Popular Culture Review Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2003 | Page 78

74 Popular Culture Review self and of privilege. Pinky’s flight from the South also implied a flight from her past as she distanced herself both physically and emotionally from her grandmother, a maternal figure responsible for her upbringing, and undeniably a signifier of the black matriarch. Pinky’s ambiguous position simulates the “psychological ambigu ity” infused in Nella Larsen’s novel. Passing, according to literary scholar Claudia Tate. If the North symbolizes privilege and whiteness, the South becomes symbolic of deprivation and blackness. However, in the end, this same mulatto woman re claims her blackness and surrounds herself with black children. Ironically, while the film is about a mulatto’s reclaiming her blackness, her transformation is not complete without the involvement of males who, in con structing her identity, serve to validate her transformation. At the end of the film, both Miss Em’s white male physician and the black male physician who propose that Pinky establish a nursing school for blacks, frequent the newly established African American clinic. The film nearly denies Pinky an opportunity to appear without the reminder of the male presence, albeit in the background. Yet, she has completed the cycle, by assuming control, in her own, this time fully-natural, voice. Naming the Mulatto Pinky’s dilemma and trauma are obscured by the neither/nor position articu lated by Spillers, subtly implying that in a world of black and white absolutes, there is no space for one “traumatized” by mixed blood that signifies “the deceits of a culture ... mirrored [by] the deeds of a secret and unnamed fatherhood made known [by white patriarchy].” Since the mulatto is fully accepted neither by blacks nor whites, the name Pinky itself becomes symbolic of her unique subject position in the film. Pink is constructed from hues of red and white and becomes a mixture — a neither/nor. Film scholar Richard Dyer implies that because of the power embod ied in whiteness and evoked by the name Pinky, the film which focuses on a mu latto character continues to be claimed by whites, perhaps further suggested by the fact that the mulatto role is played by a white actress, her fate is ultimately deter mined by whites, and the film itself is produced, directed, and written by whites. Thus, Pinky is in fact a white construction, a figment of the white imagination. Miss Em’s Desire for Blackness Film scholar Dyer gives plausibility to the assertion that it is whiteness that claims Pinky— it is the white Miss Em—who through her voyeuristc gaze of the mulatto, desires blackness. This argument is plausible when we consider that the confines of the social, political, and legal constraints imposed on white women similarly denied them opportunities in much the same manner as black women were disavowed. Miss Em is desirous of assuming the mulatto position, which she sees as a position of privilege that allows one to live in two worlds, one white and