LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Sample Student Research Project, fall 2003

Ashley Salter
LITR 5535 2003 research project

The Tragic Mulatto: Romantic Journey on the Color Line  

I first heard the term “tragic mulatto” a mere month ago.  I had just begun researching a paper about mixed race characters in and authors of Jazz Age literature.  Another professor suggested I use “tragic mulatto” as one of my search terms.  This opened up an entire dimension of the topic I was previously unaware of. 

I quickly learned that the term “tragic mulatto” refers to a literary convention of near-white mixed race characters beset with a series of stereotypically tragic events over the course of a narrative.  I also learned that the convention originated in the American Romantic era.  Applying the tenets of Romanticism I’ve learned in this course, I began to see how the tragic mulatto is an intrinsically Romantic figure entangled in a quintessentially Romantic story line. 

The Romantic journey is one that transgresses boundaries, whether social, physical, or psychological.  Tragic mulatto characters from various literary periods find themselves crossing all three boundary types.  The literary mulatto’s journeys involve crossing “the color line” – that socially-constructed border which allegedly and artificially separates the races.  Physically, tragic mulatto characters look White, but their interracial parentage is evidence that the color line has been crossed.  Mulatto protagonists experience alienation from both Black and White communities, creating a psychological dilemma.  They are forced to choose a side of the color line, and attempt to fit in by “passing” for White or embracing only their Black heritage.

I envisioned a research project exploring how Romantic mulatto characters cross boundaries.  I had in mind an essay incorporating the journeys of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, mulatto authors of slave narratives, as well as the characters of Eliza from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Cora from The Last of the Mohicans.  I soon became overwhelmed by the abundance of information on the topic and disoriented by my own lack of knowledge prior to this research.  So, I have opted for a journal that lets me investigate why the tragic mulatto myth developed and why and to what extent it persists.  I also uncovered some variations on the stereotype.  I examined literary studies alongside perspectives from history, law, sociology, and film.  I tried to ferret out sources specifically dealing with the American Romantic period in literature or the United States in the nineteenth century.  A few sources deal with related aspects of American Romanticism such as film noir.  The process of compiling the journal gave me a solid understanding of the topic and many ideas for possible future research.

An Online Overview of the Tragic Mulatto

On the web, I located an excellent introduction to the tragic mulatto at http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/mulatto.  This is part of the web site for the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.  The site contains overviews of several Black stereotypes and caricatures.  In this article, called “The Tragic Mulatto Myth,” museum curator David Pilgrim outlines appearances of the tragic mulatto figure in literature and film.

According to Pilgrim, the tragic mulatto first appeared in two short stories by Abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child.  They were published in 1842 and 1843.  Over the next century, the tragic mulatto – who is almost always a woman – was portrayed as self-loathing, depressed, addicted to alcohol, sexually perverse, and predisposed to suicide.  She is also depicted as being unable to fit into either Black society or White, and, therefore, finding “peace only in death.”  The tragic mulatto stereotype was born of the belief that racial mixing is wrong.  Thus the stories of tragic mulattoes became morality tales meant to show that “mixed blood” could only cause sorrow.  Whites believed that to be so close to Whiteness yet irreparably separated by “a drop of ‘Negro Blood’” was the ultimate tragedy. 

Tragic mulatto women are often portrayed as seductresses or manipulative beauties who somehow encourage white men to rape them.  Pilgrim traces this part of the convention back to the dangerous position of light mulatto slaves.  He writes, “The mulatto afforded the salve owner the opportunity to rape, with impunity, a woman who was physically White (or near-White) but legally Black.”  Mulattos are depicted as seductive, Pilgrim explains, in “an obvious and flawed attempt to reconcile the prohibitions against miscegenation (interracial sexual relations) with the reality that Whites routinely used Blacks as sexual objects.” 

Pilgrim believes twentieth century Americans have shown increasing tolerance for interracial unions and mulatto offspring, but does not comment on whether contemporary depictions reflect this with a change of attitude toward mulatto characters.

Mulattoes as Tools of Nineteenth Century Propagandist Writers

In, “The Mulatto in American Fiction,” a succinctly reasoned article published in 1945, Penelope Bullock surveys mulatto characters in nineteenth century novels.  She offers a hypothesis for the origin of the mulatto literary stereotype, and she discusses a few writers who broke away from conventions to produce realistic portrayals of mulatto characters.

Bullock asserts that the mulatto was a tool of propagandist writers, first of Abolitionists and later of both activists for the rights of freed slaves and defenders of “the lily-white South.”  White Abolitionists’ focus on mulattoes played on White discomfort about enslaving sons and daughters of their own racial group.  During Reconstruction, Black novelists argued that mulattoes had a duty to ally themselves with former slaves.  For these writers, “the mulatto is a tragic person only because and only so long as he fails to cast his lot with the minority group” (80).  White Southern fiction writers caricatured the mulatto as “the despoiler of white womanhood, the corrupter of the white gentleman, and the usurper of political power” (79). 

Mulatto stereotypes emerge, Bullock contends, because nineteenth century authors were using mixed race characters to support their causes.  They did not portray mulattoes realistically but in sentimental ways tailored to their own purposes.  She identifies, however, several exceptions to the mulatto-for-cause mode.  Among novels presenting mulattoes realistically are George W. Cable’s The Grandissimes (1880), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1890), and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900).

More Than One Way to Write Mulatto Characters

Another scholar, Maurice W. Shipley, conducts a related survey of mulatto characters.  Shipley contends that a discussion of the mulatto image in American literature must take into consideration the country’s political history as well as literary history.  The very definition of mulatto is entangled in politics.  Dictionaries identify mulattoes as children of one Black parent and one White.  But unlike Caribbean nations, where mulattoes were accorded a status between Whites and Blacks, the U. S. insisted on identifying mixed race individuals only with their enslaved parent.  Shipley equates this insistence on mulattoes’ Blackness with the South’s denial that miscegenation was a common practice.  Mulattoes’s mixed parentage could not be acknowledged without confronting an embarrassing reality of slave history.  After all, the country began passing laws as early as the 1660s outlawing interracial sex and marriage.  At least some of these laws specifically included prohibitions against mulatto-white unions.  Shipley writes of mulattoes, “They were anomalies, and white America did not know how to deal with them” (104).

This uncertainty characterizing white attitudes to mulattoes contributed to American writers’ fascination with mixed race persons.  “Between 1844 and 1865,” Shipley remarks, “the mulatto character became a central figure in American literature” (105).  His book article focuses on differences in how writers have envisioned mulatto stories in fiction.  From Abolition through the Harlem Renaissance, he discerns distinctly different approaches in literature by white men, white women, Black women, and Black men.  In early writing, white writers generally bring mulatto characters to a tragic end, while Black writers explore the decision of identity and passing.  Shipley primarily summarizes these differences, but he discusses characters of James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne as specific examples of how white men wrote mulattoes.  Cooper’s Cora fits easily into the tragic mulatto stereotype, because she meets the expected tragic end.  Hawthorne’s Miriam exemplifies another approach of white men – portraying the mulatto as mysterious and exotic.  White female authors tended to write more developed mulatto characters than their male counterparts, rarely used the tragic mulatto type, and expressed considerable compassion for mixed race individuals.  Black female authors frequently focused on psychological concerns, interracial relationships, and the question of whether to pass.  Black male authors wrote mulattoes who were struggling to embrace Black identity and who were generally “good [people] who simply wanted better” (110). 

Shipley agrees with Bullock that the Abolitionist writers set a standard of using mulattoes to further a cause, making the mixed race character “a pawn in our society’s game of chess” (111).  But, also like Bullock, he sees the stereotypes breaking down.  In the second half of the twentieth century, Shipley notes increasing diversity and sophistication in American writers’ portrayals of mulatto characters.  He cites

“the emergence of writers, both Black and white, who are not only much more socially conscientious, but who do not necessarily find the mulatto a simple vehicle for propaganda or aesthetic literary messages.  Contemporary writers who study the mulatto challenge themselves to find new ways to give the character literary substance.  The challenge is to move beyond history and sociological simplicity – to find new ways of utilizing this most unique American and move him/her into the cultural mainstream” (110-11). 

Regrettably, he does not analyze, or even list, examples of the literature he believes has moved the mulatto beyond earlier stereotypes.

Different Literary Treatment for Mulatto and Mulatta

            According to Nancy Bentley, some Abolitionist literature was already moving beyond the stereotype that was being created.  In an article titled “White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in American Fiction,” she discusses at some length Uncle Tom’s Cabin as domestic romance, Stowe’s attitude toward violence, and her portrayal of mulatto characters.  She introduces the heart of her analysis,

“The tacit rules of the domestic novel, I will argue, are these: for women’s bodies and black bodies the infliction of violence or abuse can be a means by which the individual achieves a transcendent grace or enriched dignity and identity.  But for the body of the white male, this law does not hold . . . the physical humiliation of a white man is obscene in the domestic novel; the representation can only degrade, never redeem” (502). 

This is important to an understanding of the tragic mulatto, because the mulatto male, especially when he appears white or is able to pass, essentially inhabits a white male body.  Thus, where females are repeatedly cast in the tragic mulatta mold, males become the mulatto hero.  The poignancy of the tragic mulatta resides in her exploitation, betrayal, cumulative suffering, and ultimately tragic demise.  But, Bentley points out, anti-slavery authors avoided portraying the suffering or violation of half-white men.  She calls this “the mulatta’s scripted fate” and the discrepancy between male and female portrayals “a fault line of gender.  White male bodies are spared and female bodies sacrificed” (507). 

            Bentley focuses on the character of George Harris, Stowe’s approximation of the mulatto hero.  “In essence,” she writes, “George is too white to play the role of martyr” (507), so Stowe casts Uncle Tom in that role.  She compares Stowe’s approach with that of Richard Hildreth who keeps his mulatto protagonist closer to the central action of the novel than Stowe does.  Bentley finishes her comparisons by summarizing a trend of later African American writers who shifted away from the mulatto hero to a protagonist of full African descent.  She points out that no similar transformation of the mulatta heroine occurred.  She remained (remains?) a passive, suffering, tragic figure.

The Mulatto in American Ideology and Attitude

            After digesting these studies of the mulatto in American fiction, I felt like I had a basic understanding of the literary mulatto.  But I wanted to understand how actual mixed race individuals have been perceived in American society.  In a 1992 book article, scholar Cynthia L. Nakashima, explains the evolving American ideology of mixed race identities.  (It should be noted that she includes all racial mixtures in her review, and the mulatto is merely one of these.)  In the U. S., she explains, race is seen as something tangible and fixed.  The existence of mixed race people threatens to introduce chaos into the neatly but artificially ordered American racial categories, to disrupt the default “us and them” manner of thinking.  Two strategies have been used in the American effort to delineate race – the creation of a negative mythology of mixed race and the outright denial that multiracial persons exist. 

            Multiracial mythology originally focused on supposed biological implications of mixing.  These arguments emphasized “hybrid degeneracy” – the notion that persons of mixed race are physically or genetically inferior to those of “pure” race.  As with the literary tragic mulatto, the mythology characterized multiracial individuals as “depressive, moody, discontent, irrational, impulsive, fickle, criminal, chronically confused, emotionally unstable, constantly nervous, and ruled by their passions – all because of an internal disharmony between the genetically determined characters of their two parent races” (167).  Multiracial people were also considered to be immoral, overly passionate, and promiscuous. 

            After World War II, arguments against racial mixing shifted from a biological paradigm to one emphasizing social and cultural aspects of mixed race.  “Multiracial people were now described as being unable to deal with their biculturality – their conflicting cultures left them torn and confused and their non-acceptance by either or any racial group meant that they were pathetically marginal and outcast, left to be the target of both their parent groups’ anger and hatred of one another” (171).  American fiction has a long history of portraying this kind of conflicted mixed race character.  The tragic mulatto is one example.

            In the last three or four decades, Nakashima asserts, the paradigm has shifted again – to utilize sociopolitical arguments.  In a potentially positive turn, mixed race people are sometimes seen as bridges “between the artificial boundaries” that divide races.  However, “people asserting their multiracial heritage confuse and threaten the boundaries that so comfortably mark people off from each other” (175).  Because people of all races and ethnicities tend to treasure the boundaries that define who they are, this means that a multiracial person is pressured to choose between their racial groups which they will strive for identity with and acceptance from.  If they embrace both or all aspects of their multiracial identity, they are not likely to be allowed to affiliate with a monoracial group.

Not Passing, Just Passing Through

            Nakashima indicates that mulattoes or other mixed race individuals were considered especially dangerous if they could pass undetected in the dominant culture.  Another scholar, Gabrielle P. Foreman, points out that mulattoes who could convincingly represent themselves as white sometimes had to struggle to claim the Black identity they preferred.  She is concerned with “the anxiety phenotypically ‘white’ bodies attract even as they are not attempting to pass” (509).  Much of her discussion surrounds the narratives of two enslaved women who escaped to the North – Ellen Craft and Louisa Piquet.  Craft’s story is titled Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and was published in 1860.  Piquet’s tale, written by a white man named Hiram Mattison, was titled Louisa Piquet: The Octoroon and was published the following year.  Craft escaped to the North wearing men’s clothing and representing herself as a white male planter.  Her dark complexioned husband pretended to be her bondsman.  Foreman draws attention to the fact that Craft didn’t so much pass for white as “[pass] through whiteness” in order to achieve freedom.  Once in the North, she asserted a Black identity.  Piquet, who also wished to identify herself as Black, met some incredulousness and resistance to her racial identification.  These women’s actual choices and experiences are in direct contrast to the convention that mulattas always wanted to pass for white and desired, above all, a white husband and a white identity.

Mulattoes and the Difficulty of Legally Defining Race

            Teresa Zackodnik focuses on the legal ambiguities surrounding mulattoes in the U. S.  She looks at how Southern courts struggled to categorize mulattoes, to define Blackness and Whiteness.  Her examples are drawn from court cases and legislation from colonial times through the 1930s.   Her focus is on “the way in which the ‘margins’ of race become bodily manifest in the figure of the mulatto, such that this figure is repeatedly called to function as a racial borderland that delimits both whiteness and blackness” (424).  I thought her language and thesis echoed perfectly my framing of the tragic mulatto as Romantic protagonist on a journey across borders. 

            Zackodnik reviews the evolution of legal definitions of race and how this reflected an effort to categorize mulattoes.  Guidelines for determining if a person should be considered Black ranged from an inspection of physical characteristics – a scrutiny of skin color as well as a search for “kinky hair, flat noses, and the distinctive negro foot” – to looking at a person’s reputation, conduct, and what race they primarily associated with, to invocation of the “one drop rule” (422).  Applying various combinations of these alternate tests of Blackness, Southern courts often contradicted themselves, because the social system was (and is) built on a binary conception of race.  Mulattoes prove the system to be inadequate for describing race in America.  Inconsistencies are evidence of the impossibility of decisively dictating mulatto identity.

            The earliest legal records dealing with race document a 1644 Virginia ruling that a mulatto man would be a slave.  Mulatto children were first considered in Virginia legislation from 1662.  This began the legal standard that “all children born in the country shall be bound or free according to the condition of the mother” (427).  Later laws provided for the enslavement of children of free white mothers and enslaved Black fathers.  According to Zackodnik, “The colonies established freedom as a privilege attendant solely upon whiteness,” and by the late seventeenth century “any middle ground between white and black was legislated out of existence” (428). 

            Zackodnik quotes a fellow scholar’s appraisal of the shifting terminology colonists used to describe themselves in the late 1600s: “From the initially most common term Christian, at mid-century there was a marked shift toward the terms English and free.  After about 1680, taking the colonies as a whole, a new term of self-identification appeared – white” (432).  This change of identifying terms, Zackodnik posits, illustrates the emerging equation of whiteness with freedom and the pressure the colonists felt to distinguish themselves from a growing colored population.  From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the limits of whiteness narrowed.  Focused on the “one drop rule,” the predominant definition of whiteness demanded a supposed purity, no intermingling of black and white races.  Some states weren’t entirely convinced of this definition’s workability and vacillated between the “one drop” stance and fractional definitions.  These struggles to clarify racial distinctions were not limited to the Old South.  Zackodnik also discusses Texas law which was without consensus on definitions of racial identity into the 1930s.

The Quadroon Balls – America’s Fascination with Mixed Race

            The term quadroon is a fractional one referring to a person with one white and one mulatto parent, someone courts would have considered one-fourth Black.  The quadroon balls were social events designed to encourage “mixed-race women to form liaisons with wealthy white men through a system of concubinage known as plaçage” (Guillory 68-9).  The history of the balls epitomizes White America’s fascination with light-skinned individuals of mixed race.  It is a fascination that can seem condescending, pernicious, and even sordid.  Monique Guillory writes about quadroon balls that took place in New Orleans, the city most strongly associated with these events.  She approaches the balls in context of the history of a building – the structure that is now the Bourbon Orleans Hotel.  Inside is the Orleans Ballroom, a legendary, if not entirely factual, location for the earliest quadroon balls. 

            In 1805, a man named Albert Tessier began renting a dance hall where he threw twice weekly dances “for free quadroon women and white men only” (80).  These dances were elegant and elaborate, designed to appeal to wealthy white men.  Although race mixing was prohibited by New Orleans law, it was common for white gentleman to attend the balls, sometimes stealing away from white balls to mingle with the city’s quadroon beauties.  “The principal desire of quadroon women attending these balls was to become plaçee as the mistress of a wealthy gentleman, usually a young white Creole or a visiting European” (81).  These arrangements were a common occurrence, Guillory suggests, because the beautiful, highly educated, socially refined quadroons were prohibited from marrying white men and were unlikely to find Black men of their own status. 

            A quadroon’s mother usually negotiated with an admirer the compensation that would be received for having the woman as his mistress.  Typical terms included some financial payment to the parent, financial and/or housing arrangements for the quadroon herself, and, many times, paternal recognition of any children the union produced.  Guillory points out that some of these matches were as enduring and exclusive as marriages.  A beloved quadroon mistress had the power to destabilize white marriages and families, something she was much resented for. 

            The system of plaçage demands consideration of economic implications of mixed race.  “The plaçage of black women with white lovers,” Guillory writes, “could take place only because of the socially determined value of their light skin, the same light skin that commanded a higher price on the slave block, where light skinned girls were bid for at prices much higher than those offered for prime field hands” (82).  Guillory posits the quadroon balls as the best among severely limited options for these near-white women, a way for them to control their sexuality and decide the price of their own bodies.  She contends, “The most a mulatto mother and a quadroon daughter could hope to attain in the rigid confines of the black/white world was some semblance of economic independence and social distinction from the slaves and other blacks” (83).  She notes that many participants in the balls were successful in actual businesses when they could no longer rely on an income from the plaçage system.  She speculates they developed business acumen from the process of marketing their own bodies.

Dorothy Dandridge as Tragic Mulatto

            Having looked at literary, historical, legal, and sociological scholarship on mulattoes and the tragic mulatto type, I knew there was a very important area I had yet to explore – film.  Mulattoes and other mixed race individuals are highly visible n American popular culture – from Tiger Woods to Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Bonet to Halle Berry.  I wanted to look at cinematic mulattas – onscreen and off. 

            On the Jim Crow website, curator Pilgrim calls Dorothy Dandridge the exception to the tragic mulatto myth.  This mixed race actress and performer actually led the troubled life and met the tragic end that the stereotype prescribes for mulatto heroines in literature and film.  There are quite a few personal or fan web sites devoted to Dandridge. I read through biographical information from this well-designed site filled with pictures as well as references to further information and links to other sites.  The main page of this site, which is titled “Dorothy Dandridge – a Life Unfulfilled,” can be found at http://home.hiwaay.net/~oliver/dandridge.html

            Dandridge, who was born in 1922, was a performer from childhood.  As teenagers, she and her sister traveled in Europe, performed at New York City’s prestigious Cotton Club, and landed several small film roles.   In the 1940s, Dorothy’s focus shifted to marriage and family.  But the marriage was an unhappy one, and her daughter Lynn, who was mentally impaired, would eventually have to be institutionalized.  When Dandridge returned to her career, she crafted a smoldering image and worked the nightclub scene, because she was more likely to achieve success there than strictly seeking film stardom.  However, good reviews led to notable film roles. 

            She made her film career with “Bright Road” in 1953 and “Carmen Jones” in 1954.  In 1955, she was nominated for an Academy Award alongside Audrey Hepburn, Jane Wyman, Judy Garland, and Grace Kelly.  She was the first Black woman to receive a Best Actress nomination. In 1957, she starred in “Island in the Sun” which Pilgrim singles out as the first film where a Black woman is shown in the loving embrace of a white man.  Later, she received a Golden Globe for her role in “Porgy and Bess.”

            Meanwhile, her personal life was descending into the chaos scripted for tragic mulattas.  She entered into a complicated relationship with the married, white director of “Carmen Jones.” After that, a second marriage paired her with an abusive husband who strove to control her career and her finances.  She began to drink excessively, another feature of the tragic stereotype.  She declared bankruptcy. In 1965, she died of an antidepressant overdose which may or may not have been accidental.

The Tragic Mulatta in a Recent Film Noir

            Onscreen, I chose to examine a modern movie with both a mulatto character and a mulatto leading lady – and a direct connection to Romanticism.  Although Devil in a Blue Dress was shot in color in 1995, it is distinctly film noir.  All the noir signatures are there – a 1948 setting, trench coats, a femme fatale, and cheeky, stylized dialogue.  Even Denzel Washington’s voice overs are characterized by a deliberate wittiness. 

            The plot unfolds as Easy Rawlins (Washington) is hired to find a white woman named Daphne Monet, the girlfriend of a recent mayoral candidate who has just dropped out of the race.  The man who hires Easy tells him, “Daphne has a predilection for the company of Negroes.  She likes jazz and pigs feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean.”  He remarks that he would look for Daphne (Jennifer Beals) himself, but he’s not the right color to go searching in the places she’s been seen.  A scandal involving some mysterious photographs moves the plot along.  The climax, however, is what ties this modern noir to the tragic mulatto theme.  Daphne confesses to Easy that her mother was a Creole and her father a white, and she has been passing as a white woman.  Like many novels with mulatto characters, it’s easy to think that Devil in a Blue Dress can be breezily summarized as a movie about passing, but at least one scholar objects to this blithe summation of the theme. 

Melodrama, an Alternative to Tragedy

            Susan Gillman believes that mulatto characters have been analyzed one dimensionally, because most scholars have disregarded the complexity of literature in the “racial 1890s.”  Works have been superficially catalogued, she says, as “novels of passing” and “mulatto fiction,” a method that reveals an underlying belief that these are not works of lasting literary merit (221-5).  She prefers to call writing from this time period “the American race melodrama,” and she examined this genre in an essay called “The Mulatto, Tragic or Triumphant?” 

“Encompassing literary, sociological, and scientific texts by both black and white writers, the race melodrama focuses broadly on the situation of the black family – almost always an interracial genealogy – and specifically the issue of ‘race mixture,’ as a means of negotiating the social tensions surrounding the formation of racial, national, and sexual identity in the post-Reconstruction years” (222). 

The melodramas are most frequently romances, but other types of writing are included.  Gillman focuses on three writers – Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, and W. E. B. Du Bois.  For Twain, she discusses Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and three obscure and unfinished sketches with what she calls “an avenging mulatto theme.”  She analyzes Hopkins’s Of One Blood.  Or, the Hidden Self – “a well-researched tale of American incest and the African origins of civilization” (241).  She looks at several of Du Bois’s sociological writings.  Overall, she is pointing out alternatives to the scripted tragic fate of mulattoes in literature.

A Tragic Mulatto Reading List

            One of the unexpected things my research accomplished was the generation of a rather extensive list of American literature with mulatto and tragic mulatto characters.  I’ve included below a sampling of these works.  The list presented here isn’t meant to be comprehensive, and it doesn’t claim to be a definitive list of the most important texts.  Rather, this is a starting point for future reading that I might do, and, I hope, something that will be useful to anyone who would like to explore this topic a bit more.  I’ve listed the texts in roughly chronological order, but have abstained from listing full publication data.

Cooper, James Fenimore.  The Last of the Mohicans.  (1826)

Hildreth, Richard.  Archy Moore, the White Slave.  (1836)

Child, Lydia Maria.  “The Quadroons” (1842) and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes” (1843)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  (1852)

Brown, William Wells.  Clotel.  (1853)

Craft, William and Ellen.  Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom.  (1860)

Jacobs, Harriet.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  (1861)

Mattison, Hiram.  Louisa Piquet: the Octoroon.  (1861)

Frederick Douglass.  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  (1865)

Cable, George W.  The Grandissimes.  (1880)

Twain, Mark.  Pudd’nhead Wilson.  (1890)

Harper, Frances E. W.  Iola Leroy; or Shadows Uplifted.  (1893)

Chesnutt, Charles W.  The House Behind the Cedars.  (1900)

Dixon, Thomas.  The Clansman.  (1905)

Hurst, Fannie.  Imitation of Life.  (?)

Caspary, Vara.  The White Girl.  (1929)

Larsen, Nella.  Passing.  (1930).

Faulkner, William.  Light in August. (1932).

Butler, Octavia.  Wild Seed.  (1980)

Mosley, Robert.  Devil in a Blue Dress.  (1990)

Hazlip, Shirlee Taylor.  The Sweeter the Juice.  (1994)

Senna, Danzy.  Caucasia.  (1998)

Conclusions

            At the outset of this project, I knew I wanted to learn why the tragic mulatto myth developed.  I encountered a satisfactory explanation in Bullock’s article where I learned that mulatto characters were used by Abolitionists and later propaganda writers to further specific causes.  This also explained why the tragic mulatto originates in the Romantic period.  I should note, however, that some of the sources underscored the importance of late-nineteenth century fiction in developing and challenging the mulatto stereotype.  Gillman’s discussion of the “racial 1890s” and a separate genre of “race melodrama” is especially relevant.  Bullock’s high regard for works by Cable, Twain, and Chesnutt also draws my attention to the final two decades of the nineteenth century.  Some of the most interesting information I encountered was accidental.  I didn’t realize when I began that I should seek out variations of the tragic mulatto portrayal.  I found such variations in Bentley’s analysis of mulatto heroes and Foreman’s examination of mulattas who choose not to pass. 

            The journal let me freely investigate extra-literary approaches to mulattoes and mixed race.  From those sources came some of the best insights and a solid background that will serve me well for another essay I am currently working on.  Nakashima’s review of race theory is essential to understanding the tragic mulatto.  Guillory’s history was undoubtedly the most intriguing among my topics.  The connections with Dorothy Dandridge and film noir seemed to pull all the ideas together in the realm of popular culture. 

            But it was in the legal reading of mulattoes that I made my most important connection.  Zackodnik’s geographically-minded language and her conception of the mulatto body as “racial borderland that delineates both whiteness and blackness” (424) affirmed the phrasing of my own opening speculations.  This convinced me there might be a worthwhile essay lurking within the notion that mulattoes are inevitably involved in a journey mapped out along the color line. 

            I am also beginning to theorize that mulattoes are not so much crossing the color line as proving that it simply doesn’t exist.  I’m fascinated by American insistence that racial purity is real.  The literature – scholarly and fictional – about mulattoes asserts that the color line and racial purity are merely fantasies of white America.  Reading about our society’s binary categorization of race, I realized why the mulatto stereotype persists.  Americans are simultaneously intrigued and discomfited by mixed race individuals, because they jeopardize the predominant conceptions of racial identities.  

            I was also reminded as I summarized my reading of a story a Mexican American friend once told me.  She was born in a small southeast Texas town in 1977.  On her birth certificate, her mother had to choose between boxes marked “White” and “Black” to designate her baby daughter’s race.  When I consider this incident, which is hardly unique, in conjunction with attempts to dictate Black identity to mulattoes, a pattern emerges.  It disturbs me that American society admits to having only two types of people – white and everything else.  And I know this insight will color my future reading of American literature by authors of all colors.

Works Cited

Bentley, Nancy.  “White Slaves: the Mulatto Hero in Southern Fiction.”  American Literature 65.3 (1993): 501-22.

Bullock, Penelope.  “The Mulatto in American Fiction.”  Phylon 6.1 (1945): 78-82.

Devil in a Blue Dress.  Dir. Carl Franklin.  Perf. Denzel Washington, Jennifer Beals, Tom Sizemore, Don Cheadle.  Based on the novel by Walter Mosley.  _________, 1995. 

Ebert, Roger.  Rev. of Devil in a Blue Dress, dir. Carl Franklin.  Chicago Sun Times 29 Sept. 1995.  21 Nov. 2003.  http://www.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/print.cgi

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