This page was created by Melanie R. Johnson. The last update was by David Squires.
Tragic Mulatta Trope
The term mulatto has been used in English to refer to mixed race people since at least the late sixteenth century. The mulatto as a trope in American literature, however, developed in the mid-nineteenth century with popular works such as Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1842) and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). Child and Brown used the trope to dramatize the evils of slavery, narrating the tragedy of characters who embodied American racial divisions. Both the term and the trope are considered offensive today due to the essentialist assumptions about race that they convey. The tragic mulatta has the perceived purity of white women and the perceived sexual immorality of black women. This version of the biracial woman is completely stripped of her autonomy and often commits suicide because of the threat of sexual violence or actual sexual violence.
Kimberly Snyder Manganelli's Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse provides historical background of where the trope originates. She states, “My study of the Tragic Mulatta begins with British and French travelers’ accounts of concubinage between white colonists and mixed-race Creole women in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue” (13). Manganelli goes on to write that while the British travelers were dismissive and disgusted by the biracial woman, the French travelers considered her to be something of an “‘American Venus’” (13). She argues that the various authors create a voice for the biracial woman without actually giving her one. The biracial woman is defined entirely by her body. One important point Manganelli makes in her exploration of the trope is the idea that travelers resented the biracial woman's potential power to upset social hierarchies. In the West Indies, the biracial woman was able to prosper economically without a problem. Her very existence undermined the patriarchy as a woman independently wealthy and in charge of her sexuality. The writers threatened by her power transform her into someone with virtually no power at all in novels like Sandition, Vanity Fair, and The Woman of Color. Later Manganelli shows how these biracial women in literature were between worlds. She frames her starting point in this way because in the tradition of the tragic mulatta trope, the biracial woman is always idolized for her beauty and physique, demoralized by jealous white women rivals for this very thing, or taken advantage of because of her perceived sexual immorality by men.
Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a character rooted in the tragic mulatta tradition as Manganelli describes it: “Represented as being both white and black, chaste and wanton, free and enslaved, the Tragic Mulatta’s mixed race blood was believed to imbue her with the fair skin and refined manners of her white sisters, but beneath the surface lingered a trace of Africa that supposedly incited passion and sexual wantonness” (39). In the novel, Gaines shows how Mary Agnes is a virtuous woman. Mary Agnes forsakes her relative privilege as a mixed race woman by living in the quarters among the black workers and teaching their children. That said, Gaines also shows that even though Mary Agnes is pretty and virtuous, she is still thought of as socially subordinate, which is evidenced by Jimmy Caya’s denigration of her: “Africa is in her veins, and that make her nigger” (182).
In line with the trope, Gaines strips Mary Agnes of her agency. She has no real choice in the matter of whether or not to love Robert "Tee Bob" Samson Jr., the son of the plantation owner. She knows that the best she could ever do is to become his mistress, never his wife. This reinforces the idea that the biracial woman is completely without options due to her existence between worlds. Unfortunately, being left without options often leaves the biracial woman subject and vulnerable to sexual violence which is exactly what happens to Mary Agnes in one of Gaines's earlier drafts at the hands of Tee Bob, a man who man who claimed to love her. Authors who use the tragic mulatta trope often make the argument that the biracial woman's liminality is her fatal flaw.