Mixed Race Studies

The Mulatto in American Fiction

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 1 (1st Quarter, 1945)
pages 78-82

Penelope Bullock

In its heterogenous population and the individualistic traits of its various inhabitants the United States possesses a reservoir teeming with literary potentiality. Throughout the years, the American writer has tapped these natural resources to bring forth products of value and interest. Even though the characters whom he has depicted are not always lasting literary creations, they are significant in that they are social and sociological indices. Wrought from American life, they reflect the temper of the times and the actualities and the attitudes surrounding their prototypes in life. One of these characters is the mulatto. In this study the portrayal of the mulatto by the nineteenth-century American fictionist is presented.

Who and what is the mulatto? According to Webster, he is, in the strictly generic sense. “. . . the first generation offspring of a pure negro and a white. . . The popular, general conception is that he is a Negro with a very obvious admixture of white blood. (In this study the persons considered as mulattoes are selected as such on the basis of this definition.) But the sociologist more adequately describes the mulatto as a cultural hybrid, as a stranded personality living in the margin of fixed status. He is a normal biological occurrence but a sociological problem in the United States. In the brief span of one life he is faced with the predicament of somehow resolving within himself the struggle between two cultures and two “races” which over a period of three hundred years have not yet become completely compatible in American life.

Two hundred years after the Negro-white offspring became a member of the population of the United States he made his advent into the American novel. How was he portrayed by the nineteenth-century writer?

The treatment accorded the mulatto in fiction was conditioned to a very large extent by the social and historical background out of which the authors wrote. The majority of them wrote as propagandists defending an institution or pleading for justice for an oppressed group. In depicting their characters, these writers very seldom approached them as a sociologist, or a realist, or a literary artist. They wrote only as partisans in national political issues. They wrote as propagandists: they distorted facts and clothed them in sentiment; they did not attempt to perceive and present the truth impartially. The persons of mixed blood pictured by these authors appealed to the emotional, prejudiced masses. But they are not truthful recreations of life and of…