{"id":11046,"date":"2010-12-28T21:37:57","date_gmt":"2010-12-28T21:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11046"},"modified":"2015-07-22T20:24:45","modified_gmt":"2015-07-22T20:24:45","slug":"%e2%80%9c%e2%80%99taint-no-tragedy-unless-you-make-it-one%e2%80%9d-imitation-of-life-melodrama-and-the-mulatta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11046","title":{"rendered":"\u201c\u2019Tain\u2019t no tragedy unless you make it one\u201d: Imitation of Life, Melodrama, and the Mulatta"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2019Tain\u2019t no tragedy unless you make it one\u201d: Imitation of Life, Melodrama, and the Mulatta<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory<\/a>
\nVolume 66, Number 4<\/a>, Winter 2010
\npages 93-113
\nE-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610<\/p>\n

Molly Hiro<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of English
\nUniversity of Portland, Portland, Oregon<\/em><\/p>\n

“I just moved here. My name is Maureen Peal. What’s yours?”<\/p>\n

“Pecola.”<\/p>\n

“Pecola? Wasn’t that the name of the girl in Imitation of Life<\/em>?”<\/p>\n

“I don’t know. What is that?”<\/p>\n

“The picture show, you know. Where this mulatto<\/a> girl hates her mother ’cause she is black and ugly but then cries at the funeral. It was real sad. Everybody cries in it. Claudette Colbert<\/a> too.”<\/p>\n

\u2014Toni Morrison<\/a>, The Bluest Eye<\/a><\/em>, 1970<\/p>\n

Sometimes, when I feel as though I cannot stand this agony, this torture, this scorn, I’m utterly glad that Peola did what she did. Sometimes when Fannie Hurst is engraved deeply in my mind, I say to myself while I am washing dishes or getting dinner, “I wonder how Peola and her white husband got along. I wonder if he ever found out.”<\/p>\n

\u2014from a fan letter to Fannie Hurst<\/a>, 1934<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The epigraphs<\/a> with which I begin demonstrate the remarkable emotional staying power of Peola, the young mixed-race character in Fannie Hurst’s<\/a> 1933 novel Imitation of Life<\/a><\/em> and the two film adaptations titled the same. Yet even a cursory glance shows that Peola appeals quite differently to one of these speakers than to the other. In The Bluest Eye<\/a><\/em>, Maureen Peal remembers Imitation of Life<\/em> for its power to make “everybody cr[y]” along with Peola, who herself expresses regret for “hat[ing] her mother” by “cr[ying] at the funeral” (67). Here, Peola’s fate\u2014what makes the story “real sad”\u2014communicates a clear moral lesson through a shared emotional experience, but in the second quotation, Peola is made to seem far less accessible, her fate far more open-ended. The anonymous…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2019Tain\u2019t no tragedy unless you make it one\u201d: Imitation of Life, Melodrama, and the Mulatta Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory Volume 66, Number 4, Winter 2010 pages 93-113 E-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610 Molly Hiro, Assistant Professor of English University of Portland, Portland, Oregon “I just moved here. My name […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,20,25],"tags":[1066,4808],"class_list":["post-11046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-arizona-quarterly","tag-molly-hiro"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11046"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41861,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11046\/revisions\/41861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}