Though claimed by two states, Willow Springs has never been legally part of either; not belonging to a state and not feeling the need for legal structures, its inhabitants vote only in presidential elections. The islanders thus participate in the nation without owing smaller allegiances to any but themselves. Honoring this independence, Mama Day creates from the European and African pasts a new vision of an evolving Afro-American order.

In displaying its sources, Mama Day alludes to a wide diversity of texts. For example, the first page after the title page consists of a family tree beginning with Sapphira. The next generation consists of her seven sons—Elijah, Elisha, Joel, Daniel, Joshua, Amos, and Jonah; the third, of another seven sons—Matthew, Mark, Luke, Timothy, James, John, and John-Paul. The clear movement from Old to New Testament not only invokes archetypal significance for the characters but announces the movement from one order to another before the traditional text of the novel even begins. That text explicitly invokes Shakespeare. The two central female characters, Miranda (Mama Day) and Ophelia, have recognizably allusive names. Ophelia's husband, George, abandons his reading of King Lear to meet her for their first date; discussion of the same play later provides their excuse for meeting when they have implicitly agreed to be lovers but cannot admit it openly. The older texts of Hamlet and King Lear deal explicitly with the violent passing of one order and the attempted establishment of another.

The embedded allusions to earlier texts from the Afro-American tradition occurs so frequently that elucidating them would require an essay in itself. For example, the responses of two main characters to their wedding quilt recall the issues of Alice Walker's “Everyday Use”: as Ophelia remembers, “[George] wanted to clear a wall in the living room and hang it up. But it had been made to be used …” (147). Similarly, Miranda, who is Ophelia's great-aunt and the elder presence of Willow Springs, experiences a temporary transformation into a tree (255), which recalls Ernest Gaines's Aunt Fe in “Just Like a Tree.” Like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Mama Day depicts a hurricane influencing the course of a love affair. At one point, George, an engineer, describes his first job building a huge generator: “And when it ran—in theory—lighting up every home in New York, a feeling radiated through the pit of my stomach as if its nerve endings were connected to each of those ten million light bulbs. That was power” (251). The large number of lights and the pun on power recall the Invisible Man's monologue from his well-lighted Harlem basement. Allusions of this kind abound in the novel, but one Afro-American source predominates, the works of Toni Morrison.

Mama Day uses Sula as a point of reference; its expanded appropriation of Song of Solomon both celebrates the original and diverges from certain continuities in Morrison's version. Sula supplies a first name for two girl children in the Day family tree, Peace, the surname for Eva, Hannah, and Sula herself. This echo accentuates the structural resemblance between the Peace family and the Day family, both matriarchies without men, both with strong granddaughters and grandmothers, weak or absent mothers. As Sula ends with the famous scene in which Nel perceives the long-dead Sula's spirit in the wind, so in the last scene of Mama Day Miranda “looks over at the yellow bungalow [where her sister Abigail had lived]. No need to cross that road anymore, so she turns her face up into the warm air—You there, Sister?—to listen for the rustling of the trees” (312). The enduring presence of female bonds constitutes an important part of both Morrison's and Naylor's visions.

Mama Day's recapitulation of Song of Solomon leads the reader to expect this same consonance. Whereas Song of Solomon puns on the name “Sing,” causing it to be interpreted at first as a verb and only later revealed as a proper noun, Mama Day puns on “peace”: when the death of the first Peace drives Miranda and Abigail's mother mad, she constantly searches for Peace/peace. Song of Solomon's radical political organization, the Seven Days, re-emerges here as two generations of seven sons with the surname “Day.” Mama Day presents in the history of Bascombe and Sapphira a story like that at the source of Milkman's Afro-American family—Solomon's liberating flight home to Africa, which is also his simultaneous desertion of Ryna and their children. But here, the inversion of gender radically alters the story: in a fireball bound for Africa, Sapphira departs from the man who bought but did not master her. Whereas Song of Solomon portrays Ryna reduced to a moaning spirit in a gulch (a clear vaginal symbol of her entrapment by biology), Mama Day shows the Goddess triumphant.

In a similarly seismic shift, Mama Day assumes an entirely different conception of history. Song of Solomon presents history as subject to archeological quest, at least if the search is undertaken quickly enough. Thus, in a classic journey of immersion, Milkman assembles pieces of his family's history by returning to the rural South to interview and observe. Once he hears the children's song which supplies the last bit of information, all the pieces make a coherent whole—no contradictions, no bad fits, no missing pieces. With Song of Solomon such a presence in Mama Day, the reader expects the same sort of revelation, the definitive discovery of what really happened between Bascombe and Sapphira and the reverberations of their relationship through subsequent generations. And Naylor both problematizes and encourages this expectation. The narrator, the collective voice of Willow Springs in 1999, begins the text with intimations of the arbitrariness of reconstructions of history, their necessary fictiveness: “Willow Springs. Everybody knows but nobody talks about the legend of Sapphira Wade. A true conjure woman: satin black, biscuit cream, red as Georgia clay: depending upon which of us takes a mind to her” (3). And though a legend, she was also a real person and is now a continuing presence: “… we guess if we put our heads together we'd come up with something—which ain't possible since Sapphira Wade don't live in the part of our memory we can use to form words” (3–4). By listening in a spiritually receptive way to the sounds around her during Candle Walk, however, Miranda learns that although the lights have been understood as an aid to Sapphira in her walk east toward Africa, they originated as a commemoration of Bascombe's heartbroken search for her later. Thus, when Ophelia lies dying and Miranda searches for a way to save her, the reader expects resolution when she discovers an old ledger beginning with the sale of “a negress” to Bascombe Wade. Instead, Miranda instinctively knows not the truth of the Bascombe-Sapphira relationship but only that her father deliberately hid the ledger—the beginning of another mystery, his motivations. The ledger has been so damaged by the passage of time and two recent storms that it's mostly illegible. Further, the bill of sale that precedes the text of Mama Day is evidently unknown to Willow Springs, so that even the name “Sapphira” remains unfamiliar to her descendents, and only “Sa” remains readable in the ledger. If Miranda is to preserve Ophelia's life, if the Day family is to survive to start a new order, a “new Day,” then it must be on some other basis than the certain knowledge of “what really happened,” a simple conception of history.

Mama Day shifts from Song of Solomon's emphasis on recovering the details of the past to using past-derived rituals, not in their original forms or meanings, as a response to and construction of present experience. The narrator here discusses the behavior of the younger generation toward the December 22 Candle Walk, which in an earlier time entailed a gift somehow connected with the earth and which was “a way of getting help without feeling obliged” (110): “Things took a little different turn with the young folks having more money and working beyond the bridge. They started buying each other fancy gadgets from the catalogues, and you'd hear ignorant things like, ‘They ain't gave me nothing last Candle Walk, so they getting the same from me this year. … There's a disagreement every winter about whether these young people spell the death of Candle Walk’” (111). Without offering any opinion, the narrator defers to Mama Day's perspective. Miranda remembers the ritual in her youth, remembers her father's description both of differences from his youthful experiences and of his own father's still different celebration. Such an overview allows her an equanimity not available to those with only one lifetime's experience:

But that's where the recollections end—at least, in the front part of the mind. And even the youngsters who've begun complaining about having no Christmas instead of this “old 18 & 23 night” don't upset Miranda. It'll take generations, she says, for Willow Springs to stop doing it at all. And more generations again to stop talking about the time “when there used to be some kinda 18 & 23 going-on near December twentysecond.” By then, she figures, it won't be the world as we know it no way—and so no need for the memory.

(111, emphasis added)

The importance of the historical past lies not in an abstract realm of truth which will set its perceivers free, but in its use to the present. The “standing forth” which takes the place of a Western funeral exemplifies another such evolving ritual. In this ceremony for Ambush and Bernice's dead four-year-old son, the minister invites those present in church to “stand forth.” Neighbors then speak to the body, recounting their experience with the boy and then projecting their next meeting with him: “‘You liked my toy whistles, didn't you?’ the owner of the general store asked him. ‘Well, when I see you again you'll be buying my silver earrings for a sweetheart of yours’” (268–69). George, as a New Yorker brought up outside the tradition, considers it in the terms of a visiting anthropologist: “Why did I get the feeling that this meeting wasn't meant to take place inside of any building? The church, the presence of the minister, were concessions, and obviously the only ones they were going to make to a Christian ritual that should have called for a sermon, music, tears—the belief in an earthly finality for the child's life” (269). The modification of the original ritual by Christianity does not harm its basic function of expressing communal sorrow at the loss while affirming the persistence and growth of the spirit. Details of the long-dead past may dissipate without damage to the present. The “front part of the mind,” that with access to words, will preserve the necessities for its own time and build connective fictions between them. Mama Day thus forgoes the solid satisfactions of a fixed truth of tribal experience in favor of a flexible, usable historical fiction.

When the known details become insufficient for the task at hand, then the back part of the mind—the realm of archetypal identification and dream—provides. Thus, having puzzled the ledger's “Sa” and rejected “Sally,” “Sarah,” etc., Miranda dreams, and “in her dreams she finally meets Sapphira” (280). The dream heals Miranda's deepest wound, the abandonment she felt when her mother lost her mind grieving over Miranda's younger sister's death. Sapphira, the archetypal Great Mother, nurtures her necessarily smaller incarnation; Mama Day/Miranda experiences herself for the first time as a mother's daughter. In addition, the dream directs her to “look past the pain,” which she interprets as a command to re-open the well where her sister drowned eighty years before and read there the possible means of saving Ophelia's life. When experience meets the limitations of a particular fiction of history, deep tribal memory intervenes, not by itself completing or changing the fiction, but by supporting and invigorating the self to undertake such revision and by implication to postulate a new order.

Such large themes call for connections to times of giants in the earth. Given her context, rural and familial, Miranda instinctually turns to Sapphira. A very different context of the mainland United States, urban and institutional, has shaped George, whose favorite reading is King Lear. King Lear articulates the violence attendant on a change of order not properly prepared for and accomplished. The person of Lear embodies two destructive responses to intense pain. First, he rages on the heath, accompanied only by his fool; second, he dies of grief on seeing the dead Cordelia. Willow Springs has seen Lear's response in Miranda and Abigail's mother, the grandmother for whom Ophelia/Cocoa is named. After her daughter Peace drowns, she spends years madly swaying in her rocking chair, meaninglessly twisting bits of thread, her remaining daughters ignored. Finally she drowns herself in the Sound (the water separating Willow Springs from the mainland), a re-sounding of Hamlet's Ophelia's fate. The Lear precedent extends backwards—as Miranda understands him, Bascombe Wade evidently spent years pacing the island eastward, retracing Sapphira's departure for Africa. Drowning in and of grief, a plot from the genre of tragedy, has a long tradition in Willow Springs. Tragedy of this sort, however, focuses on the individual; Shakespeare briefly indicates in Fortinbras's arrival and Albany's handing over governance to Kent and Edgar and continuation of the society, not the major interest in these texts. Certainly individual tragedy appears in the Afro-American tradition—Native Son, The Street, The Bluest Eye, “The Two” in Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, to name only a few. These latter two examples, however, include a central, continuing context imaged in the narrator of The Bluest Eye, Claudia MacTeer, and Mattie's dream of a block party in Brewster Place. Tragedy itself is placed in a context which modifies its meaning.

Explicitly alluding to King Lear and Hamlet, Mama Day uses a third Shakespearean element, not directly voiced but nonetheless structurally controlling, to shift context and therefore genre and order: the romance of The Tempest. The Tempest and Mama Day share island settings; magician/sorcerers in Prospero and Mama Day/Miranda; terrific storms which isolate actors on the island; serious usurpers in the false king of Naples and Ruby; comic usurpers in Stephano and Dr. Buzzard; would-be rapists in Caliban and Junior Lee; representatives of suitors from the brave new world in Ferdinand and George. Mama Day's given name, Miranda, was a Shakespearean invention, original in The Tempest. Even in small details, Mama Day recalls its ancestor. Prospero sees other places in his glass; Miranda, other times in the mirror of well-water. Just as Ariel leads Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban on a weary chase through a swamp, so do this island's spirits vanquish an officious young racist deputy from the mainland by leading him into their woods and allowing him a lonely night-long tramp back from the wreck of his patrol car with three flat tires. This said, Mama Day recasts The Tempest in fundamental ways.

The Tempest emphasizes repentance and forgiveness as preludes to the re-establishment of a just order; Mama Day, emotional connections, compassion, respect for great natural powers—and savage vengeance against fundamental betrayals of the social contract. These form the elements necessary for an ongoing process of re-forming an old order into a more fulfilling contemporary order. The attitude toward magic in the two works shows the fundamental divergence. Prospero's magic lies outside the social world, its power morally suspect. He uses it to control Caliban with the crudest sorts of physical punishment, and though he eventually liberates Ariel, he must threaten in the meantime. Further, with Ariel as his stage manager, he directs the entire shipwreck and the subsequent wanderings of the courtiers. Thus, control is central to his use of magic—control of creatures, spirits, natural elements, and finally other human beings. Master of the isle and its inhabitants as he was once king of Naples, Prospero uses magic as a quasi-legitimate extension of his rule. In order to leave the island and rejoin human society, he must renounce it.

Miranda, by contrast, doesn't exactly practice magic. A good deal of her effect comes from intuitive psychology aided by simple symbols, like the pumpkin seeds that she gives Bernice. To help Bernice conceive a child, Miranda specifies a certain waiting period followed by a visit to “the other place” (John-Paul and the first Ophelia's home, birthplace for Miranda and her sisters). Miranda prescribes the waiting period to let Bernice's body heal from a bout of self-prescribed fertility pills, though she does not explain her reason. She occupies the excessively nervous Bernice with useful chores, cooking healthier foods in old-fashioned, time-consuming ways for instance, to give another focus besides waiting for pregnancy. The pumpkin seeds are placebos: Bernice is to plant a black seed theoretically to get rid of evil thoughts, in practice to deal with her mother-in-law's destructive visits. Investing the seeds with power to bury malice, Bernice for the first time becomes confident of her ability to assert herself and survive. Some of Miranda's “magic,” therefore, consists of psychological insight aided by the useful symbol.

Miranda knows the various powers of roots, of course, and having trained her sensitivities through most of a century, can perceive—hear or see—extraordinary things in the familiar landscape. No stereotypical conjure woman caught up in the trappings of mysterious dealings with powers of darkness, however, she purposefully demystifies her powers. In a conception of conjuring like that in Alice Walker's “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,” Mama Day emphasizes that locations or activities have the spiritual power which affected individuals grant to them. Thus, she calls “the other place,” feared by most of Willow Springs as the home of a madwoman who committed suicide, just an ordinary house where she and her sisters were born. Yet precisely because it is the other place, rituals enacted there will affect the participants because they have moved themselves from the everyday to the extraordinary simply by entering it.

Unlike Prospero's magic, Miranda's work exists firmly within the natural context, speeding or slowing processes already there but not creating either processes or potential ex nihilo. When she wonders about divine objections to her work, her concern sounds rather like her habitual prayers to father and son the night that she dreams of Sapphira, an overlay: “And would God forgive her for Bernice? But she wasn't changing the natural course of nothing, she couldn't if she tried. Just using what's there. And couldn't be nothing wrong in helping Bernice to believe that there's something more than there is. It's an old house …” (139). When Bernice's child dies after four years, Miranda considers that she may have overreached herself, that helping Bernice become pregnant may have been outside the realm of the permissible. She gradually rejects that position, however:

Miranda rocks and thinks of the things she can make grow. The joy she got from any kind of life. Can't nothing be wrong in bringing on life, knowing how to get under, around, and beside nature to give it a slight push. Most folks just don't know what can be done with a little will and their own hands. But she ain't never, Lord, she ain't never tried to get over nature.

(262)

Rather than making or controlling, Mama Day facilitates. “Magic” here remains a subset of natural powers, small and constituent of, not in control of, nature.

The difference in magnitude between the powers of nature and the power of the human being working through natural processes is dramatically illustrated by the contrast of the hurricane and the later lightning storm. Mama Day knows of the hurricane's advent before the weather forecasters, not by prescience but by reading the signs of animal behavior. Spawned in Africa, the hurricane roars across the Atlantic to the mainland, on its way damaging various structures in Willow Springs. The biblical passages juxtaposed with the hurricane's arrival invest it with the same awe as its counterpart in Their Eyes Were Watching God. By contrast, the lightning storm is anticlimactic, destroying only a small, reconstructed portion of the bridge wiped out by the hurricane—and killing Ruby when a double-strike explodes her house. Ruby has earned Mama Day's wrath by conjuring Ophelia into a life-threatening illness, a result of Ruby's pathological jealousy of her no-good man, Junior Lee. It's not even clear whether Miranda, like Prospero, raises the storm that he uses. When George explicates the physical basis on which lightning could be induced to strike twice in the same place (274), he dismisses the idea of its happening in Willow Springs because no one there could have such knowledge. He has underestimated Miranda before. Clearly, the powder that she sprinkles around Ruby's house has the metallic particles necessary to effect her cataclysmic punishment.

This use of her powers separates Miranda from Prospero, who has so much power that he can limit its uses: he need not kill to achieve his aims of moving to repentance and restoring order. Partially because she works with an evolving order, not in reference to a previous and fixed order, Miranda does not have the same option. Mad, Ruby has tried to obliterate the last generation of Days for purely private (and specious) reasons. Because she has feigned belief and participation in the communal consensus about her marriage in order to lure Ophelia into her sphere of influence—“I'm sorry I married a fool. Come see me” (244)—the sincerity of any subsequent repentance would not be ascertainable. Ruby remains too dangerous, and Mama Day's powers too limited, to tolerate her continued influence on the development of Willow Springs or the Day family.

Ruby's treachery is doubly heinous in that it offends against one of the novel's primary values and one which points toward its divergence from The Tempest: motherhood. The absence of good mothering, the absence of conditions to permit good mothering, and the resultant emotional destruction recur thematically throughout Mama Day. Miranda's pet name, Mama Day, testifies to her superb nurturance of her sister, then her community, in day-to-day care, healing and midwifery. Her position as matriarch, ironically, comes at the cost of having her own children. When a lover begs her to leave with him, the youthful Miranda feels unable to leave the family responsibilities thrust upon her when her mother, Ophelia, goes mad. In an attempt to placate Ophelia's spirit, Abigail names her own first child after the child her mother lost, Peace. The second Peace also dies early. The elderly Miranda meditates that while Abigail lost only one child to her mother (and saved the two subsequent), Miranda herself lost all her possible babies.

Mama Day reiterates and develops this loss of children and loss of mothers. The second Ophelia loses her mother Grace (Abigail's daughter) to Grace's bitterness over her husband's abandonment, a reenactment of the first Ophelia's inability to assimilate Peace's death. On the mainland, too, nurturance and connection are imperiled. George's mother is a fifteen-year-old prostitute; his father, a client. When he is three months old, George's mother leaves him in a public place and drowns herself. The headwoman of his orphanage for boys explicitly rejects the role of mother, emphasizing that she is paid, that she cannot be her charge's mother. Against such a background of loss, Ruby's manipulation of the role which she had earlier played sincerely gains resonance. Ruby plants poisons in Ophelia while repeating a ritual from Ophelia's childhood, cornrowing her hair while Ophelia sits between her knees. Not only the ostensibly nurturing action but the positional birth imagery draw attention to Ophelia's motherless state.

The causes of this dearth of mother/child relationships emphasize Mama Day's departures from its Shakespearean and Morrisonian sources in its depiction of the necessary shaping of a social order. To build a world in which mothering is possible, people must reshape the fundamental relations between men and women. The Tempest depicts the restoration for the nation-state of a proper patriarchal order based on male primogeniture. Except for Miranda, females are absent from the play. Women's chief importance lies in their chastity. Miranda's mother is mentioned only in a joke affirming that Miranda is Prospero's daughter: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (I. ii. 56–7). Prospero is preoccupied with preserving Miranda's chastity, not only in regard to Caliban but to Ferdinand. Females outside this realm are represented by the memory of Sycorax, the witch who imprisoned Ariel and “whelped” Caliban. True, the play ends with the promise of Ferdinand and Miranda's marriage, but this marriage acts much as the marriage of the usurping Antonio's daughter, a bonding of political alliances, here the reconciliation of Antonio and Prospero.

Naturally, Toni Morrison's works prior to Beloved show not only much more female presence but, except for the first, much more womanly power. The Bluest Eye demonstrates the depredations of racist, patriarchal power on Black manhood through Cholly, but the novel centers on the destruction of his daughter Pecola. Focusing on the bonding of women who realize early on that they are “neither white nor male” and hence marginal to social power, Sula shows Nel replacing her false grief for Jude with her true mourning for Sula; the novel is almost as empty of male presence as The Tempest is devoid of femaleness. Song of Solomon shows a war between the sexes in the Dead household, pitched battles between the feuding spouses and insidious cold war between the male and female siblings. Although Milkman awakens to sexual and emotional responsibility after Hagar's death, the novel does not show a peace or even a truce: Guitar's shot kills Pilate, and Milkman's response to his new sense of freedom in responsibility is to make peace with this friend. The one successful sexual relationship, that between First Corinthians and Porter, requires that she give up false ideas of class and declare loyalty to him. Now Porter belongs to the Seven Days, the organization which kills whites in retaliation for racist killings; loyalty to the Seven Days as well as pique at what he wrongly believes to be Milkman's betrayal of their fiscal agreement motivates Guitar's shot. Morrison clearly critiques the adequacy of the Days as a political response with this killing, yet Porter makes no concessions to First Corinthians, no abandonment of false consciousness equivalent to hers. Men remain clearly in control. These two novels, then represent Mirroson's exploration of male and female experience as separate spheres, their encounters violet for or peripheral or both. Though the origins are somewhat different from those in the earlier works, Tar Baby images this same insistent separation in Son and Jadine's inability to find common ground.

Mama Day abandons the patriarchy assumed as the benevolent social order of The Tempest and pushes beyond the separation envisioned in the Morrison works antecedent to Beloved: it attempts a reconciliation that permits mothering and hence the nurturance of further generations. The history of Willow Springs is rooted in racist patriarchy, in Bascombe Wade's ownership of slaves. When he frees his slaves, not including Sapphira whom he couldn't master and therefore couldn't free, one kind of patriarchy ends. Its effects, of course, persist. The emotional alienation between Bascombe and Sapphira reverberates through the generations in a perpetual separation of men and women of the same generation, and of women and their children. In the family tree, this dichotomy is expressed through all-male and all-female generations.

Ophelia and George represent male and female heritages, each decent and honorable in itself but with no clue as to the other's inner workings. Ophelia's father leaves before her birth, and she has no other male relatives. Mama Day embodies Ophelia's legacy. Raised in an orphanage for boys, George has never lived with women until he visits Willow Springs. To some extent, Ophelia and George represent other dichotomies as well—especially rural and urban, Western and African American—so that the various imbricated parts of their identities make their union exceptionally difficult. George's profession, engineering, presupposes an attachment to technology, for example, and he implements others's ideas because he lacks intuition and imagination. His orphanage upbringing forced him into constant focus on the present rather than the future; he envies Ophelia's knowledge of her family's past and her wider tribal history, his own being, of course, drowned with his mother. Ophelia, in contrast, gets an advanced degree in history. George has a heart problem, literally and figuratively. Before meeting Ophelia, he has a long-term relationship with a white woman, Shawn, but no yearnings for profound emotional bonds. His passionate moments of connection come primarily from sports, either watching football at home or participating as a member of the crowd at playoffs and Super Bowls.

Despite the symbolic role of sports, Naylor's depiction of male and female heritage has little to do with stereotypes of aggressive, macho men and submissive women or of cold men and lovingly overdependent women. Miranda learns during Candle Walk that Sapphira has broken Bascombe's heart rather than vice-versa; Sapphira, after all, incarnates the Goddess, not the Madonna. From her own experience with her father, Miranda knows men to be powerfully creative (he carves wonderfully life-like vegetation in wood) and nurturant. The most vengeful and violent characters, on the other hand, are female—Ophelia's mother Grace and Ruby. Mama Day's presentation shows power as well as vices and virtues in both traditions.

George and Ophelia's marriage, the continuation of the Days, and symbolically the honoring of the Great Mother (Sapphira in one incarnation, Ophelia in another) all require a new way of ordering the world, so that their interactions do not defeat one or the other but instead create a working nurturance for both men and women. The novel sketches, sometimes humorously, George's and Ophelia's gradual awareness of the other tradition's existence and importance. Ophelia, for example, realizes that in one morning at the barbershop, George has learned the birth name of a man whom she grew up with but can call only by his nickname. (Her recognition recalls Sula's similar realization of her limitations when she discovers that her lover Ajax is really A. Jacks.) The difficulties inherent in understanding a foreign tradition and mind set explode in a fight just before Miranda and Abigail's supper honoring the happy couple.

The temporary emotional alienation of the spouses becomes the least of present difficulties, for the supper's aftermath includes the hurricane and Ophelia's illness. The hurricane removes the bridge between Willow Springs and the mainland, thus preventing George from getting standard medical help for Ophelia. In this crisis, the split between his way and Miranda's way of caring for Ophelia itself becomes a crisis. Miranda sees that a part of Ophelia lies beyond her healing powers, the part tied up in George: “You see, she done bound up more than her flesh up with you. And since she's suffering from something more than the flesh, I can't do a thing without you” (294). George has difficulty believing in the nature of the illness, much less the necessity of his participation in a cure which none of his background has prepared him for. He has had a dream which prophesies Ophelia's need and his relationship to Miranda:

You [Ophelia] were calling me and calling me. And I was swimming across The Sound. I couldn't see you on the other side, but your voice kept getting louder, the water heavier, and the shore farther and farther away. If just try harder, I thought. … In my struggles I saw Mama Day leaning over the bridge. Her voice came like thunder: No, Get Up and Walk. She's a crazy old woman, I thought as I kept swimming harder. … I was fiercely angry at her for not helping us. With my last bit of strength, I pushed my shoulder out of the water to scream in her face, You're a crazy old woman! And I found myself standing up in the middle of The Sound.

(183–84)

In real life, as in the dream, George's way consists of directed action. Frantic with anger at the relaxed pace of his companions, George works at reconstructing the bridge, considers using a leaky rowboat despite the Sound's treacherous currents and his inability to swim.

Miranda understands his dilemma and pities him. As clearly as possible, she delineates their situation: “There are two ways anybody can go when they come to certain roads in life—ain't about a right way or a wrong way—just two ways. And here we getting down to my way or yours” (295). Arming George with her father's can (the cane suggestive of Legba, its snake-decorations of Damballah) and ledger, the male icons of her family line, she sends him to gather what he finds behind the nest of a sitting hen in her chicken coop. From the dream, the reader expects George to be convinced of Mama Day's wisdom and to emerge triumphant. He doesn't. George pursues Mama Day's path but, sadly, in his own way, like an engineer. Emotional and physical exhaustion combine with overexertion to literally break his weak heart. So, in the end, George does it his way and is buried on the island. Ophelia lives. Like Sula desiring to talk with Nel, George wants to tell his boon companion about his death: “But I want to tell you something about my real death that day. I didn't feel anything after my heart burst. As my bleeding hand slid gently down your arm, there was total peace” (302). George and Ophelia's marriage is the first Day coupling to end in peace. George falls victim to the state of the culture; he has only “my way or yours” to choose from—there is not yet an “our way” between men and women. Ophelia's experiences with him and his sacrifice make possible, however, the beginnings of that new Day.

Mama Day points the way toward a new order rather than establishing one. Having mourned for her own loss and finally for George, Ophelia develops as she ages “a face that has been given the meaning of peace” (312). Her second marriage succeeds, and it perpetuates George's influence. Following three generations of females, the reappearance of maleness in the Day line may signal a rapprochement between male and female spheres. The younger son is named for George, but his personality renews Ophelia's temperament rather than George's. Mama Day visits George's grave frequently; Ophelia, yearly during her visits to Willow Springs. The reader realizes that a good deal of the narration consists of George's and Ophelia's direct speech to each other, from perspectives which can only have formed after George's death. As the novel says on its last page, “Some things stay the same.” The shape of the new order? “Some things are yet to be” (312). But for the first time, on both the east side of the island (facing Africa) and the west (the Sound, facing the mainland), those sites of Sapphira's and the first Ophelia's very different departures “the waters were still” (312). In that calm, Miranda and George have mothers, and Ophelia has children.

Note

1. I am indebted to Molly Hite for pointing out that in English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell, Frank Kermode describes the use of pastoral (often involving Africans or non-whites of the New World) to oppose the urban. This opposition is precisely what Simon's review proposes as the premium mobile of Mama Day. Kermode's introduction to the New Arden edition of The Tempest suggests that “pastoral tragi-comedy” is more descriptive than “romance.”

Works Cited

Brown, Rosellen. Rev. of Mama Day by Gloria Naylor. Ms. Feb. 1988: 16+.

Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 51–63.

Ellison Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.

Gaines, Ernest. “Just Like a Tree.” Bloodline. New York: Norton, 1976, 221–49.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Washington Square, 1970.

———. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

———. Tar Baby. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Rev. of Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor. New York Times Book Review 21 Feb 1988: 7.

Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. New York: Ticknor, 1988.

Pullin, Faith. Rev. of Mama Day, by Gloria Naylor. Times Literary Supplement 3 June 1988: 623.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest Ed. Northrop Frye. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Baltimore: Penguin, 1969.

Simon, Linda. “Black Roots, White Culture.” Women's Review of Books Sept. 1988: 11.

Walker, Alice. “The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff.” In Love and Trouble. New York: Harcourt, 1973, 60–80.