Race, Class, and the Pressure to Pass in American Maternal Melodrama: The Case of Stella Dallas

Abstract

THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella (1937) attests to the richness of the film and to its capacity to illuminate the complex representations of motherhood in American culture. Stella tells the story of a working-class woman who aspires that her daughter Laurel might gain acceptance in her father's upper-class milieu, only to discover that her own lack of pedigree threatens her child's social future. Stella chooses, therefore, to sever her relationship with her child so that Laurel might live as a member of the upper class-a decision that raises questions about the nature of class hierarchies and the possibilities of class mobility in American society. Scholarly analyses of Stella struggle with these questions, particularly when it comes to Stella's capacity to make choices and follow her own desire, for while Stella demonstrates that she can behave in an upper-class manner when she must, she apparently chooses not to and thereby estranges herself from her beloved daughter, an act that seems incompatible with Stella's maternal devotion. My contribution to the discourse on Stella's ostensibly paradoxical acts of selfactualization and self-sacrifice is to contend that much of the film's narrative logic emerges from the tradition of racial passing narratives, specifically scenarios where a person with black parentage is able to pass for white. Stella employs the logical structure of passing scenarios and associates Stella's character with stereotypes of black womanhood in order to present Stella's class status as a physical and inherited trait-a conceit that allows audiences to accept Stella's self-exclusion from the promise of the American dream. drama of self-sacrifice and maternal disappearance in Stella corresponds to larger patterns in American maternal melodrama. Christian Viviani outlines this trend in Who Is Without Sin?: Maternal Melodrama in American RIm, 1930-39, where he explains that in the 19305 the pressures of the Depression made Americans less interested in melodramas set in a romanticized European milieu and more determined to address domestic issues, either by representing Americans' economic and social problems or by offering escapism to a beleaguered population (85). Thus began the Americanization of the maternal melodrama, where maternal sacrifice became a high priority: The maternal melo in its American vein is an apologia for total renunciation, total sacrifice, total self-abnegation (96). Stella's sacrifice of her maternal bonds corresponds to this American model; unlike the mothers in European melodrama, who have their children confiscated, American mothers give up their children in order to protect them from their damaging social influence. I argue that American melodrama's substantial variations from the European model are founded on the unique racial dynamics of American society, where one's racial identity, both actual and perceived, has a central role in kinship structures and social relations. My analysis of Stella will Illustrate how the emphasis on maternal sacrifice in the Americanized maternal melodrama emerges from America's racial history and its corresponding narrative tradition of the child whose social capital rests on the mother's disappearance and anonymity. Typically, the melodrama scholarship on race focuses on films featuring multiple nonwhite characters and directly addressing racial conflicts. Stella may seem like an unusual choice to extend the discourse on race, for although are black characters in the film, their appearances are brief and scattered, to the extent that some viewers might not even notice their presence. Indeed, E. Ann Kaplan, In her seminal article Mothering, Feminism and Representation: Maternal Melodrama and the Women's RIm 1910-40, asserts that there is no race issue in Stella Dallas (133). However, if we closely examine the narrative functions of the black characters, each playing a mammy or Aunt Jemima role, while reevaluating the complexities of Stella's motherhood within the parameters of race drama, It becomes clear that American traditions of racial passing narratives, representations of black women's motherhood and sexuality, and the peculiar relationship between race and class In American society together account for the unique characteristics of American maternal melodrama, and not only in instances where race Is clearly at issue. …