Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto” |
Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto”
Cuadernos de investigación filológica (C.I.F.)
Number 26 (2000)
pages 263-271
ISSN: 0211-0547
Isabel Soto
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia
This essay explores societal fear of the mulatto as charted by Langston Hughes’ play “Mulatto” (1931). “Mulatto” dramatizes the demand for social incorporation by a mixed-race young man, Robert Norwood, who suffers a double exclusion: from a white body politic, and from the black community, by virtue of his claim to a white heritage. I make extensive use of the terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ (taken from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner) to refer to Robert’s status, his attempts to redraw that status, and the representation of space in the play. I argue that white characters’, and hence white society’s, refusal to grant Robert access their power structures reveals a complex anxiety or fear of the borderland or liminal creature that is the mulatto, born of transgression (and, in Robert’s case, ultimately a transgressor himself). I will argue that the play is as much about female agency as it about the danger attendant on the (non-white) exercise of power.
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Tags: Cuadernos de investigación filológica, Isabel Soto, Isabel Soto García, Langston Hughes