Passing and Trespassing in Stahl and Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1934; 1959)

In their 1934 and 1959 screen adaptations of Fanny Hurst’s novel Imitation of Life (1933), John Stahl and Douglas Sirk both seize on the notions of passing and trespassing to toy with the tension between America’s democratic dream and the dissenting voice of melodrama. As a genre, melodrama seems to operate as the nation’s vernacular discourse, a “major force of moral reasoning in American mass culture.” The peculiarity of the melodramatic mode is to bring to the fore what Linda Williams ref...