Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction

4. Tragic Mulattas: Inventing Black Womanhood

93 4 Tragic Mulattas Inventing Black Womanhood J ust as Harriet Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson use motherhood as a means to combat the dehumanization of slavery and racism, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline Hopkins employ a maternal consciousness to engender their protagonists. Under the rubric of the sentimental novel, Harper and Hopkins address the stereotype of the promiscuous black woman. However, like Wilson, these writers reconfigure the sentimental novel formula to better address their racial concerns. Their particular adaptations may also be read as a means of talking back to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While many later writers revise and extend the work of their predecessors, Harper and Hopkins, clearly interact with Stowe in a call and response fashion. Like Jacobs and Wilson, they share Stowe’s maternal consciousness, but they envision a different unfolding of this consciousness that is explicitly 94 Women in Chains racialized. Harper’s Iola Leroy and Hopkins’ Contending Forces, like Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents respond to the exclusion of black women from the cult of true womanhood, but unlike Jacobs, Harper and Hopkins seek to include black women within this idea of womanhood , while Jacobs attempts to dismantle the ideology. Despite this difference, Iola Leroy and Contending Forces remain critical of the exclusionary nature of the cult of true womanhood. Harper and Hopkins address this omission by depicting their protagonists as mothers or mother figures, who by virtue of their maternity or maternal consciousness must be considered true women. Writers such as Harper and Hopkins, who wrote after Reconstruction , were still affected by the legacy of slavery. Despite previous efforts to rescue the black woman’s good name from the stereotypes developed during slavery, myths of the black woman’s illicit sexuality persisted. Although the end of the Civil War brought the end of slavery, it did not eradicate a racist mindset. Technically the slaves were freed, but emancipation did not guarantee gender perrogatives; many whites continued to deny African American males and females the status associated with the titles “men” and “women.” This resistance led some writers to address the issue in their writing . While some scholars have interpreted African-American writers ’ preoccupation with issues of sexual purity as a means of emulating white standards, Catherine Clinton argues black women’s pursuit of respectability and virtue was foremost an issue of survival .1 Both Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900) respond to negative portrayals of black womanhood through their reworking of the tragic mulatta figure. Although the use of the mulatta character by black writers is often disparged as merely an attempt to placate a white readership , these writers deploy the mulatta to question racial and gender contructs. In both novels, mulatta characters are subjected to sexual assaults on the basis of their race. One moment Iola is a respected white woman of the planter aristocracy, but upon learning of her black blood, she is relegated to the status of sexual object for which no indignity is too great. Grace suffers through a similar experience in Contending Forces; she is transformed to sexual object only when her race is questioned. In both these texts, the Tragic Mulattas 95 mulatta illustrates the interconnection of race and gender constructs. This mulatta character is used as a figure of mediation to reveal that even black women are true women. Unlike the stereotypical tragic mulatta, these women do not bemoan their mixed blood or desire acceptance by white society. For Grace, this is not an issue because her actual race remains ambiguous, but both Iola and Sappho, also of Contending Forces, do not take the opportunity to pass despite their ability to do so. The issue of passing will be taken up later, but I wish to call attention to the complexity of both writers’ use of the mulatta. Rather than use the white blood of their protagonists as an inroad to respectability and true womanhood, Harper and Hopkins employ maternal ideology. Iola and Sappho are both presented as caring, nurturing women. Although Iola does not become a mother during the course of the novel and Sappho is separted from her child for most of the book, both women are shown caring and providing for the larger black community as mother figures. Thus while motherhood is not as central to these texts as that of Jacobs’ and Wilson’s, the black woman is...