The Mammy Archetype: A Black Maiden Syndrome
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“Octavia Spencer has played a maid, nurse or cleaner a total of 21 times, including in two of her three Oscar-nominated performances.”
“Maybe the most important thing to know about mammy, though, is that she never actually existed. As evidenced in the research of historians including Cheryl Thurber and Patricia Turner, while the care of white children in the antebellum US South was sometimes entrusted to enslaved people, these ‘house slaves’ were typically light-skinned teenage girls (conditions for enslaved black women were, in any case, so harsh that 90 per cent died before their 50th birthday). Given the poor diet available to slaves, they were also highly unlikely to have been either fat or jolly. All this, according to the psychologist Chanequa Walker-Barnes, “affirms that Mammy was a largely mythical figure with little basis in the lived experiences of Black women.”
A creation of White supremacy
Indeed, as Thurber has noted, literary depictions of the mammy peaked several decades after slavery, in nostalgic memoirs of the Old South written between 1906 and 1912. Along with other ‘controlling images’ of African-Americans such as the Sambo, the Jezebel and the Sapphire, the mammy was a creation of White supremacy, intended to bolster and legitimise the status quo. Or, put more simply, the US were so desperate to be absolved of the crimes of slavery, that such an absolver — maternal, asexual, ever-loyal and Black — had to be invented.
Mammy fulfilled her soothing function so well, that she was allowed to stay on long after the children had grown up and supposedly moved on. Even now, it’s practically impossible for any Black actress who isn’t Halle Berry to forge a career without playing a few mammy roles – a fact which speaks of the still-shameful lack of black women in behind-the-scenes positions of power in the film industry, says Kali Gross, a Rutgers University history professor and ABWH member. “We need to be in the room at every level when projects involving us are being considered (as well as being involved on ones that aren’t about us) and black women have to be in positions to offer critical feedback without fear of retaliation.”
~Media Depictions of the Mammy Archetype~
Many movies still cast African-Americans in roles of service, but some break the mold.
“Although “The Help” was a hit, that didn’t mean some readers — and viewers — didn’t hit back. Both the book and the movie drew fire for relying on crude humor, a White character and heavily accented “Black” dialogue. Yet “The Help” was practically “Do the Right Thing,” compared with the way earlier movies treated African-American domestics.
Men always got the worst of it, probably because Black masculinity always threatens White bigots. Black men appearing as servants were servile, too — or frightened children or sleepy loafers. There were exceptions, often personal ones (Jack Benny was genuinely fond of Eddie “Rochester” Anderson). But it was a small exception. Black butlers and chauffeurs — until “Driving Miss Daisy” — were minor characters anyway, saved for crude comedy.
African-American women were more visible, yet were still stereotyped — usually as large, loud, mothering figures, stubbornly babying their charges through adulthood. (In 1939’s “Gone With the Wind,” Mammy stays on, even after Emancipation.) But because maids tended to figure in “women’s pictures” — films revolving around love, children and other intimate subjects — the African-American characters were shown, if not as equals, than at least as real women. In many ways, Mammy is even Scarlett’s superior in “Gone With the Wind” — she sees through her wiles and better understands society’s mores (“It ain’t fittin’, it just ain’t fittin,’ ” is Hattie McDaniel’s usual harrumph of disapproval). But the character has no life of her own.
More equal is the relationship in 1934’s “Imitation of Life.” Both Louise Beavers’ Delilah and Claudette Colbert’s Bea are struggling young mothers. They even start an Atlantic City restaurant together, selling pancakes on the boardwalk. To modern audiences, the film’s relationship can feel unequal, despite its acknowledgement of race and racism. (Bea keeps 80 percent of the company, and Delilah stays on as her maid.) But ’30s films were not made for modern audiences — and at least they occasionally portrayed black women as warm, strong survivors.
They helped the actresses who played them, too — as McDaniel later snapped, in the face of criticism, “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week than be a maid for $7.” (Still, after McDaniel won her Oscar for “Gone With the Wind” — the first for an African-American –— she returned to her seat at the back of the ballroom.) As the Civil Rights movement grew, Black servants faded from movies and television, replaced by other stereotypes — blustery Irish battle-axes, Asian “houseboys,” British “gentlemen’s gentlemen.” It was easier to switch the old caricature than confront it.
But eventually the pendulum swung back — or seemed to. African-Americans now playing domestics were no longer treated like children, or made to speak in malapropisms. They emerged as real people, with a sense of dignity as well as duty. Yet — just like Delilah and Mammy — they remained selflessly dedicated to serving. These days, the characters are rarely servants, per se. Whoopi Goldberg is a nurse in “Girl, Interrupted,” Will Smith a cosmic caddy in “The Legend of Bagger Vance.” But, like Morgan Freeman’s chauffeur in “Driving Miss Daisy,” they exist for one purpose — to magically appear, clean up the White folks’ messes and firmly set them straight. “Corrina, Corrina” offered a small corrective in 1994. Set in 1959, it’s about a widower who hires Whoopi Goldberg as a nanny for his grieving little girl. This nanny has an independent mind, a college degree and no patience for people who talk down to her. She has a rich life outside her job, going to smoky jazz clubs and feeling the spirit at her church. She may be an employee, but she’s nobody’s servant.
It was a breakthrough in the depiction of domestics and the idea that provides the real heart of “The Help.”Viola Davis’ character, with the daily pains visited upon her, drives that movie — bound to her charges with affection, yet knowing they will one day look at her with condescension, when they deign to see her at all.”
– swhitty@starledger.com
~*~
“... literary depictions of the mammy peaked several decades after slavery, in nostalgic memoirs of the Old South written between 1906 and 1912. Along with other ‘controlling images’ of African-Americans such as the Sambo, the Jezebel and the Sapphire, the mammy was a creation of white supremacy, intended to bolster and legitimise the status quo. Or, put more simply, the US were so desperate to be absolved of the crimes of slavery, that such an absolver — maternal, asexual, ever-loyal and Black — had to be invented.” – BBC
