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singing talent; she is described as a white woman gifted with the singing voice of a Black vocalist. Musicologist Todd Decker stated,

"Magnolia's embrace of show business as a means to survive as a single mother is directly linked to Ferber's use of black music to characterize her heroine. Magnolia's black voice thus proves a defining aspect of Ferber's main character and a central pillar of the novel's structure and larger themes. Magnolia's story and the plot of Show Boat alike trace the course of American life across the divide separating the nineteenth century from the twentieth, an epochal shift felt with particular power in the 1920s when the effects of World War I and a series of overlapping transformations in daily life were altering the fabric of the nation."

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