Imitation of Life

Racial Subplot

The subplot follows Delilah and her light-skinned daughter, Peola. Citing her white skin, Peola resists a black identity and repeatedly passes as white, much to Delilah's despair. After attending a black southern college, Peola moves to Seattle and becomes a white librarian. Years later, Peola returns to announce her decision to marry a white engineer, move to Bolivia, and pass permanently. Having had herself sterilized, she argues that the intermarriage will not be a sin because there will be no children. With Peola gone, a heart-broken Delilah dies, and thousands, black and white, attend her grand funeral.

Imitation of Life was both a commercial success and, partly because of its sentimental style, a critical failure. The one element that many white critics praised was the “authentic” depiction of Delilah. Conversely, African American critics such as Sterling Brown objected to the novel's reproduction of derogatory racial stereotypes, particularly the faithful Mammy and the tragic mulatto. Although her image, labor, and recipe underwrite Bea's fortune, Delilah only desires to remain Bea's servant. Additionally, Delilah is the primary advocate of racial hierarchy, continually placing Jessie above Peola and insisting that Peola accept a second-class status. Peola's denunciations of racism offer a counternarrative to Delilah's subservience; however, as tragic mulatto, Peola is tortured by her own self-hate and racial betrayal. Although writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes both initially praised the novel, Hughes later parodied it in Limitations of Life (1938), a play in which a white woman is willingly subservient to a black woman, and Hurston noted that the term Mammy is always derogatory to black Americans.

Director John M. Stahl's 1934 black-and-white film is more socially progressive in representing a single woman as a successful entrepreneur. Relying equally on business instincts and feminine charm, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) first opens a pancake restaurant and then becomes rich by boxing and distributing Aunt Delilah's [Page 1138]Pancake Flour. When Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) falls in love with Bea's secret fiancé, ichthyologist Stephen Archer (Warren William), Bea indefinitely postpones her engagement in order to preserve her relationship with Jessie. Although Stahl's Bea temporarily sacrifices her romantic happiness, she is not burdened with the same sense of regret over the lost domestic sphere that haunts Hurst's Bea. She exits the film as a successful mother and businesswoman, with the promise of a future reunion with Archer.

...