19세기 미국흑인여성작가의 “비극적 뮬라타”: 피부색과 장르의 정치학

Abstract

Already in the mid-nineteenth century, African American women writers endeavored to express their experience. To appeal to the reading public and disseminate their messages effectively, they appropriated conventional literary devices and the popular stereotype of the tragic mulatta. Such appropriations enabled them to create a hybridized genre of novel that combines testimonials and fiction. African American women authors' representations of tragic mulatta became a vehicle through which they expounded the flexibility of racial identity and explored the possibilities of racial relations. As an apt sign of hybridity born of interlocked issues of gender and race in the American context, the tragic mulatta recurred in the nineteenth-century American writing, as if to reflect a widespread cultural anxiety regarding the (im)possibility of racial co-existence within one national body. By dismantling the stereotypical fate of the tragic mulatta, Harriet Wilson, Julia Collins, and Frances Harper redefine the mulatta's hybrid identity not as the source of fatal trauma that incapacitates black subjectivity altogether but as a viable ground upon which a new black subjectivity may be envisioned. This study examines these writers' literary engagements with the tragic mulatta character and explicates the political and historical significance of their outcomes.