How Does It Feel to Be a Trademark?

Hurst’s best-selling novel of the 1930s portrayed the life of a New Woman business tycoon and the African American maid whose family waffle recipe became the basis for an “Aunt Jemima” kind of product and fortune. Stereotypes such as the “mammy” and “tragic mulatta” are either damaging caricatures or images to expose racism, depending on the reader’s interpretation of the text. The novel’s use of limited point of view works to satirize Bea Pullman’s racism even as the novel looks sympathetically on her quasi-feminist ambitions. The decision of the light-skinned Peola to leave the United States presents an indictment of society’s racism, though it breaks her mother’s heart. The film version of the novel from 1934 offers an interesting comparison to more stereotypical black images in cinema at the time, though some critics still found it offensive.

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