SOURCE: Levin, Amy K. “Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day.” In Gloria Naylor's Early Novels, edited by Margot Anne Kelley, pp. 70–88. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In the following essay, Levin discusses Naylor's pairing of motherhood and the mystical in her novels and how these elements signify a connection to African models of female leadership.

The title of Gloria Naylor's third book, Mama Day, suggests that the novel will concern maternity. Yet Miranda Day, the title character, is not a biological mother. She has never married or borne a child. Instead, as the ruling matriarch of the Day family and the island community of Willow Springs, as healer, advisor, midwife and conjurer par excellence, the old woman offers a model of mothering based not on biological kinship or the Freudian reading of the nuclear family, but on female solidarity and a vision of women's leadership that can be...