Imitations of Life and Art

The works called Imitation of Life—Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel and its two film adaptations, John M. Stahl’s in 1934 and Douglas Sirk’s in 1959— investigate a series of ideas about selfhood and identity, adapting not only previous texts but also a cultural history and debate about “passing.” Resonating powerfully with novels about passing, such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), this sequence of texts reveals how adaptations display their richest meaning in conversation with other works. Often these adaptations are deeply self-conscious about their provisional nature as singular free-standing texts. The Imitation of Life texts tap into reader and viewer ambivalence about representations of race and of gender roles. The wildly varied responses these works elicit suggest their importance in examining the ways in which adaptations can ignite discussion about differing perspectives on textual and cultural matters. These works raise issues of fixity and change that are at the heart of adaptation theory, as well as of American cultural politics.