Performing Work
Maids, Melodrama, and Imitation of Life as Film Noir
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2228566 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gwen Bergner (West Virginia University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 47 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 425-449 |
| Publication date | 2022-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/716651 |
| OpenAlex | W4200409744 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
In this article I argue that Douglas Sirk’s maternal melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), advances an ideology whereby Black women are equated with and consigned to domestic labor. The film features two mother-daughter pairs, one Black and one white. The Black mother, Annie, works as a maid for the white mother. Annie’s light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, passes as white to avoid following her mother’s condition. But Annie’s death at the film’s end seems to bring a contrite Sarah Jane back to her subservient place in the white family. I consider Imitation in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of racial melodrama and current theories of Black materialism to trace how US labor practices worked with discursive systems such as the movies to make the “Black maid” ubiquitous and the modifier unnecessary. Moreover, the structural inequality that relegates Black women to service requires them to act as if they are free agents within a rigged system: that is, to perform an imitation of life. However, the Black characters seize agency from a scopic economy of pleasure founded on Black women’s embodied pain and labor. The emotional power of Annie’s funeral, heightened by Mahalia Jackson’s performance as choir soloist, appropriates melodramatic sentimentality and subverts Sirk’s intended irony to convey Annie’s value on a different scale. Sarah Jane’s protest through passing registers despite her capitulation after Annie’s death because Sirk’s technique for criminalizing her backfires. The film weaves elements of noir, including striptease, into the visual register to construct her as a dangerous femme fatale. But Sarah Jane inverts the narrative’s attempt to strip away her whiteness by making Black servitude the costume, not the essence. Thus, she destabilizes the racial binaries asserted by the tragic mulatta conventions. By theorizing Black agency in scripted performance, revealing Imitation’s hybrid genre of melodrama noir, and reconsidering representations of Black women’s labor, this essay contributes to work in Black materialism and Black feminist performance studies
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · White (mutation) · Cinema and Media Studies · Race, History, and American Society · Theater, Performance, and Music History
Scenes of subjection
Whiteness as Property
Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing
“Like I Was a Man”
No Medicine for Melancholy
Passing Films and the Illusion of Racial Equality
Black Wimmin Who Pass, Pass into Damnation”
Playing the Race Card
Comparative American Identities
Divided Images
Femmes fatales
Queering Black Girlhood at the Virginia Industrial School
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |