Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Part Three - The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The “Mulatto/a” Vengeance of ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Part One From “Monstrous Hybridity” to Enlightenment Literacy
- Part Two Transgressing the Trope of the “Tropical Temptress”: Representation and Resistance in Colonial Saint-Domingue
- Part Three The Trope of the Tragic “Mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution
- Part Four Requiem for the “Colored Historian”; or the ‘Mulatto Legend of History’
- Coda: Today's ‘Haitian Exceptionalism’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Is incest worse than parricide!—or does that jealous and avenging power (whom in my cups I have so often laughed at while I trembled), decree me just scope enough for crimes to damn me; but nothing to delight?’
—John Thelwall, The Daughter of Adoption (1801)‘The mixed race thus sprung up, as it is now doing at the South, numerous and hated, attracting, yet repelled,—often educated, yet shut out from all the prizes of life,—rich, yet despised—free, yet oppressed,—the sons of the whites, yet unacknowledged in civil and social existence—the son of blacks, yet aspiring to a more honorable position, and therefore ashamed of their parental stock;—ever in a false position, and suffering all the agonies of a wounded spirit.’
—Maria Weston Chapman, ‘Haiti’‘Dans toutes les colonies, ces derniers sont toujours regardés avec mépris par les blancs, tandis qu'ils se croient fort au-dessus des nègres. On les appelle les gens de couleur libres; mais les colons ne peuvent leur pardonner leur origine. Placés entre les deux races, ils en forment une troisième en butte à la haine des autres, et ne savent pour qui prendre justement parti.’
—Gabrielle de P****, Le Nègre et la Créole ou Mémoires d'Eulalie D*** (1825)The kind of “interracial” family drama that had the potential to muddle Theresa's decision to press forward with her revolutionary convictions is explicitly connected to the development of one of the most prominent “mixed race” tropes in all of Atlantic literary history: the tragic “mulatto/a.” The tragic “mulatto/a” is normally characterized as a “mixed-race” person who finds him- or herself depressed, suicidal, fratricidal, and/or patricidal due either to his lack of identity or to her innate, biological corruption (see Sollors, 1997, 240). According to the stereotype, these individuals are often confused about whether they are more “white” or more “black,” and they are often made to choose between their dual identities, passing either into “whiteness” (one of the most familiar presentations) or into “blackness.” Those characters who choose “whiteness,” even summarily so, are normally punished with death or worse, as in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or the President's Daughter (1853), while those who choose “blackness” are usually praised and esteemed, as in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892).
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- Tropics of HaitiRace and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865, pp. 329 - 344Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015