Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 82

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Popular Culture Review

feigns the spells. Miss Em’s masquerade us performative. For example, when Miss
Em’s cousin, Melba, arrives and tries to coerce Miss Em into making a will posi
tioning herself as heir to the estate. Miss Em fakes a fainting spell. Miss Em uses
illness as a strategic device to control those around her, including Pinky.
The control parallel between Miss Em and Pinky further validates the sugges
tion that Miss Em is transformed into Pinky. Specific scenes in the film signify this
transformation. For example. Miss Em tests Pinky’s knowledge of her broach and
also her honesty, but Pinky knows that the broach is merely an inexpensive piece
of costume jewelry, and she readily recognizes Miss Em’s intent. In another scene,
when Pinky is sleeping in a chair. Miss Em awakens and berates Pinky, ordering
her to warm a brick in the fireplace to raise the temperature of her cold feet.
Then there ensues a back-and-forth, tit-for-tat tussle for control: Pinky repri
mands Miss Em; Miss Em responds with a fainting spell. Nurse Pinky injects the
feeble, elderly Miss Em, but as Pinky stands by, awaiting evidence of relief for her
patient, she reminisces about the life she abandoned in the North, while a train
horn sounds in the background. (This train horn sound becomes a signifier of Pinky/
Miss Em as voyeur, as it is heard on nearly every occasion that Pinky reflects on
her northern experience. The train horn appears like a signal of Pinky’s voyeurism
into her past when she masqueraded as white.)
Self-Identity
Even while Miss Em is attempting to control Pinky, she is demonstrating her
own motivation and desire to masquerade. That Miss Em would be so preoccupied
with a black woman’s identity crisis reflects the fact that she is preoccupied with
her own identity crisis, in her desire to become the racial Other. Pinky becomes a
mirror image of Miss Em through the nexus of control observed in the character
izations of both.
Though the two characters become mirror images of each other, this does not
negate a secondary issue that the film presages. That issue is whether it is Miss Em
or Dicey who is the agent by which Pinky comes to terms with her blackness. Film
historian, Donald Bogle affirms that the white female is given power and claim over
the black female; he asserts that what is inescapable is “the basically patronizing
attitude inherent in Pinky: the black girl finds herself, not through the advice of her
black grandmothe ȁ