Focusing on African American novelist Gloria Naylor’s fiction Mama Day, this article intends to analyze Mama Day and George’s distinctive relationships with maternal spaces, particularly based on French philosopher ...Focusing on African American novelist Gloria Naylor’s fiction Mama Day, this article intends to analyze Mama Day and George’s distinctive relationships with maternal spaces, particularly based on French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s philosophy concerning maternal spaces and a feminine way of communication. It is to argue that the two characters’ different ways of communicating with the maternal spaces result in their different endings in the narrative, as well as their different degrees of healing, either healing their own wounded relationships with their mothers or healing the disconnection between men and women. This finding unravels Naylor’s implicit ethical and philosophical messages in writing George’s mystic and tragic death. In addition, by engaging Mama Day in active and feminine communication with maternal spaces, Naylor successfully re-establishes “the missing pillar” of the female ancestry that Irigaray observes on Western civilization, thus offering a possibility for a woman to construct her female subjectivity with reference to her maternal origin.展开更多
文摘Focusing on African American novelist Gloria Naylor’s fiction Mama Day, this article intends to analyze Mama Day and George’s distinctive relationships with maternal spaces, particularly based on French philosopher Luce Irigaray’s philosophy concerning maternal spaces and a feminine way of communication. It is to argue that the two characters’ different ways of communicating with the maternal spaces result in their different endings in the narrative, as well as their different degrees of healing, either healing their own wounded relationships with their mothers or healing the disconnection between men and women. This finding unravels Naylor’s implicit ethical and philosophical messages in writing George’s mystic and tragic death. In addition, by engaging Mama Day in active and feminine communication with maternal spaces, Naylor successfully re-establishes “the missing pillar” of the female ancestry that Irigaray observes on Western civilization, thus offering a possibility for a woman to construct her female subjectivity with reference to her maternal origin.
