Mixed Race Studies

Mammy versus mulatta: A rhetorical analysis of the act of passing and the influence of controlling images in Fannie Hurst’s “Imitation of Life”

Arizona State University
May 2010
189 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3407107
ISBN: 9781109743265

Allison Parker

A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel, Imitation of Life, and the two movies that followed in 1934 and 1959, address the issue of racial passing in a way that no text ever has before. The theme of Imitation of Life is imitation, and as a result, it lends itself to a discussion of race performativity. Imitation of Life is the first text to juxtapose the mammy character with the tragic mulatto character, and this makes it conducive to studying the category of race and how race performativity functions. In addition, instead of focusing exclusively on passing, this analysis focuses more specifically on the way that resistance to (or condemnation of) passing, mainly through the power of confession, produces a specific mode of performativity.

Each of the versions of Imitation of Life is analyzed separately in order to use the specific version of the text to examine not only how the mores of the time affect the outcome of the story to contextualize each story within its respective time period, but also to examine how each of the characters is constructed in order to evaluate the relationships between black and white women living in the same household. The focus is on the specific features of the mammy and the mulatto characters–their history, their attributes, and their significant features, in order to understand how they work in context and to understand their significance in terms of race performativity. Finally, an examination of the category of race in terms of performative reiteration is presented. Scenes from the book and the two films are scrutinized in an attempt to provide a vehicle to understand the means by which racial norms function. These sections work together to examine the condemnation of passing in Imitation of Life through the lens of race as a speech act. Imitation of Life is a passing narrative that is a crucial text for assisting theorists in understanding the complicated features of race performativity.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 REVIEW OF LITERATURE
  • Introduction and Scope
  • Theoretical Approach
  • Organization of Research
  • Concluding Remarks
• CHAPTER 2 THE 1933 NOVEL
  • Fannie Hurst: Racial Activist
  • Hurston and Hurst
  • The Conflicts in Imitation of Lite
  • A Warning for Ambitious Womem
  • Aunt Jemima: The Most Famous Mammy
  • The Influence of Zora Neale Hurston
  • Delilah—the Ultimate Mammy
  • Peola—the Tragic Mulatto
  • Peola’s Passing
  • Critical Reception and Debate
• CHAPTER 3 THE 1934 FILM
  • The Plot Thickens
  • The Embodiment of Miscegenation
  • From Page to Screen
  • The Subservient Mammy Stereotype Continues
  • An Updated Bea
  • An Updated Peola
  • Critical Reception
  • Hurston, Hughes, Morrison, and hooks Respond
• CHAPTER 4 THE 1959 FILM
  • Lana’s Imitation of Life
  • Colorblind Casting?
  • Imitation in Imitation of Life
  • Starring Sarah Jane
  • The Rhinelander Case
  • Controlling Images
• CHAPTER 5 RACE PERFORMATIVITY
  • Austin, Derrida, Butler, and Performativity
  • Foucault and Confession
  • Assumptions of Whiteness and the Contradictions of Race
  • Judith Butler and Imitation of Life
  • The Punishment for Passing
  • Mammy Versus Mulatto
  • Conclusion
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

The White Negress: Literature, Minstrelsy, and the Black-Jewish Imaginary

Rutgers University Press
2011-01-19
248 pages, 3 photographs
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4783-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4782-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-4989-7

Lori Harrison-Kahan, Full-time Adjunct Faculty in English
Boston College

During the first half of the twentieth century, American Jews demonstrated a commitment to racial justice as well as an attraction to African American culture. Until now, the debate about whether such black-Jewish encounters thwarted or enabled Jews’ claims to white privilege has focused on men and representations of masculinity while ignoring questions of women and femininity. The White Negress investigates literary and cultural texts by Jewish and African American women, opening new avenues of inquiry that yield more complex stories about Jewishness, African American identity, and the meanings of whiteness.

Lori Harrison-Kahan examines writings by Edna Ferber, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston, as well as the blackface performances of vaudevillian Sophie Tucker and controversies over the musical and film adaptations of Show Boat and Imitation of Life. Moving between literature and popular culture, she illuminates how the dynamics of interethnic exchange have at once produced and undermined the binary of black and white.

Imitation of Life

Duke University Press
2004 (Originially published in 1933)
352 pages
6 b&w photos, 1 line drawing
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3324-1

Fannie Hurst (1889–1968)

Edited by:

Daniel Itzkovitz, Associate Professor of  American Literature and Culture
Stonehill College, North Easton, Massachusetts

A bestseller in 1933, and subsequently adapted into two beloved and controversial films, Imitation of Life has played a vital role in ongoing conversations about race, femininity, and the American Dream. Bea Pullman, a white single mother, and her African American maid, Delilah Johnston, also a single mother, rear their daughters together and become business partners. Combining Bea’s business savvy with Delilah’s irresistible southern recipes, they build an Aunt Jemima-like waffle business and an international restaurant empire. Yet their public success brings them little happiness. Bea is torn between her responsibilities as a businesswoman and those of a mother; Delilah is devastated when her light-skinned daughter, Peola, moves away to pass as white. Imitation of Life struck a chord in the 1930s, and it continues to resonate powerfully today.

The author of numerous bestselling novels, a masterful short story writer, and an outspoken social activist, Fannie Hurst was a major celebrity in the first half of the twentieth century. Daniel Itzkovitz’s introduction situates Imitation of Life in its literary, biographical, and cultural contexts, addressing such topics as the debates over the novel and films, the role of Hurst’s one-time secretary and great friend Zora Neale Hurston in the novel’s development, and the response to the novel by Hurst’s friend Langston Hughes, whose one-act satire, “Limitations of Life” (which reverses the races of Bea and Delilah), played to a raucous Harlem crowd in the late 1930s. This edition brings a classic of popular American literature back into print.

Two or Three Spectacular Mulatas and the Queer Pleasures of Overidentification

Camera Obscura
Volume 23, Number 1 67 (2008)
pages 113-143
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-2007-026

Hiram Perez, Assistant professor of English
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Building on feminist and queer scholarship on the relationship of film spectatorship to subjectivity, this essay conjectures subaltern spectatorships of the two US film adaptations of Fannie Hurst‘s 1933 novel Imitation of Life as a means of tracing the impossibly entangled discourses of race and sexuality, as well as of formulating “queer of color” as a kind of critical modality. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin functions, according to Sigmund Freud, as a cultural artifact prized in the form of an idealized beating fantasy by the Victorian (white) child, Imitation of Life stages for black and queer of color spectators originary traumas, in particular the formative (and compounded) experiences of racial and sexual shame. This essay seeks to reconcile the dissonant emotions evoked by Imitation of Life by reading the overidentifications of subaltern spectators with the figure of the tragic mulatto as instances of queer pleasure, both self-shattering and subject forming. In so doing, the essay pays tribute to that tragic mulatto as a spectacular mulata and diva. The spectacular mulata diva summons queer subjectivities; furthermore, she betrays larger national and colonial secrets, locating the racially hybrid genealogies of the classic diva and the universalized subject of psychoanalysis, heretofore presumably white (European).

Read or purchase the article here.