I saw the same version of Imitation of Life when I was thirteen or fourteen. I remember watching it with my mom, it was on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) or something like that. I started watching at the part when they are moving into their new house, so when I finally saw Sara Jane and began to understand that she had “problems”, I assumed that the source of these problems had been addressed at the beginning of the movie, the part that I missed. However, after seeing the movie in its entirety, I now realize that Sara Jane was just pissed off. Yes, she was annoying and her self-hatred was completely offensive to me but I understood Sara Jane’s anger. I think that, for many of us, her intense feelings towards herself and her mother and her subsequent passing, were a little off putting. But when I really took the time to try to think about what it would be like to be black during that time (I didn’t have to think too hard), I realized that Sara Jane had probably witnessed her mother being treated like a second-class citizen her entire life. Sara Jane had probably also seen the way white people changed the way they treated her as soon as they found out she was black. I don’t think that we can expect a person like Sara Jane not to be confused and angry. And then when we think about Annie, I’m not totally convinced that she didn’t want her daughter to pass. She did die of “a brokenheart” but I think that she was just upset that Sara Jane had to leave her or wanted to leave her in order to pass. Just like Rena’s mother in House Behind the Cedars, I think Annie was “proud” of her daughters appearance and actually coveted it, which is why she was so attached Sara Jane (in the beginning she tells Laura that she never took jobs that wouldn’t allow her to bring her daughter).

And then there’s Pinky. A heartwarming tale that encourages African Americans of a higher complexion to stay within their communities and do well for their race. Whatever. Pinky is just as angry as Sara Jane but she’s smarter, because she doesn’t misdirect her anger. Its hard to compare these two movies because they deal with two different aspects passing: Imitation of Life is concerned with the effects of passing, not only on the individual, but also their family and the people they leave behind. And Pinky deals with an individual that has passed, come back, and is trying to decide whether or not passing is really worth it. But one thing that both movies have in common is that they present us with a depiction of Black people ( who don’t or can’t pass) that do not condone passing and are actually vehemently opposed to it (not so much Imitation of Life, but let’s just say that Annie wasn’t “ok” with it).

In “Passing”, Irene makes a statement which I think is relevant to the novels that we’ve read so far. She says “Its funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”(56) This element of blacks enabling passing although they may resent it or disagree with it is interesting to me. In Puddnhead and The House Behind The Cedars, we’re not presented with a Black character who is obviously opposed to passing or concerned about the effects of passing on the rest of the black community. However, I find it interesting that in both stories, there was a central Black character(who doesn’t or cannot pass) who enables the passing of another. For example, Roxy cannot pass because everyone is away of her lineage but she makes Tom’s passing possible and although Frank finds out that Rena is passing with her brother, he decides not to expose her secret. It can be argued that in both of these instances, the people who enabled to passing had an overwhelming love or sense of duty to the passing but what can be said for Irene’s complicity? Although her relationship to Clare is complicated and cannot be whittled down to one emotion or the other, she does not have an real obligation to Clare, besides that of their shared race.

I read House Behind the Cedars as a great tragic love story. I know that to read a book that is so heavily laden with racial tensions and issues of passing as a tawdry soap opera seems trite but there was something profound in the romantic relationships. What I found to be profound is that no matter how much one person loved another, or how much they loved each other, none of the main characters lived happily ever after. Rena and Tryon dont rebel against the standards of society and sail off into the sunset and Frank never gets to declare his love for Rena. It seems as if Chestnutt is trying to tell us that in interracial relations (inter-class relationships too) love is not enough to hold everything together and to live happily ever after. Franks unconditional love for Rena will never change Rena’s mind about him, even if he sincerely tells her how he feels. Its a passing thought (no pun intended) but I guess I felt it was worth mentioning.

Okay, so I was thinking about my comment the other day in class. When I had more time to sit with it, I think I realized that the way I said it seemed to be blaming Frank. That wasn’t my intention at all. I wanted to come at the problem from the angle of how the character of Rena was acted upon by everyone else. And I don’t mean to come off as cynical or untouched by Chesnutt’s portrayal of Frank. In fact, I thought that Frank was a kind character and some of his innermonologue was moving. However, I don’t think Rena had enough agency to be loved. Okay, that sounds weird. What I mean is that it seems like Rena is acting out an identiy that was given to her by the situations of her physical person and her town. For example, she looks white but everyone in the town thinks of her as black. And she is extraordinarily beautiful. Because of these traits, she is looked at by older white men as a lust object. (an object of lust because she is black and white men wouldn’t consider her to be of marriageable standards) As a result of these circumstances Rena must always be careful of her beauty. She walks timidly (John tells us this in the beginning of the book) and doesn’t leave the house behind the cedars frequently but it’s hard not to think that in any other circumstances Rena might be a precocious girl. But I guess the point of all of this was to say that Frank doesn’t really know Rena. He only knows an oppressed young woman who has learned to live in a post-Civil War, racist world.

Prof. Parham made a comment in class today that really brought some themes together for me. She said that Tryon hearing Rena’s voice as he slept and dreamt of Rena was an example of the uncanny, of realizing that what we think we know is actually completely unknown or unfamiliar. I was thinking about this before (for my paper) and this brought up an new set of ideas. I had been thinking of the idea of the uncanny as the ability to pass (because you’re physical appearance enables you to be seen as the same). I don’t know if that makes sense but to restate it, I understood the ability to pass as what was uncanny and not the revelation that one has been passing. To push this idea further, in Puddnhead, I interpreted Puddnhead Wilson’s thoughts about Roxy’s appearance (“to all intents and purposes, Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro”) as a moment in which he looks at her and sees something familiar but in the same thought understands her unfamiliarity.
However, after Prof. Parham’s remark in class today, I’m beginning to understand that revelation is key to the uncanny. Because without the revelation, there is no disruption of what was previously believed to be true.

In class today, when we were talking about Plato’s significance in the story, I kept wishing I could speak more knowledgeably about the original Plato. After a few minutes on Wikipedia, I have a tentative theory about the character’s relationship to his namesake. One of Plato’s most famous contributions to philosophy was the idea of Forms. The basic idea is that everything in the sensory world is just a shadow of some abstract ideal. The sun’s brightness is a shadow of the Form of Brightness; a sweet taste is a shadow of the Form of Sweetness. There is some essential reality outside of what we can directly perceive that nonetheless informs the concrete world.

Chestnutt uses Plato to allude to that idea with respect to race. We might imagine there is a Form of Whiteness or a Form of Blackness. But Rena cannot fit into that idea of essential difference. At the beginning of Chapter 28, “for the theory of blackness as propounded by Plato could not quite counterbalance in the young African mind the evidence of their own senses.” It is ambiguous whether Plato refers to the character or the historical figure. I think Chestnutt means to destabilize the assumption of an essential difference between White and Black by placing this philosophy of fundamental essentialism against the fact of Rena. It seems an obvious idea to us in an age where so much discourse arises around words like social construction, but I think the subtlety with which Chestnutt can even allude to that idea points to how groundbreaking and dangerous an idea it once was.