The Tragic Mulatto
Mar 19th, 2013 by becprice
Nella Larsen was a child of a mixed marriage between a West Indian father (of African descent) and a Danish mother, so the notion of passing between races was familiar to her. Compared to the amount of literature on Harlem blacks, there was considerably less material on mulattoes and their perception of the changing race-consciousness. Alain Locke, the pioneer of the New Negro Movement, was criticized for “excluding [the] mulatto from the Harlem issue” (Stewart, 16). And indeed, mulattoes were ironically excluded from a movement with a fundamental aim of promoting self and racial identity. Since mulattoes could not claim total loyalty to either race, they were caught in a difficult limbo during a time when racial identification was especially prominent. A mulatto herself, Larsen uses what is known as the “tragic mulatto” as the protagonist of Passing. Tate describes the conventional tragic mulatto as a character who passes races and reveals pangs of anguish resulting from abandoning his or her black identity (Tate, 142). Larsen’s use of a tragic mulatto character not only breaks the Harlem literary movement’s convention of a black hero or heroine, but lends insight on the complexities of identity assertion.