Literature and Multi-Racial Identity

Introduction

Early depictions of mixed race assert the absolute difference of racial heritage. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826) features Cora Munro, the child of a slave and a British officer. Cora wavers between marrying an Indian or a British officer. Cooper uses Cora to imagine the possibility of a mixed racial identity, but ultimately has her die rather than allow her to commit miscegenation. In contrast, Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok (1824) features a white heroine who has a child with a Native American. The child of this union looks like his father, but his racial features “disappear” as he develops an identity as a white person.

Abolition and Passing

Antislavery agitation in the mid-nineteenth century brought with it an increase in the depiction of people of black and white parentage. Authors used characters with a mixed race to dramatize the debate over national political identity. George Harris of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) is the son of a black mother and her white master. Harris becomes a strong spokesman in the novel for abolition, arguing that because black and white blood exist equally within him, they must enjoy equality in American social and political life. Frederick Douglass, in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) also argues that the existence of a class of slaves who are black and white destroys any theoretical justification for slavery, and that all individuals must be accorded the right of self-definition.

Given the many people of mixed race, the possibility of passing as white was real. Some racist novelists treated the issue hysterically, but many novels were written exposing how passing undermines any attempt to define people by racist precepts. William Wells Brown’s Clotel: Or, The President’s Daughter (1853), the first novel published by an African American, tells the story of a mulatto woman who adopts a white identity, marrying a white man in the North. The House Behind the Cedars (1900) by Charles Waddell Chesnutt, who was himself of mixed race, is another novel treating the question of individual identity that passing poses. Two works by white authors that use passing to satirize American racial attitudes are Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby,” which concerns a man who rejects his wife and child due to the mistaken belief she is a mulatto, only to have his sense of identity disrupted when he discovers his own mother was black, and Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) which features two infants, one of whom has a small amount of “black blood.” Tom Driscoll discovers his heritage after decades of believing in his superiority, the result of his whiteness. Twain’s character can no longer identify with blacks or whites and almost ceases to have any identity at all. Similarly, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912), an important novel about passing, features a mixed-race protagonist in a first-person narrative. The nameless narrator decides to embrace a white identity and marries a white woman and has children with her. The novel ends, however, with his realization that he has lost a full sense of his identity. The novels of passing use the problematic identities of individual characters to discuss a problematic national identity.

The Twentieth Century

The novel of passing continued to be prominent in the early part of the twentieth century, but with a slightly different focus. The condition of a mixed-race person, in addition to a denunciation of racism, became a metaphor for the alienating condition of modern life. Novels such as Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924), Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) feature protagonists who vigorously assert individual identity even as society attempts alternately to impose or deny identity for them. Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) is an orphan who may or may not have a black father; even the hint that he may be part black grows into an obsession about his identity.

Edith Maud Eaton, known by the pen name Sui Sin Far, wrote autobiographical fiction and nonfiction about her experiences in the United States as the daughter of a Chinese woman and an Englishman. Experiencing extreme racism, Eaton embraced her Chinese identity in order to make a critique of American society. She was, in the early 1900’s, the first Chinese American feminist writer. Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa) similarly wrote of her experiences in her largely autobiographical fiction, collected in American Indian Stories (1921). N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) charts his personal story as he tries to reclaim the Native American identity that had been overwhelmed by his European American cultural background. Gloria Anzaldúa, in her largely autobiographical Borderlands: The New Mestiza-La Frontera (1987) asserts her own mixed background and lesbianism to make multiracial identity a source of strength.

Bibliography

Berzon, Judith. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Frederickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969.

Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.