The Tragic Mulatta in Cane and Quicksand

The tragic mulatto is a stereotypical character that appeared in American literature during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  It is a person of mixed race who is assumed to be sad, or even suicidal, because he/she does not completely fit in with either the white or black world.  The tragic mulatto is usually depicted as the victim of the society he/she lives in, as it is a society that is divided by race. Because of society’s reluctance to acknowledge ambiguity in racial classifications, this character can be seen as vulnerable, feared, or desired, especially if it is a woman.  The tragic mulatta figure is a woman of biracial heritage who must endure the hardships of African-Americans in the antebellum South.  As the name suggests, tragic mulattas almost always meet a bad end.  Generally speaking, 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 biracial person is revealed and the story ends in tragedy.  A woman appears to be white, and it is believed that she is of Spanish or other Mediterranean European decent. She has suffered little hardship in her life, but upon the revelation that she is mixed race, she loses her social standing.  And finally, a woman who has all the social graces that come along with being a middle-class or upper-class white woman but is nonetheless subjected to slavery.  Taking this notion of the tragic mulatta figure, we examine Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, analyzing how they relate their female characters to the archetype of the tragic mulatta.

Jean Toomer was out spoken in his renouncing of one’s race as classification, as he was of mixed ethnic and racial background.  The structure of Cane, a collection of short stories and poems, allows Toomer to not be confined by the standard classifications of the tragic mulatta.  Instead, he is able to tie it into other racial issues and apply his female characters to the classification of the tragic mulatta in a much more liberal manner.  In moving from the black Southern world to the white Northern world, Toomer deliberately passes through the grey world of Becky and Esther.  Journalist Patricia Chase writes in her essay “The Women of Cane”

Through both Becky and Esther, Toomer limns women who bear the burden of     society’s vision of race-mixing. In Becky he is dealing with the creator; with     Esther, the creation. If Becky is reality in the face of absurdity, then Esther is     absurdity in the face of reality. Becky, who is white, is rejected because she bears     two illegitimate black sons; Esther is rejected because she is neither black nor     white, and her mind becomes equally grey. (Chase)

As Chase mentioned, Toomer was able to craft these two female characters so that one of them addressed the source of the tragic mulatta, Becky, and the other addressed the image of the tragic mulatta, Esther.  Because Becky has given birth to two black sons, both the black and white communities reject her.  However, they do show guilt over their reject of her and because of that they provide her with food, shelter, and some anonymity.  Toomer uses Becky as a mirror to show society its own cruelty and narrow-mindedness.  Because she is a mirror, they fear her.  Thus, Toomer is highlighting one of the aspects that define the tragic mulatta character.  A society divided by race does not understand the mulatta.  Fearing what they don’t understand, the mulatta, or in Becky’s case the creator of the mulatta, is outcast.  Esther is a much more physical embodiment of the mulatta.  Toomer uses her to portray how society places those of mixed racial heritage into social limbo, in an effort to rob them of identity.  Esther is a woman without racial or sexual identity.  Lacking color, she has been robbed of her birthright color, black, along with its significance, and is described as having a “chalk-white face” and hair with no gloss. (Toomer 22) She never truly exists in either the black or the white world, all her plans are wavering and unsure, and even her fantasies and dreams are not connected, but rather piece-meal, fragments stuck together with very little connection to one another.  They also convey how she is stuck in the middle of the black and white worlds.  For example, in section two of the story, Esther dreams of a fire in McGregor’s store.  “Esther makes believe that they [store windows] really are aflame.  The town fire department rushes madly down the road.  It ruthlessly shoves black and white idlers to one side … she is left alone.” (Toomer 24) The way in which Toomer constructed Cane allowed him to address the notion of the tragic mulatta, and other racial issues of the time period, without conforming to the set classifications that a tragic mulatta character usually falls under.  This is in contrast to Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, which has its primary focus on one female character, Helga Crane who is of biracial descent and falls under the general classifications of the tragic mulatta figure.

The tragic mulatta character of Helga Crane can be placed under the general classification of a woman of biracial descent, who enjoys the luxuries of the middle to upper-class white woman, but is none the less subject to the trails and hardship that the African American population faces.  The story takes place in a variety of settings, all of which display different aspects of tragic mulatta character, and all of which brings us back to the negative ends the character ultimately faces.  We start off in the United States (Chicago and then New York City) where very early on in the story we learn that Helga exists on the boarder between the white and black worlds, and is thus feared.  “‘If you hurry, you’ll be late to your first class.  Can I help you?’ Margaret offered uncertainly.  She was a little afraid of Helga.  Nearly everyone was.”  (Larsen 17)  Helga then moves to Denmark, where here mixed background makes her a highly sought after, racial exotic.  Finally, Helga ends up back in the states in the South in Alabama where she is subject to the poor quality of life the African American population endures, burdened by pregnancy after pregnancy and continual suffering.  Larsen does a phenomenal job of portraying the strain that one of biracial heritage felt in America during the 1920’s.  Because she exists on the boarder between the defined white and black worlds, Helga is in a never-ending search for her own identity.  She is constantly pushed and pulled by urges from both her black and white backgrounds causing her to move from one setting to another, each time plagued by “the grass is always greener on the other side” syndrome.  Jeffrey Gray, comments on this nature of the mulatto/a character in his essay “Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand,” stating,

The mulatto embodies the United States’ racial question–literally, a question: is s/he     or isn’t s/he? In Claude McKay’s story “Never White,” a character comments, “They     hate us even more than they do the blacks. For they’re never sure about us, they     can’t place us” (Berzon 25, emphasis mine). Much of the criticism of Quicksand,     both early and recent, has indeed set the novel in the context of “tragic mulatto”     novels, in which the mulatto man or woman is presented as a lost, unhappy,     woebegone abstraction. (Gray)
Helga is the embodiment of the confusion that surrounds the mulatto/a figure.  Because the character can be classified as neither white nor black, there is no set path for them.  Thus, they are on an endless search for their own definition and purpose, being pulled back and forth between the white and black worlds that they straddle.

The contrast in which Toomer and Larsen approach the tragic mulatta figure has a lot to do with the structure of their novels i.e. one woman in Quicksand and multiple women in Cane.  Toomer uses his female characters to define different aspects of womanhood and is able to apply different racial issues to different women.  As was stated earlier, he focuses on the issues of biracial descent with the characters of Becky and Esther and is able to address the issue from multiple standpoints.  He uses Becky to portray society’s views on the source of the mulatta, and he uses Esther to portray society’s views of the actual mulatta.  Also, looking specifically at Esther, he does not confine the character to the traditional roles of the tragic mulatta, and instead is able to portray the issue it a more abstract manner.  Larsen’s novel does not give her as much freedom to go beyond the classifications of the tragic mulatta character.  Working with one woman of biracial descent, she instead chooses to expertly portray one way in which the mulatta is seen.

Works Cited

Chase, Patricia. “The Women in Cane.” College Language Association Journal. 14.3 (Mar.     1971): 259-273. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Justin Karr. Vol. 45. Detroit:     Gale Group, 2001. 259-273. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. SANTA     CLARA UNIV. 3 Mar. 2009 .
Gray, Jeffrey. “Essence and the Mulatto Traveler: Europe as Embodiment in Nella     Larsen’s Quicksand.” Novel. 27.3 (Spring 1994): 257-270. Rpt. in Twentieth-    Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 200. Detroit: Gale, 257-270. Literature     Resources from Gale. Gale. SANTA CLARA UNIV. 4 Mar. 2009 .
“Tragic mulatto.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 3 Mar 2009, 03:32 UTC. 4 Mar     2009     .
Toomer, Jean.  Cane.  New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1988
Larsen, Nella.  Quicksand.  New York: Penguin Classics, 2002