LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Matriarchal and Mythical Healing in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day

A. Vijayalakshmi, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D. Candidate
R. Padmavathi, Ph.D.

Southern Flavor in Gloria Naylor's Fiction

There is something peculiarly Southern about Gloria Naylor's fiction--and this despite her birth in New York City. Careful consideration of place--whether it is a dilapidated, rat-infested housing project situated on a dead-end street or a magical island paradise off the Georgia coast--and the uniquely individual folk inhabiting such locales are hallmarks of Naylor's carefully crafted novels. Her deft rendering of people, places, and customs invites comparison with that of the best American local colorists who have brought national and, in some instances, international attention to little-known regions of the country.

A Biographical Sketch

Gloria (born in 1950) is a novelist, essayist, screenplay writer, columnist, and educator. Gloria Naylor was born in New York City to Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, who had migrated northward from their native Robinsonville, Mississippi. Having worked as cotton sharecroppers in Mississippi, her father became a transit worker for the New York City subway system and her mother a telephone operator. Naylor, who was a very shy child, grew up in New York City, where she lived until she graduated from high school in 1968.

After her graduation until 1975, Naylor worked as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses in New York, North Carolina, and Florida. Eventually deciding that missionary life and the Jehovah's Witnesses were not for her, Naylor returned to New York City and attended college while working as a telephone operator in several different hotels. Although she studied nursing for a short time at Medgar Evers College, she soon decided to pursue a BA in English at Brooklyn College, from which she graduated in 1981.

Naylor entered Yale University on a fellowship and received an MA in Afro-American studies there in 1983. Having published her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, in 1982, she wrote for her Master's thesis at Yale what would become her second novel, Linden Hills (published 1985). Mama Day (1988) Bailey's Cafe (1992), and The Men of Brewster Place (1998). In addition to these primary works, she has also published essays - including a column in The New York Times in 1986 and a scholarly piece, Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel, which was published in the Yale Review in 1988 and has written several unproduced screenplays. Another important publication is 'A Conversation between Naylor and Toni Morrison,' which appeared in the Southern Review in 1985. She edited Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to the present in 1995.

Mama Day

Her third novel, Mama Day (1988), Naylor has received the most praise. As the story of the title character and her great-niece, Ophelia (Cocoa) Day, this work fully develops Naylor's themes of magic, myth and family. Naylor superimposes the two settings of Willow Springs-an island off the coast between (but not in) South Carolina and Georgia-and New York City, thereby contrasting the philosophical differences between Cocoa and her husband, George Andrews. In a 1989 interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, Naylor said that her purpose in Mama Day was to analyze the makeup of individual belief, as well as what constitutes an individual definition of reality. During the course of the novel, she compares her depictions of magic and personal faith with the willing suspension of disbelief that all readers of fiction undergo.

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