Tragic mulatto explained
The tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries, starting in 1837. The "tragic mulatto" is a stereotypical mixed-race person (a "mulatto"), who is assumed to be depressed, or even suicidal, because they fail to completely fit into the "white world" or the "black world". As such, the "tragic mulatto" is depicted as the victim of the society that is divided by race, where there is no place for one who is neither completely "black" nor "white".
Tragic mulatta
The female "tragic octoroon" was a stock character of abolitionist literature: a light-skinned woman raised in her father's household as though she were white, until his bankruptcy or death reduces her to a menial position and she is eventually sold.[1] She may even be unaware of her status before being so reduced.[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 endures the hardships of Africans 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 features a tragic mulatta character.
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, Clare Kendry, 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.
In popular culture
Literature featuring "tragic mulatto" and "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles
- Le Mulâtre 1837 short story by Victor Séjour
- Sab, 1841 novel by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda
- "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
- Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe (published serially 1851–1852)[4]
- Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, 1853 novel by William Wells Brown
- The Garies and Their Friends, 1857 novel by Frank J. Webb
- The Octoroon (Life in Louisiana) 1859 play, by Dion Boucicault[4]
- A Escrava Isaura, 1875 novel by Brazilian author Bernardo Guimarães
- Iola Leroy, 1892 novel by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
- "Désirée's Baby", 1893 short story by Kate Chopin
- Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894 novel by Mark Twain
- 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
- "Talma Gordon," 1900 short story by Pauline Hopkins
- The Marrow of Tradition, 1901 novel by Charles W. Chesnutt
- The Clansman, 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. (the source material for D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation).
- Summer, 1917 novel by Edith Wharton
- "Mulatto", 1927 poem by Langston Hughes
- The White Girl, 1929 novel by Vara Caspary
- Passing, 1929 novel by Nella Larsen
- Dark Lustre, 1932 novel by Geoffrey Barnes
- Light in August, 1932 novel by William Faulkner
- Imitation of Life, 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst (source material for the 1934 film and its 1959 remake)
- "Father and Son", 1934 short story by Langston Hughes
- Mulatto: A Play of the Deep South, 1935 play by Langston Hughes
- 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
- Band of Angels, 1955 novel by Robert Penn Warren
- To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960 novel by Harper Lee
- A Soldier's Play, 1981 play by Charles Fuller
- Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990 novel by Walter Mosley
- The Human Stain, 2000 novel by Philip Roth
- Island Beneath the Sea, 2009 novel by Isabel Allende
- The Vanishing Half, 2020 novel by Brit Bennett
- All the Sinners Bleed, 2023 novel by S. A. Cosby
Films featuring "tragic mulatto" and "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles
Television movies and series featuring "tragic mulatto" and "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles
- Alex Haley's Queen, the acclaimed television series by Alex Haley, offers a subversion of the "tragic mulatta" archetype, while making reference to many of its elements.
- A Escrava Isaura has been adapted to Brazilian television twice, first in 1976 (as Escrava Isaura), and again in 2004.
- Angel (the television series) featured a tragic mulatta character (portrayed by Melissa Marsala) in its 2000 episode "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been".
- The television series, Quincy, M.E. includes an episode, entitled, "Passing," that subverts the tragic mulatta trope. A female character raised to believe she is white learns that her deceased father was passing all the time she knew him and that she has been mixed-race all of her life. Instead of viewing the news as tragic, she ends the episode saying, "Black is beautiful."
- The television series, Murdoch Mysteries features an episode, entitled, "Colour Blinded," in which a white-passing black woman is suspected in a murder: it is revealed her husband is responsible, and that he killed the victim, her biological father, to hide to his wealthy campaign contributors that she is partially of black descent.
Folktales
Video games featuring "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles
Music
- The 1973 song "Half-Breed" by Cher tells the story of a child rejected by both White and Cherokee society. Cher appeared on the single's artwork in a native headdress, as her mother Georgia Holt at one time claimed Cherokee ancestry.
See also
References
Sources
- Book: Raimon, Eva Allegra . [{{google books |e9jhiScL-4EC |plainurl= yes }} The Tragic Mulatta Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction ]. Rutgers University Press . 2004 . 0813534828 .
Notes and References
- Book: Gross, Ariela J.. What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America. Harvard University Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 2010. 61. 978-0-674-03130-2.
- Kathy Davis. "Headnote to Lydia Maria Child's 'The Quadroons' and 'Slavery's Pleasant Homes'. "
- Book: Sollors, Werner. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. Oxford University Press. Oxford, England. 2000. 285. 0-19-512856-7.
- Book: Robinson, Cedric J.. Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II. University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 2007. 272. 978-0807858417.
- Web site: I'm Surprised By How "Black" Assassin's Creed Liberation Feels. Kotaku. Evan. Narcisse. November 1, 2012. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20121103102124/http://updates.kotaku.com/post/34760797518/im-surprised-by-how-black-assassins-creed. November 3, 2012.
