“Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

“Sons of White Fathers”: Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Nineteenth-Century Literature
Volume 65, Number 1 (June 2010)
Pages 1–37
DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2010.65.1.1

Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

Although many literary critics have traced the genealogy of the tragic mulatto/a to nineteenth-century U.S. letters, in this essay I argue that the theme of tragedy and the mixed-race character predates the mid-nineteenth-century work of Lydia Maria Child and William Wells Brown and cannot be considered a solely U.S. American concept. The image can also be traced to early-nineteenth-century French colonial literature, where the trope surfaced in conjunction with the image of the Haitian Revolution as a bloody race war. Through a reading of the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s representation of the Haitian Revolution, “Le Mulâtre” or “The Mulatto,” [Read the entire text in French here.] originally composed in French and first published in Paris in 1837, this essay considers the implications of the conflation of the literary history of the tragic mulatto/a with the literary history of the Haitian Revolution in one of the first short stories written by an American author of African descent.

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