There has been a long history of the cinematic negation and distorted delineation of the black female body in cinema. From the myopic cross-media stereotypes of the black woman as "mammy" to silencing the pseudo "unrapeable" black woman "for the sake of racial unity," black women have been either completely erased or misrepresented so as to perpetuate the superiority of white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze. Recent studies have shown that as a result of this treatment of the black female body in cinema, black female spectators undergo a unique cinematic experience than that of both the black man and white viewer. Black women create what Black feminist film theorist bell hooks refers to as an "oppositional gaze," resisting the complete negation or marginalized portrayal of black women in the film and questioning this absence, becoming active participants rather than passive spectators. To better understand this notion of an oppositional gaze on behalf of the black female spectator, I will take a close look at scenes primarily from director John Stahl's 1934 film "Imitation of Life" and discuss the black female gaze and presence in relation to the phallocentric gaze and the portrayal of the two black characters, Delilah Johnson, as played by Louise Beavers, and her mixed daughter, Peola, as played by Fredi Washington. In the film, Beavers represents the marginalized Mammy stereotype, or the desexed, nurturing, and self-sacrificing servant always ready to please her white master. Black female spectators, unable to accept this stereotypical portrayal of black womanhood, must put on the "oppositional gaze" in order to "enjoy" the film. However, with the character of Peola, the tragic mulatta figure, the black woman viewer is able to at least sympathize for one black character.

 

Bobo, Jacqueline. “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers.” Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram. London: Verso, 1988. 90-109.

 

This chapter discusses black women as audience members and cultural consumers of the film The Color Purple.  As Bobo states, her aim is “to examine the way in which a specific audience [black women] creates meaning from a mainstream text [The Color Purple] and uses the reconstructed meaning to empower themselves and their social group.”  Although the film predominately features black women, criticism, reviews, and discourse concerning the film did not include the voices of black women.  Bobo counters this problem by interviewing average black women, as an ‘interpretive community,’ and recording their reactions to the film.  Through her research, Bobo discovered that black women oftentimes have responses to texts that differ from those of other audiences, including mainstream film critics. By watching these films and discussing them with each other, the women Bobo interviewed negotiate new interpretations of the texts, which in many cases stand at odds with dominant or conventional readings.

 

Through this text, Bobo makes evident that African-American women, as a distinct interpretive community, view cultural products, specifically film, in a unique way.  Her argument could be used for the movie Imitation of Life, in which the roles of the black women are limited, just as in The Color Purple. Although the black women characters are marginalized, black female spectators are still able to create meaning from the film and interpret it as readers using the “oppositional gaze.”  Working together as an interpretive community, black women can engage in the text and produce meanings in ways that have potential for empowerment. 

Thaggert, Miriam. “Divided Images: Black Female Spectatorship and John Stahl’s Imitation of Life.” African American Review Vol. 32, No. 3 (Autumn 1998): pp. 481-491. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3042248>.

 

When discussing cinema, black women turn to Imitation of Life because it provides a unique intersection between feminist film theory and black female spectatorship.  Black women occupy a space closer to the center than most other Hollywood movies, enabling black feminist discussion concerning the portrayals and reception of black women in film.  Thaggert makes reference to bell hooks, stating that the film initially caused her to stop going to the movies, yet as an adult it helped her form an “oppositional gaze” with which to question the imaging practices of Hollywood cinema.  hooks’s term suggest a distinction from the white masculinitist gaze. Unlike white men, black women can neither identify with the white male hero nor the white woman. Instead, they must look beyond what is presented to them and view films from a critical standpoint that she calls “an oppositional gaze.” Black female viewers of Imitation of Life, the author argues, can pose questions, such as “What pleasure is available for the black female viewers when the valued black maternal figure is recoded into the mammy, a woman who mothers others for economic survival?” or “How can a black viewer identify with a character who constantly rejects a black racial identity?”  Throughout the film, Delilah and People are offered as spectacles, making it hard to identify with them.  Delilah is easily recognizable as a descendant of “Aunt Jemima,” leaving  little opportunity to engage with her when she is portrayed as a pancake-flipping mammy. “The more commodified her appearance, the more distance exists between her and the spectator,” notes the author. 

 

The article goes on to discuss the role of Peola for the black female viewer.  Unlike Delilah, black women may identify with Peola, as hooks suggests, not because she looks for whiteness, but because she looks at whiteness and does not find a black self there. However, the fact that she is light-skinned may have created other dilemmas. The complexities of dark-skinned women trying to identify with the light-skinned women that Hollywood favored in its films create other levels of identification and/or resistance that have yet to be explored.  In the end, Imitation of Life offers two divergent representation of blackness, both based on stereotypes: the mammy and the mulatto.  Imitation’s  methods of imaging black women produce a complex process of identification and resistance for black female spectators.

Caputi, Jane. “‘Specifying’ Fannie Hurst: Langston Hughes's ‘Limitations of Life,’ Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes were Watching God, and Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye as ‘Answers’ to Hurst's Imitation of Life.” Black American Literature Forum Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 1990): pp. 697-716. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3041797>.

Caputi discusses the impact of Imitation of Life on black audiences. According to Lawrence Reddick, “while white liberals generally applauded the picture and hailed it as a progressive step forward in racial attitudes, editorials in the Negro press were rather unanimous in their praise of Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington as actresses, but they expressed annoyance and disgust at many scenes.”  One scene in particular that let a strong negative impact on the black audience was the “once a pancake scene.” In a review by Sterling Brown, he calls both the film and the novel offensive, resurfacing the old Mammy stereotype.  Hurst was outraged by this review, arguing that Imitation of Life was an important to film and society as a whole, showing the Negro as a part of American life.

Caputi also recounts her reading of the novel Imitation of Life and Their Eyes Were Watching God in succession, after which she became convinced that Hurston’s story deliberately challenged and responded to some of the racist and sexist themes and characterizations in Imitation of Life.  There are striking resemblances, from the parallels between Hurst’s Bea and Hurston’s Janie, as well as between Janie and Peola.  Also, Hurston’s novel mocks and transcends the structuring stereotypes of the mammy and the tragic mulatto through her creation of two multi-dimensional black characters, Janie and Nanny.   She then compares Imitation of Life to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. She states that Morrison offers Pecola as a tragic mulatto, similar to Peola; however, Morrison describes society’s role in this worshipping of white standards of beauty and condemns the racist culture.

This article serves as supporting evidencef for bell hooks’s claim about the black female spectator’s ability to find delight in films that negate the black woman presence through interrogation.  The two novels that Caputi discusses, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God are examples of black women acknowledging their presence in Imitation of Life, no matter how negated  it was, and finding a way to challenge it. Through their works, both Morrison and Hurston constructively make use of their “oppositional gazes,” challenging the stereotyped caricatures of the black female in cinema.

Affron, Charles. “Performing Performing: Irony and Affect.”  Cinema Journal Vol. 20, No. 1 (Autumn, 1980): pp. 42-52. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1224970>.

Charles Affron argues that the 1934 version of Imitation of Life does not require its intended white middle class audience to engage in “a textual deconstruction of performance” when watching the narrative. Unlike the later version, in which the spectator must personally redefine the conventions of sentimental expression, it is not necessary with the original film, at least for the intended viewers.  Affron feels that the film is straightforward in its stagings and attitudes about the emotional centers of the text, race and motherhood.  Claudette Colbert, the author believes, can easily be perceived as a model of clarity. She is intelligent, witty, and tactful.  Bea, on the other hand, seems to lacks all of these characteristics, never seeming to know where things are, who people are, and who she herself is. The film’s title bears no reference to Bea, rather it alludes to the black characters of Peola and Delilah. Through master-shots and close-ups, action-reaction shots, and the obviously codified décor, the film reflects negatively on the imitative life of the black women who doesn’t know her place.   However, the white viewer is able to overlook this aspect of the film, too engaged with the ‘white plot’ of Bea’s career success and the failure of her relationship with her daughter Jessie. 

This article affirms hooks’s notion of the “oppositional gaze.” Although it first appears as if Affron goes against her theory when he states that there is no need for a textual deconstruction of the film, the author makes it clear that he is only referring to the intended white middle class audience.  The black female viewer, unable to overlook the ‘black plot’ of the film, therefore, must redefine the storyline and relationships between the black characters on her own.

Heung, Marina. "’What's the Matter with Sara Jane?’: Daughters and Mothers in Douglas Sirk's ‘Imitation of Life.’” Cinema Journal Vol. 26, No. 3 (Spring, 1987): pp. 21-43.  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1224906>.

In this article, Marina Heung argues that the 1959 remake of Imitation of Life, which can be classified in the woman’s film genre, represents a body of work that at least purports to assume a feminine perspective and to address the conflicts and aspirations of a predominately white audience.  The film flouts Hollywood’s typical inherently patriarchal films and deals with issues that are oftentimes ignored, particularly the mother-daughter relationship.  Although the film deals with race through its development of the black-white relationship between two single mothers, the overarching theme is not of race, but of melodramatic elements.  Heung cites Jeanine Basinger’s essay, “When Women Wept,” which suggests that at the core of the film, like other women’s films, is the “rise-to-power” plot. She believes that the film focuses on the white mother’s career aspirations and desire to become a famous actress, which leads to her

Although this article focuses on the remake of Imitation of Life, most of the arguments can be applied to both films.  For example, both works assume a feminine perspective; however, they focus on the conflicts and aspiration of a predominately white audience, ignoring the needs of a black audience. Black women appear marginally in the film, forcing black female spectators to look beyond what is presented to them as what others may call entertainment or “pleasure.”

Smith, Valerie. “Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing.”  Diacritics Vol. 24, No. 2/3 (Summer - Autumn, 1994): pp. 43-57. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/465163>.

Valerie Smith shows Imitation of Life’s attempt at creating a hierarchy of gender and race as a way to manipulate spectatorial allegiances.  However, focusing on the resistant spectator, or black female viewer, the author states that this spectator would refuse the film’s attempt at disaggregating class and race from gender identity.  She argues that an oppositional viewer would rearticulate these connections, thus disrupting, at least partially, the overdetermined logic of the film.   This viewer would question the premise of the film, that the black woman should remain in her place.  Likewise, such a spectator would also challenge the film’s logic. She would also notice the film’s attempt at glossing over the racial differences between the two women’s circumstances in order to establish People’s story as a metaphor for Bea’s. 

Very much in line with bell hooks, Valerie Smith argues that the resistant spectator (her term for the black female spectator) would pose questions and delve further into the text while watching Imitation of Life as a way to gain pleasure through the deconstruction of myths and stereotypes within the film. Smith contends that the oppositional viewer would refuse Imitation’s attempt at downplaying racism so as to propagate more so the notion of sexism to its viewers and make her own judgments based on personal examination.

Hyatt, Marshall. “Film as a Medium to Study the Twentieth-Century Afro-American Experience.”  The Journal of Negro Education Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring, 19804): pp. 161-172. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2294817 >.

The article discusses the significance of film in American culture though its ability to reflect and interpret society.  However, according to Hyatt, a film must be viewed by analyzing it within the context of the atmosphere of opinion of the nation at the time of its creation.   The author feels that cinema offers great opportunities for the teaching and learning of African-American history, believing that students will learn to cope more effectively with their own social roles as a result of having the experience of watching and discussing the cinematic representation of the struggles and triumphs of African-Americans.  Discussing the 1930s, Hyatt argues that in order to find more positive images on the screen, one had to look beyond Hollywood.  Films such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and Imitation of Life (1934) reinforce the use of blacks as domestic servants, using Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers, respectively.  The article goes on to specify Beavers’ role in the film. She labors long and hard for her white mistress and helps her become wealthy, refusing her share of the fortune.  Thus, the film ultimately instructs African Americans to know their place vis-à-vis white society. 

Hyatt’s text suggests that selected films reflecting the diversity of the African-American experience in the United States, such as Imitation of Life, be used, along with selected readings, to teach twentieth-century African-American history to college students. He contends that the film, although it shows marginalized portrayals of African Americans, can be challenged. Once again, the notion of questioning what is seen on screen is discussed. He argues that these various serotypes are as a result of the political and racial climate of the time that it was produced, and that in order for them to be overcome, they must be examined and discussed.

Bogle, Donald. “Imitation of Life: Mother Knows Best.” Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2001. 57-60.

This portion of Donald Bogle’s Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, and Buck: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films offers a detailed synopsis of Imitation of Life. Bogle discuses the humanization of the Negro servant within the film. Although the black woman was a servant, she was imbued with dignity.  On the surface, the film appears to be a simple tale of motherly love and motherly woes; however, beneath lies, according to Bogle, “a conscious apotheosis of the tom spirit and an unconsciously bitter comment on race relations in America.” Louise Beavers’ Delilah is a combination of tom and mammy and her daughter, Peola, is the subversive tragic mulatto figure, not wanting to be white, but wanting the same things in life as white people. 

This reading offers a unique perspective and interpretation of the film.  Contrary to many other readings, some of which are cited in this annotated bibliography, Bogle believes that the racial theme is the most significant of the film.  He argues that the humanization of Beavers, which is a result of a new social consciousness that had infiltrated the motion picture industry after Roosevelt’s election and the end of the Depression, the film portrays the modern black woman, although she is still a servant. From Bogle’s piece, it can be argued that black female spectators are able to identify with the black character in this mainstream film; thus, the viewer des not need to use her “oppositional gaze.”

 

Bogle, Donald. "Black Beginnings: from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Birth of a Nation." Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc., 2001. 3-18.

 

The opening chapter of Bogle’s landmark text begins with a history of Uncle Tom, the American movies’ first black character, and Edwin S. Porter’s 12 minute film, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After the tom’s debut, a variety of black presences arose in cinema, such as the coon, the tragic mulatto, the mammy, and the brutal black buck.  Each were stereotypes used to entertain by stressing Negro inferiority.  Bogle goes on to define the popular Black caricatures.  The tom was a Good Negro character, always content in pleasing his White master.  The coon presented the Negro as amusement object.  There were two types of coons: the pickaninny and the uncle remus. The pickaninny was the harmless, little screwball Negro child actor. The uncle remus was the first cousin to the tom, naïve and comical.  The third figure of common black stereotypes was the tragic mulatto, or the victim of divided racial heritance whose life is ruined because of the drop of black blood. The Mammy, or “handkerchief head,” represents the content, ready to please black female servant. Lastly, the brutal black bucks are the oversexed, violent black men who lust for white flesh. Audiences believed that these Black caricatures embodied all the aspects of the black experience itself, rejecting the slightest modification of these archetypes. 

 

Bogle details the characteristics of the “mammy” stereotype, which are important to be familiar with when attempting to understand why black women would not enjoy the portrayal of Louis Beavers within Imitation of Life. He also explains the notion of the “tragic mulatto” figure, giving the reader better insight into the complexity of the character of Peola. Without knowing the definitions of mammy and tragic mulatto, it would not be possible to fully comprehend all that is wrong with the film in terms of racial issues.