The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae

(2.) Sapphira's similarity to the Christian God-the-Creator is underlined by her tongue-in-cheek choice of surname for her children: she chooses "Day" for her seven sons because "God rested on the seventh day, and so would she" (iii). Naylor may possibly have had in mind a feminist revision of the Christian hymn that addresses God the Creator as "Ancient of days" ["Ancient of days, [...]/Thy love hast blessed/The wide world's wondrous story/With light and life/Since Eden's dawning day"].

(3.) To read the well at the other place through Derrida, as Philip Page does in" 'Into the Midst of Nothing': Gloria Naylor and the Differance," seems to me less accurate than an archetypal reading. Page argues that wells symbolize differance (or, life at the edge of the abyss) in Naylor's fiction, but because only one actual well can be found in all of Naylor's oeuvre, Page includes as evidence "well-like images such as basements, alleys, and walls" (114), structures that bear little or no resemblance to wells. An archetypal reading posits wells as omphalos (umbilical cords) connecting the living people in the upper world with the "loving and terrible Mother" in the underworld, almost precisely Miranda's experience when she uncovers the well at the other place and hears "[c]ircles and circles of screaming" from two long-dead mothers, Sapphira and Ophelia, and one baby daughter, Peace, issuing from the depths of the well.

(4.) I disagree with Page's conflation of the unconscious with repression in his discussion of this pain. To say that Miranda and her "entire family had privileged consciousness and presence in their acceptance of the ancestry of Sapphira Wade and their denial of the family's tragedies" (p.115) is to overlook not only the half-dozen references to Sapphira as archetype and part of the collective unconscious of the Willow Springs community but also the many references to and acknowledgments of the family's tragedies throughout the text, particularly in Miranda's sections. Moreover, Miranda knows very little about her great grandmother or Bascombe Wade; it is difficult to repress what one does not know.

(5.) In "Metaphor and Maternity in Mama Day," Amy Levin misreads the evidence when she argues that Miranda deliberately "eliminate[s] George before he draws Cocoa away from [her] influence permanently" (81). Although George's rationalism does threaten the semiotic chora to some extent, Miranda knows that Cocoa is deeply rooted in Willow Springs at the other place as a Day. Moreover, Miranda admires, respects, and loves George; she thinks that he is the perfect husband for her strong-willed great-niece. In fact, "it scares [Miranda] sometimes how much she likes [George]" (229). At the climax of the novel, Miranda's conflict with George is over how best to save Cocoa, not over who "controls" Cocoa.

If Miranda had wanted to eliminate George, she would not have needed to lift a finger after realizing that George could save Cocoa by sacrificing himself; she could have just sat in the rocker at the other place and waited for George, a non-swimmer, to enact his planned attempt to row across the treacherous Sound in a leaky rowboat to get help for Cocoa. Instead, Miranda uses every resource at her disposal to convince George to employ her nonrationalist, supernatural method of saving Cocoa so that George, too, can be saved.