The tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries, starting in 1837.[1] 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".[1] 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.[2] She may even be unaware of her status before being so reduced.[3] 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.[4]
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,[1] 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.[1]
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".[1]
Generally, the tragic mulatta archetype falls into one of three categories:[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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."[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
^Sollors, Werner (2000). Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 285. ISBN0-19-512856-7.
^ abRobinson, Cedric J. (2007). Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. p. 272. ISBN978-0807858417.
