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Rereading Mammy Myth in The Sound and the Fury and The Bluest Eye

After the Civil War and the emancipation proclamation, many white Southerners had a fear of losing their masterhood over ex-slaves, so it was extremely urgent to find a new way to craft new racial orders such as culture of segregation, mammy myth, and Old South myth. These entire methods to keep blacks in their 'place' were throughly entrenched, establishing white superiority as the American way following the Jim Crow Era. Mammy myth must be read as an historically and culturally produced code that is situated within specific material conditions and is interactive with the complicated problems of class, race, and gender. The mammy figure and its symbols are linked to America's racial consciousness. It is undeniable that mammy was 'invented' after the Civil War as part of the Lost Cause mythology, so mammy's character is linked to the 'happy slave' mythology of the antebellum South. Mammy's stereotypical attributes - infinite patience, implicit acceptance of her own inferiority and her devotion to white children - point to a long-lasting confluence of racism, sexism, and southern nostalgia. More importantly, mammy is a multi-faceted prism used to illuminate a continuous spectrum of American views and attributes about racial hierarchy. As a free woman working as a servant in a white family, the mammy character Dilsey Gibson in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, is largely associated with the care of white children. Dilsey who stands between the white home and the culture of segregation embodies the continuity between the Old South and the new southern world. As a modern version of mammy, an ideal servant Pauline Breedlove in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye also embraces and affirms her inferiority. Her unprecedented devotion to her white employer reflects her racial inferiority and leads her to internalize white superiority and lose her true self. Both Dilsey and Pauline show why mammy myth was established and how it continues to influence American concepts of race and gender.