Mixed Race Studies

The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 45, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1984)
pages 314-322

Vashti Lewis

During the antebellum years, the near-white black character played a central role in the American novel. In fact, almost all of the novels of that period which feature near-white characters are antislavery tracts. According to literary critics Sterling Brown and Darwin T. Turner, one of the most tenacious and pervasive stereotypes of anti-slavery fiction is the mulatto, usually a female who elicited sympathy from a white audience not because she was black but because she was an ill-fated white. The following description by Berzon of the tragic mulatto—who in fiction is indistinguishable in appearance from Caucasians—is more explicit than that of Brown’s and Turner’s but conveys the same meaning.

The tragic mulatto is usually a woman. Especially in mediocre melodramas, so often the vehicle for presenting the tragic mulatto character. Nothing supposedly inspires sympathy more than the plight of a beautiful woman whose touch of “impurity” makes her all the more attractive. The fact that many of these stereotyped characters are raised as white women—in fact as aristocratic white women and only discover their Negro blood as adults—allows white readers more identification with them than with full-blooded Negroes.

Catherine Starke in Black Portraiture in America suggests that the popular ill-fated mulatto in nineteenth-century fiction was repeated so often that it came to be archetypal and spoke to a Jungian collective unconscious of a white audience. With the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the female tragic mulatto was permanently implanted in American fiction and in the American national consciousness. Turner claims that the image of Eliza, “heroine of thousands of evenings of flight across slippery floes only a half-stage’s distance ahead of drooling mongrels in stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popularized to such a great extent that Eliza became the prototype for the tragic mulatto type in drama.” In 1853, a year after the publication of Stowe’s novel, William Wells Brown created the mulatto near-white female prototype in black American fiction in Clotel, the first novel known to have been written by an American of African descent The popular image of the near-white black woman was later repeated in most nineteenth-century novels by black Americans—in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), in James Howard’s Bond and Free, (1886), in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and in Pauline Hopkin’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South…