SOURCE: Overbye, Karen. “Resisting Ideologies of Race and Gender: Evelyn Scott's Use of the Tragic Mulatto Figure.” In Evelyn Scott: Recovering a Lost Modernist, edited by Dorothy M. Scura and Paul C. Jones, pp. 123-39. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Overbye focuses on Evelyn Scott's depiction of two mulatto characters—in Migrations and A Calendar of Sin—through whom Scott comments on the racial, cultural, and artistic oppression of Blacks in American society.]

Whether in direct response to her writing or in discussing her contribution to American letters, contemporary literary critics often drew attention to Evelyn Scott's outspoken protest against the lack of artistic freedom and the oppressive gender, race, and class ideologies in America. Several critics noted her treatment of African American characters in her novels and praised her unusually realistic portrayals that challenged racist stereotypes employed by other white authors. Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling, fellow southerners, writers, and co-editors of the North Georgia Review, admired her work, and, in 1937, Smith named Scott “the most brilliant and profound woman of contemporary English-American letters” (10). Smith saw writing as a vehicle for social criticism and saw form as less important than what the book had to say about contemporary society; that is, the cultural work a book does gives it value. Snelling, in an article entitled “Evelyn Scott and Southern Background,” determined that what distinguished Scott's writing set in the South from that by others was, in Migrations, for example, “its sympathetic awareness of the Negro's position in society,” and she proposed Scott was worthy of the Nobel Prize (26). As evidenced by their writing, Smith (in Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream) and Snelling (in various articles) were particularly sensitive to and concerned with race issues, and they must have been pleased Scott began her reply to their survey “How Can Intelligent Southerners Best Help Their South?” with “By confronting the race problem benevolently and realistically” (19). Scott's efforts were also noted by Sterling Brown, the black critic and writer whose work on the depiction of blacks in literature is regarded as seminal. In his 1933 article “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” Brown identified Scott as one of the few white writers whose depiction of blacks was realistic and fair (170). Brown asserted that Scott (along with T. S. Stribling) “giv[es] us rounded pictures of antebellum Negroes. … They are characterized as human beings, not as representatives of a peculiar species” (170). Scott's aim of authenticity was part of her personal political agenda; she told Stanley Kunitz, “I early resolved to do my bit to insure the political and economic equality of races, thus finally safeguarding individual freedom” (1252). In her historical novels, a trilogy consisting of Migrations (1927), The Wave (1929), and A Calendar of Sin (1931), covering the years 1850-1914 and set primarily—though not exclusively—in the South, one of the ways she mediates her concerns on the issues of gender, race, and class is through her depiction of marginal characters, most notably the “mulatto.”

Scott's recognition of the injustice of racism developed early as a result of the close bonds she, like many white southern children, formed with African Americans in her own home and neighborhood, and of her observation of their treatment by whites. In her autobiography, Background in Tennessee, she explains the origin of a haunting memory from early childhood. Three black men had been hanged upon three cedar trees near her home, and her horror at the discovery was further increased by the fact that her “father pointed them out to [her] quite casually” while giving her the impression that the men “had hung there … long after the mob that had put them there had been dispersed—until the great, flapping, bald buzzards … had come … and carried the flesh off piecemeal!” (144). Although Scott devotes a significant part of her book to remembering several important black men and women in her childhood and early adolescence, at the end she returns to the “[t]hree poor lynched Negroes,” who remained a vivid part of her portrait of Tennessee (302). In her review of Background in Tennessee, fellow Tennessean Lorine Pruette wrote that Scott “tries to tell the truth and to make sense of [Tennessee]. She does not make sense of it, but she makes it very believable” (4). Scott's memory of the lynched blacks had been reworked in an incident in Witch Perkins, a children's book she published in 1929. The young protagonist, Ella Wilson (a version of Scott as a child), meets the somehow still living lynched men, and in response to their cries of “Save us, little Missy,” rescues them (157). Although Ella is afraid when they tell her that they have been needing someone's help for fifteen years, “[t]heir voices were so mournful that Ella could hardly bear to hear them, and she began to cry” (157). Despite danger to herself, she uses magic to free them, and, in return, they give her their own magic gifts to replace hers, including the ability to understand the language of animals, and they then use the wings they have been growing all this time to fly to Heaven. The scene is only incidental to the plot, but it represents a telling revision of a memory that greatly disturbed Scott. Considering her sympathy for oppressed black Americans, it is not surprising that she created several memorable black characters in her novels, particularly the black cook Nellie in Narcissus (a character who resembles Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, published years later), Hortense and Jim in Ideals, and characters in a wide range of walks of life in Migrations, The Wave, and A Calendar of Sin.

Like other modernist southern writers, Scott wanted to dispel the myth of moonlight and magnolias and reveal both the antebellum and the contemporary South as a culture that oppresses women, blacks, and the poor. She also wanted to show that the southern code of honor promoted the use of violence in preserving male white authority. This code depended upon certain basic shared beliefs: white men had honor; white women had virtue, and white men protected their own honor by protecting their women's virtue, mainly from the perceived threat of black male sexual advances, to guarantee racial purity and legitimacy. If the white woman represented the South, then by protecting her, the white man protected his culture and his status. Although Scott sets her trilogy in the past, her work is informed by the continuing volatile conditions in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan were having their strongest resurgence, numbering two million members in the 1920s. Night riding and vigilante action against blacks were so prevalent during this time that Jessie Daniel Ames, a feminist activist from Texas, formed the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching in 1930 in protest, denying any need or desire for “protection.” While the scenes of vigilante violence, as well as other evidence of race and gender oppression, are historically realistic in her novels, Scott's rendering of them suggests contemporary parallels, and thus her writing resists the power structures that persisted in her own time.

We should keep in mind that, during Scott's lifetime, not only was the legal definition of “Negro” dependent on an ancestry consisting of as little as 1/64th “black blood,” but there were also laws prohibiting miscegenation throughout the South. In 1903 W. E. B. DuBois declared, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (16), and his assertion was supported by the number of literary treatments of the color line: identification, discrimination, passing, and miscegenation. For example, Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote several articles on the color line, as well as about his own experience as a black who had no visible black attributes, and he, like several other writers, black and white, translated his views into fiction.¹ Court cases such as the Rhinelander trial in 1924 kept issues of the color line in the public view. In that particular instance, a rich young white heir claimed that his “mulatto chambermaid” bride had kept her racial identity from him, and he petitioned for an annulment to keep his inheritance for himself. Although he eventually lost the case, after a “long, emotionally-charged trial” (525), the judge made the point to the jury that “[t]here isn't a father among you who would not rather see his own son in his casket than to see him wedded to a mulatto woman” (526).

It is not surprising that with the attention paid to racial issues at the time the literary figure of the “tragic mulatto” would enjoy a resurgence, especially because of its capacity to expose oppressive race and gender roles. Mary Dearborn, in Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture, suggests that the mulatto character represents a threat to societal distinctions and to definitions of the self by disrupting categories of race and family, “a ‘grey’ area in which limits are tested and boundaries of selfhood [are] in flux” (139). Dearborn's assessment explains, in part, Scott's purpose in choosing to examine the subjectivities of mulatto characters. As Hazel Carby has argued, “[t]he mulatto figure is a narrative device of mediation; it allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relationship between the races” (171). By exploiting and extending the traditional literary figure of the tragic mulatto, Scott explores and exposes the abuses in power relations, protesting the dominant race and gender ideologies that define and limit the individual. When Scott chooses the mulatto to mediate her concerns about race and gender relations, she invokes associations with a literary figure established in America nearly a hundred years before. According to Jules Zanger, a variation of this figure, “the tragic octoroon,” first appeared in R. Hildreth's The Slave in 1836 (63), and Lydia Maria Child's story “The Quadroons,” published in the Liberty Bell in 1843, appears to be the earliest instance of the “tragic mulatta” used to further the abolitionist cause. In brief, the tragic mulatto (more often a tragic mulatta) are marginal characters that lack any features that distinguish them as having black ancestry; however, they are treated as black. They possess some exceptional qualities, including physical beauty and moral superiority, but they are victimized as a result of their “inferior” blood and usually die in a manner required by sentimental fiction: by sacrificing themselves for a loved one or by suicide. Typically, they fall in love with and are loved by a white character, but marriage is an impossibility. Some nineteenth-century authors used the characters to appeal to the sympathies of white readers or to titillate readers with the presentation of a somewhat exotic but reassuringly familiar Racial Other.² However, in abolitionist works such as Child's story or Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, white female readers were invited to identify with mulatto characters with whom they shared a common enemy that limited their freedom—white patriarchy.³ Scott, too, uses mulatto figures to criticize white male dominance. By drawing on the narrative paradigm of the tragic mulatto figure, extending and challenging the stereotypical depictions, she is able to show the interrelatedness of race and gender oppression and the forces that determine the individual sense of self. This chapter examines two examples of mulatto figures from her trilogy who not only are denied a sense of self but are also unable to escape their social construction as racial inferiors and sexual transgressors.

THE TRAGIC MULATTA: EUGENIA GILBERT

Nearly a third of Migrations is taken up with the story of Eugenia Gilbert, despite her socially marginal position as a quadroon, and she reappears briefly in The Wave and in the first volume of A Calendar of Sin. Initially her story closely resembles that of the traditional tragic mulatta: until she reaches young adulthood, Eugenia is unaware of her black ancestry, has been raised as a white aristocrat, lives at a proper convent school, and only learns her racial background upon her father's death. She is devastated, and in the tradition of the tragic mulatta, she considers suicide when she discovers that “Miss Eugenia Juliette DeNegre-Blair of New Orleans” is no longer entitled to be a southern lady (243). Unlike the traditional mulatto figures, she is not directly the product of master and slave; although her French Jewish grandfather, a plantation owner in Martinique, did impregnate a slave, he adopted the child, made him his heir, and sent him to a Paris university. Eugenia's father, then, carries the racial burden, but his wealth allows him to pass as white when he moves to the South, and he marries a white woman from a good family short of money whose daughter was, we are told, “past the freshness wanted for a bride,” so his background is unquestioned (244).

Scott departs from the literary paradigm and has all of Eugenia's tragic mulatta attributes—her intelligence, taste, and attractiveness—come from her mulatto father. Because her mother died years before and she has no siblings, she also is allowed to keep her large inheritance, which makes keeping her ancestry a secret much easier. However, her racial legacy deprives her of a “knowable” self, a self whose identity partly depends upon clear racial distinction. Her father committed suicide partly out of guilt and partly out of fear. He had stopped sending money to support his mother, whom he hated because she was black, and he feared her death was a consequence of this omission. He was also afraid that he was going to lose his fortune. Without money, he could not continue to hide his racial background, and his emancipation by his own father may not have been respected in America. Like her father, Eugenia hates her black ancestry and curses her grandfather for his choice of lover. Although she was brought up to be a devout Catholic, the discovery of her ancestry leads her to deliberately “harden” her emotional self and distance herself from former beliefs.

Through Eugenia, Scott rewrites some of her own history in her description of Eugenia's attempt to escape social construction through relationships with men. The suicidal young Eugenia is rescued by a Polish count, an older married friend of her father, who raises her self-esteem and elopes with her amid scandal to Europe. Readers familiar with Scott's biography will recognize a parallel to her elopement with Frederick Creighton Wellman; in both the fictional and “true” stories, the women love and admire these men for the rest of their lives, even though their relationships end. The count educates Eugenia and develops her taste and introduces her in art and literary salons. After Eugenia and the count separate, she has a short-lived disastrous affair with a young misogynist painter who “[because she was] a woman, … would not allow her a soul of her own” (252). She returns to the States and decides that marriage will provide the necessary stable element for her confused sense of self and will offset the denigrating label of “loose” woman. Scott may have been drawing on her relationship with artist Owen Merton (later fictionalized in Eva Gay) and explaining why she sought marriage to John Metcalfe when she was writing Migrations. The parallels between character and author suggest the negotiating of Scott's own subjectivity; clearly Scott occasionally uses Eugenia as a mouthpiece, particularly when she complains about the narrow conventional roles that are open to her, because “[b]eing a woman, such intelligence as [she] ha[s] is applicable to nothing” (279). While Scott never claims to experience the degree of oppression levied against nonwhites in her country, she does use the example of Eugenia's experience to demonstrate how women's social space is severely circumscribed, here further emphasized by the threat of discovery and resulting racial discrimination.

Scott's exploration of racial politics in the formation of identity begins when Eugenia returns from Europe to New Orleans in 1850 after her relationships with the count and the artist are over. Although her wealth and sophistication enhance her social standing, and her racial identity is a secret, her questionable reputation (as a result of her elopement) threatens her social stability. Like the “tragic octoroon,” Eugenia is viewed by white men as an irresistible temptress. To avoid any possible links between her sexual scandals and the position of the infamous New Orleans octoroons (as mistresses of white aristocrats), she seeks respectability through marriage to a promising lawyer, Geoffrey Gilbert. He marries her despite her confession of “black blood,” but she suspects he pities her, and she maintains her self-respect by insisting on relying on her own money. Again Scott departs from the traditional tragic mulatta trajectory, for Eugenia's “guilty” secret does not prevent her from having money or from having a white husband. In fact, Eugenia has hopes of passing for white indefinitely.

Passing means she must follow the dominant race ideology and deny any affinity with the black race, and her racism is only fueled by her fear of sharing black powerlessness. Not only is she “repelled by [blacks],” she is afraid of them (277). She believes they might be able to detect a shared heritage, and when she puts on a headscarf in secret, her reflection tells her that only her usual accoutrements of wealth and style camouflage her. She searches her mirror image constantly for signs of her ancestry, and then finds herself “retreat[ing] from the mirror, for that word, ‘negress,’ … made her shiver with self-loathing” (258). Acutely aware that how others see her determines her identity, she becomes the object of her own gaze, the Racial Other as herself. Self-denial in turn forces denial of motherhood; typical of many “passing” heroines in American literature, Eugenia decides she “can never have a child” (256), obviously because of what Dearborn and others have identified as a typical fear, that the child might be “coal black,” that “blood will tell” (155). She becomes a bored housewife who worries that “she live[s] for clothes” (277), and although she feels at first that she is truly free when outdoors, even there she is imperiled by a poisonous snake, an incident which foreshadows danger to come (282).

Threats of violence reveal the extent to which Eugenia's complicated position is unstable. After she and her husband move to Mimms, Tennessee, townsfolk are suspicious of Geoffrey Gilbert's abolitionist leanings and his wife's lack of proof of “family.” One night, a lynching party comes looking for Bosh, the son of Mammy May, the Gilbert's cook. He has frightened a white woman by peering in her window, and her hysterical reaction leads community members to interpret the event as an attack. Bosh had approached her house because he was hungry, but when he sees how fearful she is, “something more revengeful” actually does occur to him (264). The vigilante group represents those threatened by the crossing of racial boundaries of behavior, not only by the behavior of Bosh but by the very existence of “mulattos” (whom they suspect includes Eugenia), whose racial origins are not readily identifiable and whose social positions not easily enforced. The sheriff leader of the group is named Dixon, and Scott may be making a point of connecting the mob action with that in the well-known (and racist) books by Thomas Dixon such as The Clansman (1905). Upon the couple's lack of cooperation, the vigilantes begin to address the Gilberts themselves, calling out for the “nigger wife” and threatening Geoffrey for his flagrant disregard for the law. Discreet sexual relations with a black woman could be ignored, but a white man's willingness to marry one and make any offspring legitimate heirs demanded their attention. Their behavior suggests that the vigilantes had been looking for an opportunity to test their suspicions about the Gilberts, and the couple's apparent protection of Bosh proves them right. After hours of deliberation, Eugenia, terrified for Geoffrey's safety, defies her husband and reveals Bosh's whereabouts. She sees this as a sacrifice, rather than an act of cowardice or betrayal. However, her husband loses respect for her, and when he flees West to avoid prosecution for shooting one of the vigilantes, he leaves her behind with a friend, Edwin George, who will take her to another state. Scott depicts in some detail the capture of Bosh and Mammy May, both of whom are tortured and killed in a frenzy that suggests they are serving as scapegoats for Eugenia and her husband. The vigilante group will not tolerate that which threatens their own identity and power: Eugenia's passing and marriage, a refusal on both her part and her husband's to abide by racial distinctions. To save herself, Eugenia must give up her home and her husband to cling to her false identity.

In the second and third books of the trilogy, Eugenia takes on intercessor roles, still denied agency. In the few pages devoted to Eugenia in The Wave, we learn that she has become an abolitionist spy for her absent husband and that she is willing to seduce Edwin George to get the information she needs. She knows that Edwin has always been intrigued by her European sophistication and attracted to her slightly exotic beauty. They have not been in touch for over a decade, yet he agrees to meet her in Cincinnati. Much of the episode is taken up with Edwin's point of view, emphasizing that Eugenia's identity depends upon construction by others. Before he meets with her, he forcibly reminds himself of her racial heritage, telling himself that “[h]e ought to have looked down on her properly [because] … her respectability was a rag” and surmising that “Gilbert had certainly been a martyr to his creed of abolition when he married such a woman” (329). He further worries about her reason for writing to him, convincing himself that “[t]reachery was the half-caste's habit” (330). Unable to escape his acute awareness that Eugenia is a more fitting intellectual companion than his own wife, he must keep “trying, deliberately, to work himself up”: “The woman was a nigger. Never stop thinking of that—the woman was a nigger, servile breed even when ‘educated,’ and not to be trusted—not to be reckoned with as a man reckons with a person of his own race. … Impure product of the worst institution of our century” (331). He must convince himself of society's rightness in this and his own weakness in not believing it; finally, “[i]t relieve[s] [him] to despise her” (331). He has always been uncomfortable with the treatment of slaves, even in his own family, and he was especially disturbed by the discovery that some slave women bore their masters' children. By detailing Edwin's conflicting feelings about Eugenia and his determination to “despise her,” Scott clearly indicates that the negative traits associated with the black race are socially constructed, that Edwin must rely on this construction to maintain not only his distance from an attractive woman, but also to maintain his position as a superior white man.

While Edwin represents the racist attitudes of white, middle-class men of his time, Eugenia once again represents intelligent women with no real place in society even more than a tragic mulatta overwhelmed with a conflicting racial identity. However, like the tragic mulatta figures she resembles, Eugenia is willing to do anything to please her white lover (in her case, her absent husband). Her spying for the abolition cause is done solely for Geoffrey, rather than with any interest in its success; however, her efforts seem to her “base—not simply because the work was spying, but because the ends she sought to gain were in contradiction of her own leanings, her own heart” (331). In spite of her independent means, Eugenia finds that her only tool for achievement is her sexuality. She is caught in the conflict between wanting to be independent and yet finding herself only able to act by being dependent on her ability to attract men. Since she has no interest in them, but uses them only to gain something for her husband, she views “her deceit toward these [men] … [as] a kind of offering to Geoffrey” (332). It is clear that her identification as a “good,” self-sacrificing wife is more important to her than self-sufficiency, even though she has not seen her husband for eleven years, and there is little or no chance of their ever living together again. In this desire, she resembles the tragic mulatta, willing to give up anything for the sake of the white man she loves.

Rather than being obsessed with concealing her racial identity, Eugenia is mostly concerned about maintaining a youthful, attractive appearance. Now when she looks in a mirror, she muses on “[h]ow she despised her position as a woman! In the most selfless step a woman took, her appearance counted” (332). Yet, she depends upon Edwin viewing her with his former “sensual, almost sycophantic gaze” so that “her heart would harden” toward him; “if he accepted her at her own face value, it would be a torture to her that she would not forgive” (332-33). Her “face value,” her “real” purpose in seeing him, just like her “real” self, cannot forge a connection between them, because then he would be accepting her in a way that her husband cannot. Although readers may be unlikely to see Eugenia as she does, as a saint, they can appreciate the burden she bears, that as “[a] woman suspected of a negress grandmother, [she] had been born branded,” and that her choices are severely limited (333).

The first thing Edwin notices upon their meeting is the change in her appearance: he is “shocked to observe … how old she was. … She was handsome yet, but she was haggard” (333) and, again, “[w]hat shocked him was her worn-out look” (334). He worries that he will not be able to fend off any requests (he suspects she wants money) because of his sympathy for her, so he scans her face, “beginning to pick out again that something subtle, indefinite—which he supposed he should describe as ‘nigger’—varying her face so that it resembled no other face” (334-35). He saw his aid to her eleven years before not as a favor to his friend Geoffrey, but as “a gesture of sympathy” to “a woman who had excited his senses,” “which had endangered his position in the public confidence and his whole business life [since] … [h]e had been suspected of an alliance with the Underground Railway” (335). Although he uses ideas of her racial difference to try to make her seem more repellant to him, it is clear that this very difference is part of her appeal; as Dearborn suggests, for a white man, “[i]ntercourse with a black woman raised troubling but intriguing questions of difference and sameness, of the boundaries of the self” (134), and Edwin, always concerned not only about his social position but also with discovering his “real” self, will be drawn into these questions. Within minutes of their meeting, he determines that she will become his lover, a mistress in keeping with the New Orleans octoroon tradition. The scene closes with their decision to meet again privately.

We discover in A Calendar of Sin that Edwin and Eugenia did have an affair at that time; six or seven years later, in 1869, when Eugenia is pointed out to Edwin in Washington, he is disturbed when Senator Malone identifies her as “[a]nother one of our so-called lady lobbyists” (high-class prostitutes serving political ends), rumored to be an “octoroon” (1:321). This recalls the very construction she had sought to escape by marrying Geoffrey and leaving New Orleans. Eugenia does not notice Edwin, but she does catch a glimpse of her long-estranged husband a short time later. Now that abolition has been accomplished, he serves the causes of Native Americans and has brought several chiefs to Washington to see the president. He gives Eugenia a hostile look that deeply wounds her and brings on several minutes of sorrowful reflection. Eugenia wonders “why had she done everything harmful and nothing she could look back on of which she was proud” in terms of her “sacrifices” for Geoffrey (1:356). She has come to hold Geoffrey responsible for her failures “[b]ecause, regarding her as a woman, and condescending to her even though he professed Woman's Rights, he had never shown any confidence in her” and because “[i]t was as if he blamed her, and not Nature, for the influence she had upon his senses” (1:356). Gender and race intersect here as reasons for his inability to appreciate and respect her: she is “only” a woman and her black ancestry has, she suspects, made her appear sensual to him and exciting desires he would deny.

Geoffrey's brief reappearance underlines how Eugenia's attempts to reinvent (or conceal) herself have failed. In Washington, she has taken the Polish count's name, Wittorski, and now thinks of him as her only “true” love, seeing a connection between herself and women like George Eliot or George Sand “because she believed in freedom in love and was a free woman,” something Eugenia tries to believe she has become (1:356). However, when she hears a poem written about her by Walt Whitman (read aloud by her latest male companion, a drunken Milo Harvey) that refers to her many lovers and to “Afric's shores,” she fears exposure. Trying to force herself to accept society's racial construction, she shouts at her reflection: “Your grandmother was a nigger! Your grandmother was a nigger!” (1:358). Not able to deny this self, she chooses to destroy it by committing suicide, the usual end of the tragic mulatta. She accuses the church of causing her misery, rationalizing that if the Catholic Wittorski had been able to divorce his wife and marry her, all would have been well. In keeping with the tragic mulatta tradition, she determines that only death can bring freedom. Scott makes it clear, however, that her position as a woman is at least as oppressive as her position as a mulatta; it is because she is a woman that death is appealing. Eugenia decides “[o]nce she was dead she would never have to please anybody again. She would not be frightened of growing old, of being hungry, of losing the power she had in her attractiveness” (1:360) and asserts that “she ought never to have made the attempt to think out anything for herself or do anything according to her own ideas, because the problem, for a woman, was too terrible” (1:361). Here she resembles several of Scott's heroines who feel not only oppressed but also attacked for being a thinking being. Scott draws attention to her lengthy, painful death, in which “she uttered shriek after shriek, while she tore and beat at the carpet” (1:360), a death not at all beautiful or sentimentally portrayed as it may have been for tragic heroines, but more in keeping with the likes of Madame Bovary—a naturalistic and horrifying end.

As an epilogue to the scene, Scott provides a scene in which Edwin receives the news; a major Mimms figure, the patriarch Major Cowley tells Edwin that he “heard the other day that octoroon wench that ruined Geoffrey had committed suicide. It seems some financier was supporting her and she's been living like a lady up in Washington” (1:380). Edwin is naturally upset, for we learn he had been willing to give up his family for her but that she had broken off their relationship. In the end, then, Eugenia is marked with the label she sought to escape her entire adult life, and her “sacrifices” for Geoffrey are lost in the memory of the lynching party years before. While Eugenia lacks elements of the conflicted subjectivity that variations of the tragic mulatta have, hers is equally fragmented because of the necessity of denying her racial makeup as well as trying to find a position of agency open to her as a woman.

THE TRAGIC MULATTO: SAM TURNLEY

Sam Turnley also experiences a double marginalization: he is not only denied a stable racial identity but also an identifiable role as a man. Sterling Brown points out one of the main issues associated with the stereotype of the tragic mulatto: “The mulatto inherits the vices of both races and none of the virtues [and] … any achievement of a Negro is to be attributed to the white blood in his veins” (160). Brown explains further that “from [the mulatto's] white blood come his intellectual strivings, his unwillingness to be a slave; from his Negro blood come his baser emotional urges, his indolence, his savagery” (160). It is interesting to note how Scott risks evoking racist stereotypes in her rendition of a tragic mulatto even as she upsets the tradition. In the final volume of A Calendar of Sin, the mulatto Sam Turnley is introduced into the life of one of the main characters, Edith Dolan, a fifteen-year-old white girl whose family history has been developed throughout Scott's trilogy. It is 1907 and Sam lives on the edge of the estate of his white father, Jim Furness, just as he exists on the social boundaries of the community. Sam's attempts to pass as white have rarely been successful, and in his final attempt to appropriate a white male identity, he is constructed as the representative of one of the most powerful psychological threats to southern white society—the black rapist. Scott's depiction of Sam's subjectivity shows the injustice of this construction even as he fulfills the role.

To understand the complexity of Sam's characterization, we need to examine that of the young woman he attacks. Edith, like Eugenia and several other female characters in Scott's fiction, experiences the oppression of women, the unfairness of rules and exploitation. From the time she reaches puberty, she finds herself fending off potential molesters, most notably a doctor who has been invited by her uncle Eugene Cowley to take advantage of her. Eugene's wife, Linda, a talented artist whose creativity has been successfully suppressed by her husband, has done a complete about-face and now sings the praises of motherhood and wifely duty. She destroys Edith's copies of The Woman Who Did and Story of an African Farm (a book acknowledged by Scott as influential in her own life), as well as any hopes of a free life for her as a woman. Edith's boyfriend, Frank Keeler, is rejected by the family as a social inferior, and she agrees to their lovemaking as an act of rebellion and a rejection of suitors pushed her way. Edith increasingly refuses what she sees as sexual hypocrisy all around her and decides “[i]f everything's fake and everybody is a fake—I don't want to grow up and get married” (2:597). Like Eugenia, she suspects the only freedom she could achieve would be in death, surmising, “[i]f you were dead, you wouldn't care what people said” (2:649). She has seen Sam while out riding and has mistaken him for a foreigner rather than a local mulatto. She finds him attractive but dreams of a “foreign-looking man” harming her. Scott sets up Edith as having enormous potential—she is unusually intelligent and perceptive—but that potential could never be realized in her family.

The day of her encounter with Sam Turnley begins with Edith setting out for a ride in a provocative outfit her cousin insists that she wear, and Edith leaves the house “defiantly,” deciding “[m]aybe I never will come back” (2:646). She wonders if she will see the handsome “foreign-looking man” on the ride, and, when her horse stumbles on a remote road and she falls, Sam comes to her aid. Her sudden realization that he is a mulatto terrifies her because she recognizes that mulattos (and blacks) have good reason to hate whites. The horse belongs to her Uncle Eugene and has the unfortunate name of “Darkey.” When Sam hears her speak the name, he takes off his “white man's” hat and beats Darkey until the horse gets up. Readers cannot miss the significance of Sam beating Darkey and of Darkey's blood splashing Edith's clothes and skin. Sam hates the black in himself, and it is Edith's family, and race, that has the stain of violence towards the black race on themselves, for which they are about to experience revenge. Sam invites Edith to his cabin to wash herself, and though she fears he will kill her to obtain her valuable necklace, she rationalizes that her only defense is to speak kindly to him and appear unafraid. She wants to treat him as a fellow human being, not as an inferior mulatto. Although he has no interest in her necklace, he responds to what he interprets as her inappropriate and provocative gaze, and he rapes and murders her.

Instead of representing the rape and murder, which would demand reader sympathy exclusively for Edith, Scott focuses on Sam's own agonizing after the fact, where he asks himself repeatedly “What'd Ah do it faw?” (2:655) and evokes the name of his white father. Furness is a notorious womanizer and a drunk, well known for his lascivious speech and behavior, who has warned his illegitimate (and publicly unrecognized) son that only a white man has the right to enjoy white women. Sam found this advice puzzling because, as he later says, “Ah ain't nevah touch no white gal Ah say an' Ah doan want to” (2:656). Yet, Sam clearly would like to be identified as white, and only a white man can be seen, in his eyes, as fully male with all rights and privileges. Sam's attack on Edith was at least in part a rebellion against his father as well as a revelation of his father's brutish sexuality and cruelty reborn in himself. Sam's vices appear to come from his white father, not from his mother's race, and Scott will upset the mulatto figure tradition by showing that the “savagery” is inherent in the white men of the community. Sam's character further contradicts such social theorists of the period as Edward Byron Reuter, who claimed mulattos were raised in intelligence and refinement by having white ancestry. Sam's confusion stems from the intersection of race and gender ideologies in the construction of his identity. To fulfill his gender identity and to appropriate a racial identity, he must act as a white male, and he has dressed in the latest fashions and pursued (nonwhite) women to do so. He deliberately misreads Edith's apparent trust as a sexual invitation that will allow him to cross over into the dominant class.

Rather than experiencing an elation over this trespass, or even gaining any satisfaction from it, he feels only misery and remorse for what he has done, and although he tries to cover up his crime, he anticipates its discovery and the probable consequences because he is acutely aware that he is not white. While Sam follows in the tradition of the male tragic mulatto who recognizes the unfairness of his denied paternity and rights as a man, he does not become the morally superior tragic hero, fighting for right, but rather ends his life as a pathetic madman lynched by vigilantes. Scott chooses to focus on the horror of his death rather than Edith's and clearly takes a risk in showing some sympathy for and understanding of the rapist, and in placing the blame on the dominant race and gender ideologies which have constructed and confused his sense of self.

Scott's narrative also reveals the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of those determined to maintain their power as the dominant race and gender. Representative of the mentality of those who lynch Sam is Edith's Uncle Eugene: a man who has kept his talented wife under his thumb by keeping her pregnant, who molested Edith's mother (his sister-in-law) repeatedly while she was an adolescent and young woman, who had arranged a tryst for Edith with an older friend of his in which she narrowly escapes being raped, and who has sexual relations with black women whenever he feels what he regards as “animal lust.” Eugene holds back at the lynching at first, but then he finds he “took a sensual pleasure in himself—in being male and white” and hopes his wife hears of his brutality (2:667). Eugene and the others seem to be the “brutes” and “savages,” labels they claim identify blacks. None of the men seems horrified by the rape and murder itself, and later the newspapers will imply, unjustifiably, that Edith was already pregnant as well. The motivation for the vigilantes' murder of Sam is most clearly revealed to be the threat he poses to white patriarchy when the leader Farrell justifies the lynching by saying: “The god-damn bastard thinks he's white!” (2:661). As the result of miscegenation, Sam has no rights to paternity, and thus he lacks identity even as a man because he cannot be an heir nor carry on the family “honor.” Nor has he the right to think that he has any privilege or any access to the world of the dominant race just because he has “white blood.” Thus, the vigilantes punish what they believe to be Sam's sense of self, attacking his failure to accept a subject position that does not exist. While Sam may bear little resemblance either to the black rapist in Dixon's The Clansman or to Faulkner's Joe Christmas, the lives of all the characters end the same way: victims of a lynching posse who claim to be protecting their women from the evils of the black man and, particularly in Sam's and Joe Christmas's case, the victims of the resentment of their apparent appropriation of white identity.

.....

Aside from the specific recognition by Snelling and Brown of Scott's achievement in depicting blacks, there is little to gauge response to her use of the tragic mulatto or to assess the possible influence her work may have had on other writers. Although most of the reviews of her historical trilogy were favorable, some highly so, few mention at any length her black characters. One reviewer, “M. M.,” writing for the New York Evening Post, dismissed Migrations by claiming that, through Edwin George's character, “the authoress could state her scorn for the manner of living practised by Tennessee slave holders” (10). M. M. saw “the old stock creatures of Southern fiction” as unrealistically displayed, such as “[t]he yaller gal whose baby was sired by Old Massa” and such, although he admitted “[s]omething new [was] added in the way of an experiment in freedom for the blacks” (10). The very fact that the reviewer chose to focus on these aspects of the book indicates that Scott's depiction hit a racist nerve. On the other hand, reviewers ignoring black depictions suggest an acceptance of her stance.

Scott was aware of the efforts of other white writers to portray blacks realistically and sympathetically; in Background in Tennessee, Scott notes that “[w]hite Southern writers sensible of the Negro do exist—William Faulkner, Du Bose Heyward, Julia Peterkin—and are creatively capable of conveying individual Negroes authentically; but such writers incline to a single interest in manifestations of the Negro's sex life, presenting as it does, to the repressed white, an attractive picture of escape from taboos” (154). It is interesting that Brown had put her in the same company, but without having the same inclination. Certainly Mr. Compson's view of Charles Bon's mistress in Absalom, Absalom! as representing the “victim [of two doomed races]—a woman with a face like a tragic magnolia, the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers” (114) bears only small resemblance to Eugenia Gilbert; however, echoes of Scott's characterizations of tragic mulattos can be found in the works of others. Writers who appreciated, to varying extents, her work, such as William Faulkner, Lillian Smith, and Robert Penn Warren, wrote novels which followed the tragic mulatto theme: Faulkner's Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Smith's Strange Fruit (1944), and Warren's Band of Angels (1955). These writers used and challenged the traditional stereotypes for their own purposes. Scott's development of the tragic mulatto character not only links her to past and contemporary uses of the literary figure, but to the issues raised then and today in which gender and racial identities are inextricably linked and complicated by each other.⁴

Both Eugenia Gilbert and Sam Turnley choose to exercise what little control or power they believe they have access to through sexual expression, by social transgressions (miscegenation) by which they negate their racial boundaries but reinforce the gender stereotypes suggested by those boundaries—the octoroon temptress and the black rapist. They are unable to resist social construction, and yet, as characters of mixed race, they are not allowed to signify anything other than, perhaps, as Houston Baker claims, “[m]ulatto … [as] a sign of the legitimacy and power of … whitemale [sic] patriarchy: an economically, politically, and socially maintained authority” (36). By extending the traditional use of the mulatto figure in the depictions of Eugenia and Sam and emphasizing the means of oppression with scenes of violence, Scott explores and protests the dominant race and gender ideologies, and in doing so she positions herself in the history of writers' resistance to racism and sexism.

Notes

1. For example, White published “White, but Black” anonymously in Century Magazine 109 (1925): 492-99 and another article under his name, “Color Lines,” Survey Graphic 55 (Mar. 1925): 680-82. His “passing” novel with a tragic mulatta theme is Flight (1926; reprint, New York: Negro UP 1969).

2. For a much more detailed look at the tragic mulatto or tragic octoroon figure see, first, Brown's article, then Zanger's, and other discussions in Judith R. Berzon, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York UP, 1978); Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980); Anna Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1989).

3. Pointed out by several critics, including Karen Sanchez-Eppler in Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993).

4. Besides much of the nonliterary work on the experience and representation of persons of mixed race, for further literary investigations see Werner Sollors, Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Exploration of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1997).

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper given at the Canadian Association for American Studies Conference held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 1992. I wish to thank Dr. Mary Chapman for her helpful comments on that version. Thanks also to Glenda Murdoch at the University of Saskatchewan library for retrieving copies of the essays by Sterling Brown and Jules Zanger.

Works Cited

Baker, Houston. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writings. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

Brown, Sterling. “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors.” Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America. Eds. James A. Emanuel and Theodore L. Gross. New York: Free Press, 1968. 139-71.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Dearborn, Mary. Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1961.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Modern Library, 1936.

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft. “Evelyn Scott.” Twentieth Century Authors. New York: Wilson, 1942. 1252-53.

M. M. “Tennessee in 1840.” Review of Migrations, by Evelyn Scott. New York Evening Post, Apr. 16, 1927, 10.

Madigan, Mark. “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class’: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen's Passing.” Modern Fiction Studies 36 (Winter 1990): 523-28.

Pruette, Lorine. “In Intimate, Baffling and Exciting Tennessee.” Review of Background in Tennessee, by Evelyn Scott. New York Herald Tribune Books, Oct. 17, 1937, 4.

Reuter, Edward Bryon. Race Mixture. New York: McGraw, 1931.

Scott, Evelyn. Background in Tennessee. 1937. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1980.

———. A Calendar of Sin. New York: Cape and Smith, 1931.

———. Migrations. New York: Boni, 1927.

———. Response to “How Can Intelligent Southerners Best Help Their South?” North Georgia Review 6 (Winter 1941): 18-21.

———. The Wave. New York: Cape and Smith, 1929.

———. Witch Perkins: A Story of the Kentucky Hills. New York: Holt, 1929.

Smith, Lillian. “The Artist in Society.” Review of Bread and a Sword, by Evelyn Scott. North Georgia Review 2 (Summer 1937): 10, 23.

Snelling, Paula. “Evelyn Scott and Southern Background.” North Georgia Review 2 (Winter 1937): 26-31.

Zanger, Jules. “The ‘Tragic Octoroon’ in Pre-Civil War Fiction.” American Quarterly 18 (1966): 63-70.