Fannie Hurst,
Imitation of Life.
Edited and introduced by Daniel Itzkovitz
Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
ISBN: 0 8223 3324 4
352pp
US$19.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Many of the classic women’s melodramas produced in Hollywood studios were adapted from best sellers written by women. The male directors who specialized in this lowly genre have been elevated to the movie canon and their movies are widely accessible through theatrical screenings, video rentals and DVD sales, but the female authors have been forgotten and their works have been long out of print. You will not find the name of Olive Higgins Prouty or Fannie Hurst in surveys of American literature, despite the fact that the former is the author of Stella Dallas and Now Voyager, and the latter the author of Back Street, Humoresque and Imitation of Life. In biographical sketches of literary women it may be briefly noted that Sylvia Plath and Zora Neale Hurston benefited from the material assistance and professional patronage of Prouty and Hurst, respectively, but Plath bit the hand that fed her while Hurston’s more grateful attitude was undercut by later commentators attributing snide motives to Hurst’s patronage. Finally, after 50 years of neglect, the tide appears to be turning. In 2004, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York re-published Prouty’s Now Voyager with an essay by Judith Mayne as Afterword, in their series Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp. (The series to date includes In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes and Bunny Lake is Missing by Evelyn Piper.) In the same year, Duke University Press re-published Hurst’s Imitation of Life, with an introductory essay by Daniel Itzkovitz.
A single novel by an author who reputedly published more than 40 books (novels and short story collections) [1] is scant evidence on which to base an assessment of Hurst’s literary skills. Unfortunately I have been unable to gain access to any other novel or story written by her. Her work was immensely popular before WW2 but contemporary literary critics heaped scorn on her, dismissing her writing as florid and sentimental. I certainly found Imitation of Life over-written, verbose and repetitive, and the narrative agglutinative rather than artistically shaped. Prouty’s Now Voyager is much more compressed in style, the narrative more artfully constructed, the dialogue and imagery more spare and suggestive – so much so that the film version retained most of her words and images, including the lovers’ romantic cigarette-lighting routine and Bette Davis’ moony/starry monologue. But I did not find Hurst’s Imitation of Life sentimental. In fact, you could say that Hurst displays here a quite unsentimental grasp of the social and material conditions of women’s lives, and the contradictory desires produced by these conditions. The black woman Delilah is certainly a black mammy figure, but I don’t think she is a caricature. She too has her contradictions: superstitious but intelligent; devoting herself to her white betters but supporting black causes; wanting her daughter to be upwardly mobile and yet stay in her place. She is affectionately and colorfully rendered, and her characterization has understandably invited much comment and criticism from recent critics [2] . The white heroine, Bea, is treated more coolly, with quite clinical detachment.
But Hurst’s novel is especially useful in recording the conditions of black and white women’s lives in the early years of the 20th century – before the advent of the post WW2 liberation movements. It is easy now to decry the racism and sexism of the period, some of which seeps into the language of the novel despite the progressive attitudes of its author. Hurst was actually a pioneer activist in the causes of feminism and anti-racism. Her Imitation of Life demonstrates only too well the repressive upbringing inflicted on lower middle-class white women [3] , the limited openings available to white women who had to support themselves and their families, the even more demeaning jobs open to black women and the racist social system which restricted relations between whites and blacks to master-servant relationships. The young white widow Bea manages to become a successful businesswoman in the catering industry, after many years of hard slog in trying conditions, enduring exhaustion, numerous frustrations and failures. She succeeds as a result of tenacity, entrepreneurial skills, and the absence of a private life (no time for family, leisure activities or social life).
However, her success is also dependent on the domestic labour and image of Delilah, the black single mother, who cares for Bea’s daughter and aged invalid father (a figure omitted from the film versions) as well as her own daughter, runs the home, supplies the old Southern pancake recipes that are the mainstay of Bea’s business empire and provides the advertising emblem of the Bea Pullman cafeterias – personifying the happy devoted Southern Mammy. With their complementary skills, the two single mothers form a successful domestic and business partnership but it is necessarily a very uneven partnership. Both mothers are very capable, hard-working and committed to their daughters’ welfare; but they both end up unsatisfied and miserable. Delilah’s daughter cuts off relations with her mother, so that she can pass for white, and thereby gains a respectable professional job and marries her white boyfriend; this rejection is the final nail in her already sick mother’s coffin. Bea’s daughter sends her mother into exile (a death-in-life) by stealing the heart of the only man that Bea has come to love in a life starved of sex and romance.
The book makes it quite clear that Bea has to work to support the family, to provide for her invalid father and her young daughter as well as herself, and that she is motivated to keep on expanding her business, when it is already successful, by the desire to give her daughter the best material, educational and social opportunities. Delilah also has to work but is restricted to live-in domestic work as she does not want to be separated from her daughter. In today’s terms, both mothers suffer unjustly – the novel seems to punish working mothers and to suggest that they cannot mother properly if they work full time.
These women do not have the luxury of choices enjoyed by married middle class women today, but even today the problem of juggling the work of mothering with paid employment is still an issue and many people still believe that young children suffer deprivation if their mother is in full time employment outside the home. Fannie Hurst herself had a successful career but did not have children, so she did not face this issue. Perhaps she thought it was mistaken of women to rate their children’s happiness above their own, that children are not worth it. Certainly, the daughters in Imitation of Life are not appreciative of their mother’s sacrifices. Bea’s daughter Jessie grows up to be a pretty empty-headed ninny; Delilah’s daughter, Peola, won’t have anything to do with her mother because she is desperately seeking to escape her origins.
The issue of “passing” is a major issue raised in the book. Nowadays, we live in an era of assertive identity politics, but in the days before gay pride, the black power movement, the feminist movement and the acceptance of multiculturalism, members of minority groups were made to feel ashamed of their difference – for not being male, white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian and/or heterosexual. To escape that shame, and the overt and subtle forms of oppression that operated in society, many people sought to be not visibly different from the majority. Homosexuals got married, had children and thereby tried to pass as heterosexuals. Light-skinned people of black heritage tried to pass as white. Jews converted to Christianity or became militant atheists and tried to pass as Gentiles. Women writers with serious literary ambitions wrote under male pseudonyms, trying to pass as male authors. In Hurst’s novel, Bea’s initial start in business is facilitated by her using her husband’s business card and passing as a male businessman. Only after the business is well established does it become public that B.Pullman is in fact a woman. Peola is the light-skinned daughter of a black mother and a light-skinned father; she is ambitious and sees that she does not have opportunities as a black woman, so decides to pass as a white. She can thus attend white schools, gain a professional librarian’s position, and marry a white man. In fear of producing a black child, she has herself sterilized. When political commentators decry the dominance of identity politics today, they forget how much suffering occurred when social norms made people ashamed of their own identity. Fannie Hurst understood these matters. As a Jewish child in an anti-semitic society, she had wanted not to be Jewish; later, as a serious career woman, she felt it necessary to keep her marriage secret.
The book was originally published in 1933, parodied by black poet Langston Hughes in a play entitled Limitations of Life, and adapted to the screen by Stahl (1934) and Sirk (1959) into two successful Hollywood melodramas [4] . Both movie versions glamorized the white heroine, by casting a glamorous star (Claudette Colbert and Lana Turner, respectively) in the role, by giving much attention to her grooming and costuming, and by accelerating her rise to success and downplaying the sweat and grind involved on the path to that success. Stahl retained the original names of the characters and the nature of their business partnership (pancake parlours); Sirk changed the names (Bea, Delilah, Peola and Jessie become Lora, Annie, Sarah Jane and Susie) and the occupations of the lead characters – the white heroine is no longer a businesswoman but a star of stage and screen; the black heroine becomes merely her maid. Sirk, as a man of high culture, despised the novel but loved the title.[5] For him, “the mirror is the Imitation of Life. What is interesting about a mirror is that it does not show you yourself as you are, it shows you your own opposite.”[6] By constantly screening Lana Turner in front of mirrors and reflected in mirrors, he stresses her artificiality, her phoniness. Hurst uses the image of the mirror and the title quite differently. Her Bea is too busy working to pay attention to her appearance until, having achieved fame as a businesswoman, she is befriended by Virginia Eden, another successful businesswoman who is in the beauty business. Virginia has lovers and a busy social life and encourages Bea to follow her example. It is only at that point that Bea starts to look at herself in the mirror, to give attention to her image, her figure, her dressing and grooming, in order to attract the young man who is her business manager. She had come to the realization that she hadn’t lived, hadn’t experienced love and happiness, and that her former life was merely an “Imitation of Life”, a life of “petty and mundane routine” (161). So, in Hurst’s case, the mirror is the reflection of a desirable feminine image, one designed to attract the man Bea loves; it is a means to an end. Her new self-indulgent life is not the phony one; it is the old one, the life of the daily grind, with its concomitant neglect of her appearance and repression of her romantic and sexual desires, which was an “Imitation of Life”.
Sirk claimed to have adapted his script from Stahl’s, rather than from Hurst’s novel [7] , and he follows Stahl in providing a highly charged resolution of the black mother-daughter conflict at the end of the film. In the novel, Peola marries her white boyfriend and goes off to South America; she does not return and break down at her mother’s funeral; she just disappears from the action. Both Stahl and Sirk offer the audience an emotional catharsis – and unlock their tear ducts – by having the hysterical, tearful girl make her apology and acknowledge her mother in a melodramatic public performance. Sirk adds three other scenes which underline Sarah Jane’s status as victim: the jarring scene in which she is brutally bashed by her white boyfriend; and the two scenes in which she performs degrading work as (i) a sleazy cabaret performer leered at by ugly old men; and (ii) a chorus-line floozy. He claims to have thus updated the story, and made it more socially critical, but one could question his verdict. For, by making the dissident daughter a victim of false consciousness and an oppressive society and heroinizing the submissive mother, he could be seen to be validating a conservative position.
Freda Freiberg
Australia.
Endnotes:
[1] According to The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (Yale University Press, 1990), she was the highest-earning fiction writer in America throughout the 1920s and 1930s; and the author of 17 novels, over 300 short stories and many film and radio scripts, articles and civil rights pamphlets. (p 554)
[2] See the introductory essay by Izkovitz in this publication and essays by Sandy Flitterman-Lewis and Marina Heung in Lucy Fischer (ed), Imitation of Life: Douglas Sirk, Director, Rutgers University Press, 1991.
[3] Both movie versions (Stahl’s and Sirk’s) omit the story of the white heroine’s early life and experiences prior to her meeting with Delilah/Annie, to which Hurst devotes the first 75 pages of the novel.
[4] Both films are available in one DVD from Amazon.com
[5]“..Imitation of Life is more than just a good title, it is a wonderful title. I would have made the picture just for the title, because it is all there – the mirror, and the imitation…” (Interview with Jon Halliday, Sirk on Sirk, Cinema One Series, Martin Secker & Warburg Lyd, London 1971, p 124)
[6] Ibid, p 48.
[7] Ibid, p 129.
.
Created on: Friday, 24 November 2006