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Mama Day, as Fowler, Traub, and Erickson have shown, is studded with references to Hamlet, The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear, which broaden and reinforce Naylor’s signifying on the narrative of The Tempest. The naming of the principal character in the novel, Ophelia/Cocoa, evokes the death by drowning of Hamlet’s former lover, a role that Cocoa’s husband George will assume in Mama Day in a way that is consistent with the pattern of gender inversions Naylor sets up in the novel. Early on in their relationship, Cocoa meets George on an “evening [when] I had left King Lear naked and wandering on a stormy heath” (Naylor 1989:59), introducing yet another foreboding reference to cataclysmic meteorological and emotional tempests in Shakespeare. Later on, George and Cocoa meet to discuss his favorite play, which happens to be King Lear. With play copies in hand, they argue point for dramatic point, although The Taming of the Shrew seems to be the operative text in the lovers’ relationship at that point. As Cocoa says of King Lear in one of her monologues addressed to George, “along with The Taming of the Shrew, this had to be Shakespeare’s most sexist treatment of women—but far be it from me to contradict anything you had to say” (106). Apparently George, like Petruccio, Lear, and Prospero before him, perpetuates one of the most disturbing practices of Shakespearean misogyny, the silencing of potentially independent women such as Kate, Cordelia, and Miranda.

Peter Erickson makes a great deal of George’s “attachment to Shakespeare,” particularly King Lear, which ‘‘serves as a badge for his upward mobility” as well as his superiority as a male (1993: 242). George, who is an orphan, identifies openly with Edmund, the bastard son whose ambitions are fueled by his disadvantaged childhood, but he may also feel sympathy for Edgar, who is disowned, and therefore “orphaned,” by his father Gloucester. Such a combination of ruthlessness and sensitivity aptly captures the polarity of George’s character. He admits that Lear “had a special poignancy for me, reading about the rage of a bastard son, my own father having disappeared long before I was born” (Naylor 1989: 106). Traub notices that George and Cocoa’s relationship is described, in an allusion to Romeo and Juliet, as “star-crossed” —in other words, as fated to materialize in some legendary memory as it indeed will be memorialized on the island of Willow Springs (1993: 157). Traub also suggests that Naylor has Cocoa playfully signify on the canonicity of Shakespeare. In order to express how alienated

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