Tragic mulatto

The tragic mulatto is a stereotypical fictional character that appeared in American literature during the 19th and 20th centuries, from the 1840s.[1] 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".[1] As such, the "tragic mulatto" is depicted as the victim of the society in society divided by race, where there is no place for one who is neither completely "black" nor "white". This trope was also used by abolitionists in order to create a mixed-race, but white-appearing, slave that would serve as a tool to express sentimentality to white readers in an effort to paint slaves as "more human".[2]

For underground rock band, see Tragic Mulatto.

The related concept of the "tragic half-breed" or "tragic mestizo" involves the child of a white person and a Native American. Especially when such a person has a white mother and native father (and is thus excluded under most native tribes' matrilineal kinship from being considered legally native), the same basic tropes of dual societal rejection apply.

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 has her reduced to a menial position and sold.[3] She may even be unaware of her status before being so reduced.[4] 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.[5]

The "tragic mulatta" figure is a woman of biracial heritage who endures 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,[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:

  • 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, 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, 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.

Literature featuring "tragic mulatto" and "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles

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

Folktales

Video games featuring "tragic mulatta" characters in pivotal roles
  • Assassin's Creed: Liberation, the first PlayStation Vita installment of the Assassin's Creed series, has the playable character, Aveline, subvert the trope, according to Kotaku writer Evan Narcisse.[8]
  • Lincoln Clay of Mafia III fits this trope, being of (presumed) Dominican and Italian ancestry.

Music
  • The 1973 song "Half-Breed" by Cher tells the story of a child rejected by both white and Cherokee society. Although Cher appeared on the single's artwork in a native headdress, and her mother Georgia Holt at one time claimed Cherokee ancestry, her dark hair and complexion instead came from her Armenian father.

See also

References
  1. Pilgrim, David (November 2000). "The Tragic Mulatto Myth" (also: ). Jim Crow: Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. Retrieved 26 June 2012.
  2. Cedric J. Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in American Theater and Film Before World War II
  3. Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America, p. 61. ISBN 978-0-674-03130-2
  4. Kathy Davis. "Headnote to Lydia Maria Child's 'The Quadroons' and 'Slavery's Pleasant Homes'."
  5. Werner Sollors, Interracialism p. 285 ISBN 0-19-512856-7
  6. Maurice Broaddus (March 23, 2009). "Worf's Journey of Blackness Part I". mauricebroaddus.com.
  7. "Ziyal, Tora". StarTrek.com. Retrieved 2017-02-07.
  8. Evan Narcisse. "I'm Surprised By How "Black" Assassin's Creed Liberation Feels". Kotaku. Archived from the original on 2012-11-03.

Sources
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