**Imitation of Life

Imitation of Life

Adapted from Fannie Hurst’s 1933 bestseller, *Imitation of Life *(John M. Stahl, 1934) arose from a cultural moment in which women’s stories were at once voraciously consumed yet frequently belittled. Hurst’s fiction, progressive in its exploration of race and gender (though still somewhat steeped in the stereotypes of its time), carved out a space for marginalised characters rarely granted narrative centrality. At this point in his career, John M. Stahl was no stranger to female-driven narratives. Often condescendingly dismissed as ‘women’s weepies’, these films were deemed “unworthy of the serious consideration bestowed on more male orientated genres”.1 Stahl’s adaptation situates its drama within the rhythms and intricacies of the domestic sphere, yet beneath this sheen of melodrama lies a conscious effort to interrogate the period’s constructs of race, class, and social convention.

The film introduces its two mother–daughter pairs through a scene of domestic disarray. Recently widowed, Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert), a white woman navigating the demands of single motherhood, is pulled between tending to her young daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley as a child, Rochelle Hudson as an adult) and sustaining the modest maple syrup business left by her husband. Disorder ripples through the house – a haphazard kitchen, a telephone ringing from the hallway, a child calling from the bath upstairs. Into this scene arrives Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), a Black woman who mistakenly comes to the Pullman home in response to an advertisement for a housekeeper. Initially reluctant, Beatrice rushes off to rescue her unattended toddler while Delilah lingers long enough to perceive the household’s need. By the time Beatrice returns, the table has been set and the room restored to order. Delilah seeks nothing more than board for herself and her fair-skinned daughter, Peola (Sebie Hendricks as a child, Fredi Washington as an adult), to whom she’s ever devoted, and Beatrice accepts the two into her home.

Imitation of Life

When Delilah shares her family’s secret pancake recipe, Beatrice takes it as an opportunity to develop her existing business into a boardwalk shop. Though intending to be mutually beneficial (more so from naivety than any ill intention), her enthusiasm leaves little room for negotiation, and Delilah is drawn into the venture with little say. The imbalance solidifies when Beatrice begins discussing the designs for the business with a sign painter. She asks Delilah to smile, prodding until her expression becomes a contrived caricature, eyes wide and grinning from ear to ear – an almost exact reference to Quaker Oats’ “Aunt Jemima” mascot. Equal parts dutiful and discomforting, Delilah remains frozen in this grossly exaggerated expression far longer than necessary, the moment carrying an uneasy expectation: that in this world, Delilah, and by extension, Black women more broadly, must contort themselves to appeal to the imposed standards of their white peers.

The commodification of Delilah’s image underscores a broader cultural context. Though it’s difficult to gauge the level at which Stahl intended a visual echo of the era’s marketing tropes, Delilah’s smiling caricature invokes the labour iconography of the time, mirroring how Depression-era markets commodified Black domesticity as a reassuring emblem for white consumers and their anxieties about racialised hierarchies. Her likeness is marketed as wholesome, “home-y”, and endearing, yet in the social and professional settings to come, her identity remains devalued and peripheral. Additionally, Delilah’s later refusal to accept the offer of a mere 20 percent share in the business – even though it’s built upon her image, name and family recipe – and eagerness to stay in her role as Beatrice’s factotum reflects a Hollywood that neglected to cast its Black actors beyond limited ‘mammy’ stereotypes, inadvertently (or not) perpetuating racist myths of ‘happy’ Black servitude.

Transcending such reductive portrayals, Beavers embodies a quiet resilience, her calm endurance of injustice signalling a steadfast will to survive, making the emotional weight of her character’s trajectory all the more devastating. Though praised by critics, her performance did not earn the accolades her peers would come to receive, preceding the gradual, though painfully slow, social progress that would make Hattie McDaniel the first Black artist to win an Oscar in 1940 for *Gone With the Wind *(Victor Fleming, 1939), and award Juanita Moore an Oscar nomination for the same role in Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life.

Imitation of Life

In the film’s second and third acts, a decade has passed, and the narrative turns toward the romantic entanglement of Beatrice, Jessie, and ichthyologist Stephen Archer (Warren William). Though valid in its considerations of gendered ideas of work, romance, and independence, the presentation of the Pullman family’s dilemma reads comparatively trivial compared to the gravity of Delilah and Peola’s far more complex struggles. There is, nevertheless, a sense that the Pullmans’ romance functions as a kind of cover – a marketable A-story that allows a challenging portrait of Black motherhood and filial conflict to unfold alongside it, one which the era’s white spectators may not have been receptive to as a stand alone offering.

Granting some necessary levity to the social landscape of the time, as a studio picture, Stahl’s film does make an earnest attempt to grapple with questions of racial exclusion, domestic hierarchy, and the limits of the American Dream. Yet one wouldn’t be wrong to feel that the film approaches, but never quite confronts, its political subject matter head on. This is perhaps most evident in its themes of racial passing and bi-racial identity, which serve as the narrative’s main conflict and emotional core. Though Stahl’s adaptation omits the novel’s explicit reference to Delilah’s prior marriage to a European, the Production Code Administration (PCA), led by the catholic and notoriously puritanical Joseph Breen, strongly objected to Peola’s bi-racial status, insisting that the script alluded to the act of “miscegenation”, in “spirit, if not in fact!”.2

The PCA’s influence indeed permeates the film, but Peola’s existential crisis nonetheless manages to convey the wider social injustices that don’t fully materialise on screen, forming a portrait of a young woman desperate to outrun the social limits imposed upon her from birth. Whereas Delilah clings to an identity she believes essential for survival, Peola seeks to shed the one that circumscribes her future, recognising that her ability to pass as white offers a form of protection. Whether through the shame felt when her mother accidentally ‘outs’ her – first in the classroom and then at her job in a store for white patrons – or at Beatrice’s party where she breaks down before a mirror insisting that she can’t be the “white girl” reflected back at her, these scenes distill the profound toll of living between identities. Unlike Beatrice and Jessie, no amount of economic uplift can emancipate them from the racial hierarchies and ideological entrapment of their time.

In light of its sometimes ambivalent engagement with racial dynamics, Imitation of Life marks a decisive step in the right direction for an era that too often sidelined Black stories, leaving no doubt as to where Stahl’s political and ethical sympathies lie. Nearly a century later, the film endures as both a document of its time and a poignant meditation on the human costs of prejudice and inequality.

Imitation of Life (1934 USA 111 mins)

Prod Co: Universal Pictures **Prod: **Carl Laemmle Jr. Dir: John M. Stahl **Scr: **William J. Hurlbut **Phot: **Merritt B. Gerstad **Ed: **Philip Cahn, Maurice Wright Mus: Heinz Roemheld **Art Dir: **Charles D. Hall **Cos Des: **Travis Banton

**Cast: **Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, Rochelle Hudson, Warren William, Ned Sparks, Fredi Washington, Juanita Quigley, Sebie Hendricks, Alan Hale, Henry Armetta, Wyndham Standing

Endnotes

1. Wendy Ide, “The Rise of the Women’s Weepie,” The Times, 31 July 2008. ↩
2. Susan Courtney, “Picturizing Race: Hollywood’s Censorship of Miscegenation and Production of Racial Visibility through Imitation of Life,” Genders, Volume 27 (May 1998). ↩