Does the gaze truly see?: Living Between Societal Witnessing and Perpetual Invisibility
Objective
My research observes specific scenes from Imitations of Life through Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, specifically Mulvey’s notions of bearers and makers of meaning. This work looks at Sarah Jane and Annie Johnson, specifically at Sarah Jane’s racial identity and Annie Johnson’s assumed societal positionality to show how the gaze does not see but merely translates societal narratives. As Mikki Kendall writes in Hood Feminism “traumas of the past are woven into the fabric of our coping mechanism,” my work builds upon this notion by declaring the gaze as a translator. Additional theoretical frameworks such as Christina Sharpe’s Beauty is a Method, bell hooks’ The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators, Saidiya Hartman’s A Minor Figure, and Patricia Hill Collins’ The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships will be used to support the observation of the characters and their told and untold stories.Three questions that build the foundation of my analysis.
- Does the gaze truly see?
- If it does, what happens when one is truly seen?
- If it doesn't, is the self rendered in a state of being witnessed through societal misperceptions of identity resulting in perpetual invisibility?
My research argues that Sarah Jane and Annie Johnson are witnessed through a gaze that looks at them but does not truly see their identities and stories which makes their existence invisible.
MAMMY TROPE
In Patricia Hill Collins’ The Meaning of Motherhood in Black Culture and Black Mother/Daughter Relationships, Collins describes the trope as “The mammy, the faithful, devoted domestic servant. Like one of the family, Mammy conscientiously “mothers” her white children, caring for them and loving them as if they were her own. Mammy is the ideal Black mother for she recognizes her place. She is paid next to nothing and yet cheerfully accepts her inferior status.” The mammy trope functions around the notion that overly excited Black women consent without commenting on how exploitation is used to racially skew power dynamics that suppress Black women’s labor by paying low wages while prioritizing the high demands required to care for white children.- Her very first introduction to the film, Annie is assumed by Lora Meredith to be a “mammy” and not the biological mother of Sarah Jane. This notion of the mammy trope is presented throughout the film and touches on racial struggles between the character’s identities. The audience's gaze is confronted with the looking but not truly seeing of Annie’s identity. The gaze that assumes identity rather than acknowledges identity because of societal ideas regarding Black women which lean toward belittlement, demoralization, or dehumanization. Dr. Hartman poses a brilliant question regarding the identity of a Black child in a photograph while situating racial stereotypes that Black women are subjected to saying “ Who is she? I suppose I could call her Mattie or Kit or Ethel or Mabel. Any of these names would do and would be the kind of name common to a young colored woman at the beginning of the twentieth century. There are other names reserved for the dark: Sugar Plum, Peaches, Pretty Baby, and Little Bit-names imposed on girls like her that hint at the pleasures afforded by intimate acts performed in rented rooms and dimly lit hallways.” (14) Like the little Black girl in the photograph that Dr. Hartman is discussing, it is in the act of societally naming and un-naming of an identity that curses Annie Johnson.
- Annie uses that distortion to create a life for her child, a home for her child. In this act of knowing she is not truly seen, Annie responds to Lora by asking if she needs “someone to take care of your little girl? A strong, healthy, settled down woman who eats like a bird and doesn’t care if she gets no time off and will work real cheap?” Annie is deliberating using the gaze that positions her as a carer of white children to survive not only for herself but for her child.
SLAVE NARRATIVES
The gaze that sees Annie as the “mammy” and Sarah Jane as the “mulatto” can be directly tied to slavery during America’s colonial era. Both Annie and Sarah Jane are the result of the positionality that renders Black women in constant relation to their skin, the service they can provide, and the colonial era, as Annie was denied the right to be a mother and Sarah Jane was denied a mother. Bell hooks in aint I a woman elaborates on the societal position of Black slave women’s offspring stating, “the offspring of any Black slave woman regardless of the race of her mate would be legally slaves, and therefore the property of the owner whom the female slave belonged” The legalities surrounding Black enslaved women’s children empowered plantation owners to largely recognize the economic gain of breeding Black enslaved women.- Sarah Jane is constantly confronted with her mothers race while there are little to no inquiries regarding her father’s race. This directly situates Sarah Jane within the gaze that centers racial biases that are built upon slave narrative such as social positionality being dictated by maternal status.