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Page 114 Not only the island, but also its maternal origins, are reconceived by Naylor in Mama Day. Traub suggests perceptively that “Sapphira not only invokes, but also newly configures Caliban’s mother Sycorax, the original mother and conjurer of the uncharted island usurped by Prospero” (1993:155). We might add that Sapphira is from Africa, but is brought, like Sycorax, to the New World against her will. Prospero relates to Ariel that “This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child,/And there was left by th’ sailors” (1.2.271– 72). Naylor’s choice of name for the great-great grandmother of Cocoa, Sapphira, may also signify on Willa Cather’s neglected late novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which Toni Morrison makes so much of in Playing in the Dark. Cather’s Sapphira is the invalid mistress of a huge plantation who is dependent on slaves for “the most intimate of services” (Morrison 1992:18ff.). She suspects her ‘‘slave girl” Nancy of having an affair with her husband and takes that as an occasion to tyrannize all the slaves who serve her, particularly Nancy, who is innocent. Naylor’s Sapphira, on the other hand, is a Black “conjurer” who manipulates her White master erotically to liberate the island’s posterity from dependence on White authority. There are other Shakespearean echoes in the novel. A rival witch and neighbor named Ruby makes trouble for George and Ophelia and challenges Mama Day’s supremacy; drunk with her illegitimate power, Ruby may parallel Stephano. Even Trinculo seems to turn up in the story as an alcoholic doctor named Buzzard, who also mounts an innocuous challenge to Mama Day’s magical dominance of the island. The most problematic character in the novel, however, is George (Ferdinand/Caliban), as we have been suggesting all along. Although there is nothing of the colloquial bastard in George, he does die of a heart attack after he is perceived as having failed to appreciate the enchantment generated on the island by Mama Day. Initially a Ferdinand, imagining himself the owner one day of the island, but drunk, exhausted, and filthy by the end of the novel, George comes to resemble Caliban more than the Prince of Naples. Neither Miranda nor Ophelia, it turns out, needs a Prospero or a Ferdinand, not to mention a Polonius or a Hamlet. The death of George, who as Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s version would have continued Prospero’s patriarchy back in Milan, completes Naylor’s rewriting of The Tempest. In form as well as content, Mama Day both controverts and extends the range of The Tempest. The impetus of African American signifying, according to Gates, is the search for the “black voice” in |
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