Mama Day's Relation to The Tempest

In the novel Mama Day, their are a few things about it that link it to Shakespeare's, The Tempest, such as magic, the storm, and the island.  Besides these loose parallels I don't think the two works had much to show us, that would make a reader think that Mama Day was a revision of The Tempest, like A Thousand Acres was with King Lear.  I found myself reading  Mama Day and looking for things that would link it to The Tempest, but this seemed to only make my reading of the novel more difficult, and once I began reading it with its own voice and characters it became easier to follow.  If this is a revision of The Tempest then it is very loosely based, in my opinion, and the reason for that is that all the significant things that Shakespeare put into his work aren't all their in the work by Gloria Naylor. I believe that Naylor may have crafted her novel with the intent to take the main ideas of a magical island that has quite a few issues, but not to remake Shakespeare's play, thus Mama Day was created with a magical island setting. The rest can only be found by reading the novel itself,  because you wont understand this novel just by having read The Tempest.

Prospero's Plans

I think that Prospero's goals in the beginning were very step by step because after he stranded everyone on the island he did each and everything in sequence.  He first used Ariel to shipwreck the boat and strand everyone unharmed.  Then he made his daughter fall in love with the future king. This makes it very clear to me that his intentions were to first better himself by taking revenge on his brother, Antonio, who stranded Prospero and his daughter on the island, and second to better his daughter by magically making her and the future king to fall in love.  I thought Prospero executed his plans very well because both of the things he wanted to happen fell into his plan and ended up happening throughout the play.