Hattie McDaniel: Gone With the Wind

Introduction

Hattie McDaniel's portrayal of a "mammy" number in Gone with the breeze, a function for which she obtained an Oscar award in 1940 as best carrying actress, is still regarded as a definitive interpretation. McDaniel (1895-1952) was the first African American to receive an Oscar award.

Analysis

Hattie McDaniel's 1939 portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the breeze set the computer display likeness of the trusted black maid serving a household of well-to-do white people. Known for her very wide smile, plentiful percentages, and ebullient manner, the player appeared in over 300 movies throughout the 1930s and 1940s, almost without exclusion in the feature of maid or prepare food, a function with which she became so identified after the achievement of Gone with the Wind that many of her fans and friends took to calling her Mammy (Lambert 78-111).

McDaniel relished a long and prosperous vocation in movie and wireless drama and in 1940 became the first African American to win an Academy accolade; but because she was used solely in the function of a domestic, she became the object of strong condemnation from progressive blacks in the 1940s. By the time she appeared in Gone with the Wind, McDaniel had broadened her portrait of the Mammy function, endowing the feature with an earthy, all-knowing sensibility and consigning her lines with saucy self-assurance. But, apprehended between the demands of two heritage, McDaniel became embittered by the attacks on her integrity made by the black intelligentsia, and when she past away in 1952 the role of Mammy pretty well died with her (Vertrees, 45-117).

Hattie McDaniel was born in 1895, in Wichita, Kansas, the thirteenth child in a family of performers. Her dad, Henry McDaniel, directed a varied life as a Baptist minister, carpenter, banjo contestant, and minstrel showman, eventually organizing his own family into a minstrel troupe. Henry married a gospel singer named Susan Holbert in 1875 and moved their growing family to Denver, Colorado, in 1901 (Wood, 123-36).

McDaniel was one of only two black children in her elementary school class in Denver. Racial prejudice was less virulent in the West than elsewhere in the joined States, and she became certain thing of a very popular at the 24th Street Elementary School for her talents as a vocalist and reciter of poetry. Even as a progeny, according to a note in writing to Hattie years subsequent by her educator, "you had an outstanding dramatic proficiency, an proficiency to task to your listeners your strong character and your ever present sense of humor." McDaniel sang at place of worship, at school, and at dwelling; she sang so continuously that her mother reportedly bribed her into silence with replacement change. Before long she was also singing in professional minstrel shows, as well as dancing, performing humorous skits, and later writing her own songs (Leff, pp. 146-64).

In 1910 McDaniel left school in her sophomore year and became a full-time minstrel entertainer, traveling the western states with her father's Henry McDaniel ...