To infuse true pathos into "Mammy," Jolson always envisioned, as he put it, "a Southern Negro boy who... can't think of one human being... who has treated him like a human being".
(At times she sounds like Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in "Gone With the Wind").
Around the time that the Mammy and Jezebel came into the public consciousness, the "cult of true womanhood" (sometimes referred to as the "cult of white womanhood" and the "cult of domesticity") began to develop during the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the United States.
The Road to Tara Museum, in an old train depot in Jonesboro, is filled with Gone With The Wind memorabilia including the original cotton pantalettes from the movie, the ones Mammy struggles to lace Scarlett into.
I still think it stinks, this movie that reduces the American civil war to the status of spectacle; that advertises the masochistic pleasures of tight-lacing – did you notice how often Mammy is depicted brutally compressing Scarlett into her corset?
Prune-faced and bossy, Zellweger stomps into the movie like a junior Mammy Yokum.
She's not quite sure about that redolent spoonful, and she doesn't have a clue to its possible ingredients, which include poverty, garbage, jazz, sex, slavery, and dancing crab demons, all breathed into existence by a slumberous earth mammy.
The book breaks these tropes into three general categories: the comforting Mammy, the lascivious Jezebel, and the angry Sapphire, with the idea of the stereotypical "strong black woman" manifesting in all three.
Other films include The Singing Fool (1928), Say It with Songs (1929), Mammy (1930), Hallelujah, I'm a Bum (1933), Go into Your Dance (1935), and Swanee River (1940).
Her mother -- whom O'Faolain refers to as "Mammy" -- was both undomestic and unmaternal and retreated into the solace of novels and alcohol.
