(DOWNLOAD) "The Trope of the Mulatta Woman in the Cottage in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Critical Essay)" by Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: The Trope of the Mulatta Woman in the Cottage in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Critical Essay)
- Author : Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table
- Release Date : January 22, 2010
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 317 KB
Description
Introduction In 1853, William Wells Brown publishes what is considered to be the first novel by an African American writer, Clotel; or, the President's Daughter where he introduces the image of the tragic mulatto--a character of mixed heritage who is consequently torn between the two races and whose life ends tragically--to African American literature. (1) Of the six mulatta characters in the novel, there is one whose life does not end tragically: the novel ends with Clotel's daughter, Mary, living in France and re-united with her former slave lover. In 1858, Brown publishes a play, The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom, which also features a mulatta who, like Mary, is not a tragic mulatta figure. Moreover, more contemporary interpretations of Clotel have rejected the protagonist's status as a tragic mulatta. Although Clotel commits suicide, her act can be read, so argues one of these critics, "less as victimization than as a powerful political statement." (2) What is evident from a close reading of Brown's work is that all of his mixed-race female characters are not tragic mulattas; however, as Barbara Christian notes, "the mulatta [is at] the center" of Brown's work. Consequently, also in Brown's work is an alternate depiction of the mulatta: a slave woman placed in a cottage in an isolated setting at the behest of a white male who is most often her owner. This pattern becomes "the trope of the mulatta in the cottage." This trope is repeated and revised, to use Henry Louis Gates' terminology, not only by Brown but also by Harriet Jacobs' in her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and by Hannah Crafts' in her fictionalized The Bondwoman's Narrative (c. 1853-61), thereby firmly establishing it in the African American literary tradition.
 "The Trope of the Mulatta Woman in the Cottage in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (Critical Essay)" by Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}