Tragic mulatto
The Tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries. The "tragic mulatto" is an archetypical mixed race person (a "mulatto"), who is assumed to be sad or even suicidal because they fail to completely fit in the "white world" or the "black world". As such, the "tragic mulatto" is depicted as the victim of the society they live in, a society divided by race. They cannot be classified as one who is completely "black" or "white".
The female "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a light-brown-skinned woman raised as if a white woman in her father's household, until his bankrupty or death has her reduced to a menial position and sold.[1] She may even be unaware of her status before being reduced to victimization.[2] This character allowed abolitionists to draw attention to the sexual exploitation in slavery, and unlike the suffering of the field hands, did not allow slaveholders to retort that the sufferings of Northern mill hands were no easier, since the Northern mill owner would not sell his own children into slavery.[3]
The "tragic mulatta" figure is a woman of biracial heritage who must endure the hardships of African-Americans in the antebellum South, even though she may look white enough that her ethnicity is not immediately obvious. As the name implies, tragic mulattas almost always meet a bad end. Lydia Maria Child's 1842 short story "The Quadroons" is generally credited as the first work of literature to feature a tragic mulatta, to garner support for emancipation and equal rights. (Child followed up "The Quadroons" with the 1843 short story "Slavery's Pleasant Homes", which also has a tragic mulatta character.[4] )
Writer Eva Allegra Raimon notes that Child "allowed white readers to identify with the victim by gender while distancing themselves by race and thus to avoid confronting a racial ideology that denies the full humanity of nonwhite women." The passing character in Nella Larsen's Passing has been deemed a "tragic mulatta".
Generally, the tragic mulatta archetype falls into one of three categories:
- A woman who can "pass" for white attempts to do so, is accepted as white by society and falls in love with a white man. Eventually, her status as a bi-racial person is revealed and the story ends in tragedy.
- A woman who appears to be white and thus passes as being so. It is believed that she is of Greek or Spanish descent. She has suffered little hardship in her life, but upon the revelation that she is mixed race, she loses her social standing.
- A woman who has all the social graces that come along with being a middle-class or upper-class white woman is nonetheless subjected to slavery.
A common objection to this character is that she allows readers to pity the plight of oppressed or enslaved races, but only through a veil of whiteness — that is, instead of sympathizing with a true racial "other", one is sympathizing with a character who is made as much like one's own race as possible. The "tragic mulatta" often appeared in novels intended for women, also, and some of the character's appeal lay in the lurid fantasy of a person just like them suddenly cast into a lower social class after the discovery of a small amount of "black blood" that renders her unfit for proper marriage.
Popular culture
- Literature Featuring "Tragic Mulatto" & "Tragic Mulatta" Characters in Pivotal Roles
- "The Quadroons", 1842 short story by Lydia Maria Child (introduced the literary character of the tragic mulatto)
- "Slavery's Pleasant Homes", 1843 short story by Lydia Maria Child
- Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, 1853 novel by William Wells Brown
- A Escrava Isaura, 1875 novel by Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães
- Iola Leroy, 1892 novel by Frances Harper
- The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line by Charles W. Chesnutt (1899)
- The House Behind the Cedars, 1900 novel by Charles W. Chesnutt
- The Marrow of Tradition, 1901 novel by Charles W. Chesnutt
- The Clansman, 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr.
- "Cross", poem by Langston Hughes published 1925
- "Mulatto", poem by Langston Hughes published 1927
- The White Girl, 1929 novel by Vara Caspary
- Passing, 1930 novel by Nella Larsen
- Light in August, 1932 novel by William Faulkner
- Imitation of Life, 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst
- "Father and Son", short story by Langston Hughes published 1934
- Mulatto: A Play of the Deep South, 1935 drama by Langston Hughes
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937 novel by Zora Neale Hurston
- Lost Boundaries, 1940 book by William L. White
- The Wind From Nowhere, 1943 novel by Oscar Micheaux
- The Barrier, 1950 opera by Langston Hughes and Jan Meyerowitz
- "African Morning", 1952 short story by Langston Hughes
- A Soldier's Play, 1981 drama by Charles Fuller
- Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990 novel by Walter Mosely
- The Human Stain, 2000 novel by Philip Roth
- Films Featuring "Tragic Mulatto" & "Tragic Mulatta" Characters in Pivotal Roles
- Televisions Movies and Series Featuring "Tragic Mulatta" Characters in Pivotal Roles
See also
References
- ^ Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trail in America, p 61 ISBN 978-0-674-03130-2
- ^ Kathy Davis. "Headnote to Lydia Maria Child's 'The Quadroons' and 'Slavery's Pleasant Homes'."
- ^ Werner Sollors, Interracialism p 285 ISBN 0195128567
- ^ Pilgrim, David. "The Tragic Mulatto Myth". Jim Crow: Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/mulatto/. Retrieved 6 September 2011.
- The Tragic Mulatta Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction, by Eva Allegra Raimon