Imitation of Life: On Passing Between

Hurst’s novel, too, had been a sensation. When she published it a year earlier, she was already one of America’s most famous writers, known for her compelling, readable “woiking goil” tales. Hurst biographer Abe C. Ravitz claims Hurst’s “gaslight sonatas,” often set in the Jewish ghettos of large American cities, as forerunners of contemporary American feminism, featuring archetypal, white-adjacent, working-class New Women. Hurst’s short stories appeared in popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post as early as 1909. Raised in St. Louis, Hurst had been living and writing in New York City for a decade by the 1920s and had there formed friendships with leading stage producer Daniel Frohman and silent-film scenarist Frances Marion. Both were admirers of Hurst’s scrappy underdog heroines, her quickly paced writing, and the marketable balance between urban realism and weepy melodrama in her plots. With her connections to the entertainment industry, and the adaptive interplay between silent film and print media, Hurst’s published stories and novels soon became regular choices for cinematic treatment.

Imitation of Life was Hurst’s eighth novel, and because of the two film adaptations made of it—Stahl’s and the glossier 1959 version directed by Douglas Sirk—it is likely her best-known work today. It is often characterized as owing something of its plot to Hurst’s friendship with Harlem Renaissance novelist, folklorist, and cultural anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Hurst and Hurston first met in 1925, at a National Urban League–sponsored literary contest in Harlem. Hurst was known as a slightly scandalous bohemian by this time, and an outspoken “friend of the Negro.” She served as a judge for the Urban League’s contest, in which Hurston’s story “Spunk” took second prize. Hurston’s writing and ebullient personality also helped her secure a scholarship to Barnard College through the largesse of its founder, Annie Nathan Meyer, who was in attendance that evening. As Hurston began her studies at Barnard, and needed a job with flexible hours, Hurst stepped in, initially employing her briefly as a live-in personal secretary, and then keeping her on for about a year as a companion and chauffeur.

It is tempting, if ill-advised, to look immediately for parallels on the theme of interracial cohabitation between this arrangement and Imitation of Life. Beyond the obvious conceit of a white woman opening her household to support a Black woman in need, it is difficult to imagine how Hurst could have conjured either simple Delilah or tragic Peola from the flamboyant, eccentric, and utterly complex Hurston. Hurst and Hurston’s letters and their writing about themselves and each other furnish evidence to suggest that, despite their well-publicized friendship, the differences in race, class, and generation were not easily surmounted between them. Indeed, if there is a salient way to understand anything like a connection between their friendship and Hurst’s authorship of Imitation of Life, it may be through this inequity and opacity in the relationship. Such gaps are present in the unequal friendship between Bea and Delilah. And while Delilah and Peola’s racially charged plot is unusual compared with depictions in other Hollywood films of the time, as characters, their capacity to understand and navigate their circumstances is arguably limited by Hurst’s own capacity to understand racial dynamics, or to know her “friend” Zora.

Stahl’s body of work makes clear that as a director he was both socially progressive and consistently interested in women’s stories. Already in Her Code of Honor (1919), one of his earliest silents, one can see many of the narrative tropes that would become familiar in his oeuvre, including secrets, mother-daughter relationships, and questions of parentage and identity. Stahl began the second half of his career at Universal, making his first talkies, including Seed (1931) and another Hurst adaptation, Back Street (1932), both of which, like Imitation, concerned the plight of independent white women. His visual style tends toward sincerity and simplicity. Yet as Black feminist scholar Valerie Smith suggests, in the case of Imitation of Life, this aesthetic “‘sincerity’ . . . implicates viewers more directly in the effects of specific constructions of race and gender relations,” underscoring the film’s race problems and limiting audiences’ opportunities to keep these tensions at a distance.

Stahl’s efficiently edited introduction to Bea and Delilah’s “Boston marriage” as the heart of the narrative marks a departure from Hurst’s book, which devotes fourteen chapters to Bea’s life from teenager to widow to desperate mother, before Delilah and Peola even make the scene. With the two-family household so quickly assembled, Peola’s light skin, her attempts to pass as white, and the disruption and anguish these actions cause come to constitute the film’s most central, compelling conflict. This streamlining of the story means that, in Stahl’s film, the white characters regularly rely on the Black characters and their B plot for narrative interest. Nevertheless, the Black characters still receive less screen time—especially the grown Peola, played by Fredi Washington. It is a paradox that highlights Imitation’s profound ambivalence about race and marks it as bearing a kind of insoluble representational conundrum for mainstream cinema.