Tragic mulatto

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Tragic mulatto is a myth describing an archetypical mulatto person or fictional character, who is assumed to be sad or even suicidal because he/she is caught between the two poles of the White and Black worlds without fully belonging to/being accepted by either of them, trapped in a permanent state of liminality. The tragic mulatto is the victim of the society he/she lives in, a society divided by race; thus allowing no middle ground, no intermediate space which often leaves this character particularly vulnerable. One purpose for creating this archetype in films and novels may have been to discourage people from marrying interracially and having biracial children.

Today's mulattos themselves are divided as to whether they have to face particular difficulties. Some completely reject the idea while others don't. The environment seems to be one of the key factors. Even Halle Berry recently told the press that she spent most of her life "trying to fit in". On the other hand others like Rebecca Walker in her memoir "Black, Jewish, Other," continually states, "I was a Civil Rights Movement baby; I am not tragic." Multiracial writers and activists also have worked hard to challenge this trope.

The tragic mulatta is a stock character that appeared primarily in American fiction before the American Civil War. Literary critics sometimes distinguish the tragic mulatta from the tragic mulatto in that the latter encompasses a broader definition that includes characters suffering from a sort of biracial angst, while the former term applies specifically to the female characters existing during the time period in which the presence of "negro blood" would result in legally sanctioned restrictions.

This figure is a woman of biracial heritage, a mulatta, who must endure the hardships of African-Americans in the antebellum South, even though she may look white enough that her ethnicity is not readily apparent. As the name implies, tragic mulattas almost always meet a bad end. Lydia Marie Child's 1842 short story "The Quadroons" is generally credited as the first work of literature to feature a tragic mulatta, allegedly in an effort to garner support for emancipation and equal rights. 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 character appeared in numerous subsequent works, and later in film as well.

Generally, tragic mulattas fall 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 mulatta is revealed and the woman ends in tragedy.
A woman appears white and believed she is Greek or Spanish. She has suffered little hardship in her life, but upon the revelation that she is a mulatta, she loses her social standing.
A woman who has all the social graces of 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, also, 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.

The passing character in Nella Larsen's "Passing" has been deemed a tragic mulatta because she is torn in-between two very different worlds, her affinities being with both of them. American pianist and child prodigy Philippa Schuyler also experienced a similar situation. Her life reflected the dilemma of being caught in-between well. She spent most of her adult life travelling searching for a "home" and trying to "fit in somewhere". In Latin America she found her situation to be easier and finally adopted an Hispanic American identity by changing her name to Philippa Schuyler y Montero.