A Study On The Theme Of Quilting In Mama Day: From A Womanist Perspective

Gloria Naylor is one of the greatest African-American women writers after Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.From 1982 till now,she has published five novels and a great number of essays,which brought her the American Book Award in 1983.And her quartet novels have attracted much attention from American critics,making her a major voice in African-American literature.Her third novel,Mama Day,which is deeply grounded in the social and historical realities of African-American people, really raises their literature to a higher level.With the development of African-American women's literature, black feminism also independently emerges from American critical field. Then,in 1980s,Alice Walker firstly articulated "womanism",including themes of blackness,woman-centeredness and wholeness.Through this term,Walker calls on people to unite solidarize with respect and love for each other so as to strengthen themselves and then lead men to reform and eventually found a new society on the basis of human spiritual needs - love,beauty and harmony.For Walker,the final goal of women's struggle is to realize the wholeness and existence of humanity. Therefore,womanism not only enriches connotations of traditional feminist critics,but also introduces new perspectives to its further study. In this thesis,the author intends to explore the painful and embarrassing journey toward peace and survival by way of an in-depth textual analysis of Mama Day from a womanist perspective.Through Afro-centered quilting aesthetics,Naylor successfully appropriates womanism as a source to weave blackness,woman-centeredness and wholeness together.As a focal point,black culture functions as a core mechanism in Naylor's writing,breaking black-marginalized but white-dominated cultural value system.Naylor clearly demonstrates the relationship between individual and community:Only in his own community,can the black man identify himself;only on the basis of his own cultural heritage,can he achieve integrity of humanity.By embracing the strength of motherhood and sisterhood,Naylor reverses black women's double-marginalized identity and subverts problematic ideology of patriarchy and racism.Then she offers effective roots for black women to pursue self-identity and affirmative subjectivity. Meanwhile,from a womanist perspective,Naylor not only dwells on the African-Americans life and experience in particular,but also manifests the universal reality of wholeness,including the quilting of races,human beings and nature.As an outstanding woman writer with double-consciousness,Gloria Naylor actually weaves racial cultural and humanistic warmth together to realize her concern for multiple marginalized minorities,such as African-American women,and then,stitches a harmonious quilt of whole beings.And this kind of writing,which seeks for subverting marginalized African-American literature and intends to preserve black ethnic culture, really contributes to Mama Day's literary value.Undoubtedly,Mama Day is a masterpiece in contemporary African-American literature.