When William Wells Brown wrote Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter in 1853, it appeared he had a goal in mind: to expose the tyrannies, cruelties, and bare-faced hypocrisy of slavery as an institution. In a land of churches, there on an auction block stands Clotel, the radiant daughter of a slave mother and an unnamed white father (presumed to be Thomas Jefferson). She is so near-white that the white persons in the room could mistake her for one of their own daughters. Yet, she is a slave by virtue of "one drop" of African American blood.
"Why stands she near the auction stand,
That girl so young and fair?
What brings her to this dismal place,
Why stands she weeping there?"
(Clotel, Chapter One)
The "Tragic Mulatta" as a term has understandably fallen into disrepute of late, in light of Critical Race Theory, and of many other identity-based dialogues involving biracial, or individuals of mixed heritage. It has been labeled a "stereotype," an item of "anti-black imagery," "outdated," and "offensive" (Google Search). Historicists might agree that, in his time, William Wells Brown was working with (but mostly against) the popular terms of the time associated with miscegenation--the term applied to interracial sexual relations. His evident mission was not to champion, but to challenge those terms, and to create a compelling image of the sufferings endured by womanhood in servitude to a callous, cruel, and despicable institution. In so doing, he added to his project the tearing down of the hypocrisy of the day: a woman placed on an auction block to be sold on the bases of her beauty, Christianity, purity, and grace--but "fit for a fancy girl" for any taker. It does not escape even the presentist that this scene was a jibe at the predatory white male who simultaneously boasted his morality, his devout Christianity, while seeking out a sixteen-year-old child-woman of color to serve as his whore. The narrator makes this hypocrisy--and his repulsion of it--clear, when he remarks "Reader, when you take into consideration the fact, that amongst the slave population no safeguard is thrown around virtue, and no inducement held out to slave women to be chaste, you will not be surprised when we tell you that immorality and vice pervade the cities of the Southern States in a manner unknown in the cities and towns of the Northern States. Indeed most of the slave women have no higher aspirations than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man" (Clotel Chapter One). Even in the understated and genteel syntax of the Victorian writer, Brown makes his point clear.
The "Tragic Mulatta" in this discussion, is a literary trope, or theme, that Brown introduced when he invented the characters of Currer, Althesa, and Clotel. This character serves to dramatize the impact upon black women who were prematurely sexualized, torn from their families, and trafficked for the pleasure of white males. Yet, they existed within a system that even such a fate was better than being sold as chattel.
The "Fancy Girl Balls" of the eighteenth and nineteenth century reveal how young women of mixed race were sold into sexual servitude under a system called "placage." Mothers, eager to see their female children escape the fates of some women as breeders, field hands, or even the chamber maid of some tyrannical and histrionic mistress. They would groom their daughters as beautiful and eligible arm candy for well-to-do sons of cotton factors, slaveholders, and other men of means. The young females would appear at a ballroom, line up, and wait to be chosen. A man (like Horatio Green of the novel) would choose a young girl he liked, take her home, set her up with an opulent wardrobe, a comfortable cottage, and have as many children by her as he liked. When he grew bored, he abandoned her and the girl was left to struggle on her own. Often she was absorbed right back into the system into which she was born. Her story rarely has a happy ending, and the "tragedy" of this young woman is that she continues to suffer--first the loss of her child through death or slavery, then the rejection of whites and blacks simultaneously, and, separated from her child, she cannot escape the grips of her fate and resorts to suicide. In Brown's novel, Clotel's suicide is symbolically carried out in full view of the stately White House, home of the Commander in Chief: her unwitting, uncaring sire. How could Brown more fully illustrate the painful irony of being the child of a statesman, thrown away as a slave?
