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The "Tragic Octoroon" in Pre-Civil War Fiction

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The JULES ZANGER SouthernIllinois University,Edwardsville Campus The "Tragic Octoroon" In Pre-Civil War Fiction ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CHARACTERS OF PRE-CIVIL WAR ABOLITIONIST fictionwas the "tragicoctoroon." Presented first in the earliestantislavery novel, The Slave (1836), the characterappeared in more than a dozen other works.' By the time the most importantof these works-Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Octoroon-were written,the characterhad ac- quired certain stereotypicqualities and had come to appear in certain stereotypicsituations. Brieflysummarized, the "tragicoctoroon" is a beautifulyoung girl who possessesonly the slightestevidences of Negro blood, who speaks with no trace of dialect, who was raised and educated as a white child and as a lady in the household of her father,and who on her paternal side is descendedfrom "some of the best blood in the 'Old Dominion.'" In her sensibilityand her vulnerabilityshe resembles,of course, the conven- tional ingenue "victim" of sentimentalromance. Her condition is radi- callychanged when, at her father'sunexpected death, it is revealed thathe has failed to free her properly.She discoversthat she is a slave; her person is attachedas propertyby her father'screditors. Sold into slavery, she is victimized,usually by a lower-class,dialect-speaking slave dealer or overseer-often,especially after the Fugitive Slave Act, a Yankee- who attemptsto violate her; she is loved by a high-bornyoung Northerner 1 Among the most readily available of these works are R. Hildreth, The Slave (1836); J. H. Ingraham, Quadroone (1840); H. W. Longfellow, The Quadroon Girl (1842); Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Retribution (1840); E.C. Pierson, Cousin Franck's Household (1842); H. B. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); W. W. Brown, Clotel, or the President's Daughter (1853); Mary Langdon, Ida May (1855); W. W. Smith, The Planter's Victim (1855); J. T. Trowbridge, Neighbor Jackwood (1856); H. B. Stowe, Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856); Mayne Reid, The Quadroon (1856); J. S. Peacocke, The Creole Orphans (1856); V. B. Denslow, Owned and Disowned (1857); D. Boucicault, The Octo- roon (1859); H. S. Hosmer, Adela the Octoroon (1860); M. V. Victor, Maum Guinea's Children (1861). 64 American Quarterly or European who wishesto marryher. Occasionally she escapes with her lover; more often,she dies a suicide, or dies of shame,or dies protecting her younggentleman. Although the melodramaticand titillatingaspects of this plot are evi- dent, it is specificallythe implied or articulatedcriticism of the institu- tion of slaverythat makes the "tragicoctoroon" situationso interesting. The octoroon,by her beauty,by her gentilityand by her particularvul- nerabilityto sexual outrage,offered to pre-CivilWar Northernaudiences, accustomedto idealized and sentimentalizedheroines, a perfectobject for tearfulsympathy combined with moral indignation. To twentieth-centuryliterary historians, the attack on slaverydirected by the creatorsof the "tragic octoroon" appears thin, unrealistic and irrelevant.Modern criticspoint out that the octoroon situation,while possible,was hardlygeneral and that,while enforcedconcubinage was a Southern reality,it was hardly the paramount evil of slavery.Further, the tendencyof antislaveryauthors to see the plightof the slave in terms of the octoroonrather than in termsof the full-bloodedblack has been seen as an indication of racial prejudice. Bone, for example, writes, "Such novels . contain mulatto charac- ters for whom the reader's sympathiesare aroused less because theyare colored than because they are nearlywhite." Gloster describesthe anti- slaverywriters as "sympathetictoward the Negro-whitehybrid because of his possessionof Caucasian blood, which theyoften consider a factorthat automaticallymade this characterthe superiorof the darkerNegro and thereforea more pitiable individual." SterlingBrown describesthe octo- roon as "a concession,unconscious perhaps, to race snobbishnesseven among abolitionists."2 Certainly,the strategyof the octoroon plot was to win sympathyfor the antislaverycause by displayinga cultivated,"white" sensibilitythreat- ened by, and respondingto, a "black" situation. It was the octoroon's "white" characteristicswhich made her pathetic to the white audience- and, consequently,the writersof "tragicoctoroon" storieshave generally been accused of makingtheir attack not on the institutionof Negro slav- ery,but only on certainparticular and incidental injusticesarising from the institutionof slavery. Southern apologists have interpretedthe "tragic octoroon" figureas corroboratingtheir own theoriesof white superiority,insisting that only slaves of mixed blood were ever unhappy and that the unhappiness of these was due solely to their white blood. Even such an indefatigable 2 Robert A. Bone, The Negro Novel in America (New Haven, 1958), pp. 22-23; Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1948), pp. 12, 17; Sterling Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (Washington,D. C., 1937), p. 45. The "Tragic Octoroon" 65 romanticizerof slaveryas Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworthwas able to present the pathos of the "tragicoctoroon" in Henny of Retribution.The tactic of the Southernapologists has been to concede the possibilityof the octo- room situation,but to dismiss the octoroon figure,whether female and tragic or male and heroic, as being unrepresentativeof "the happy-go- lucky,ignorant, coon-hunting, fun-loving field hand who, more than any other class of slave, typifiedthe great mass of black men throughoutthe South." 3 The tendencyof modern pro-Negrocommentators has been to judge the writersof "tragicoctoroon" storieson the groundsof the validityor comprehensivenessof the picture they painted of the Negro in slavery; on thesegrounds, naturally, the octoroon plot has been found wanting. This judgment,though a just one as far as it goes, has had one unfortu- nate result: the effectivenessof the conventionaloctoroon as part of the antislaveryarsenal has been belittled.In reactionto the Southernreading of the "tragic octoroon" as a corroborationof Southern race theories, Northerncritics have dismissedher and have accused her creatorsof being racist snobs. It is interestingthat when SterlingBrown, a Negro critic, attacksthe tragicoctoroon as evidence of racial snobbery,he writes: "As one critic says: 'This was an indirect admission that a white man in chainswas morepitiful to behold than the Africansimilarly placed. Their most impassionedplea was in behalf of a person little resemblingtheir swarthyproteges....' " 4The "one critic"he is quoting is J. H. Nelson, an extremeSouthern apologist, and the quotation comes fromthe same book as does the "fun-loving,coon-hunting" passage quoted above. The charge-that the abolitionistauthor's motive amounts to no more than a concession to racism-fails to take into account the overriding and avowed purpose of the abolitionist author, the propagandisticin- tention.What is particularlyinteresting about the "tragicoctoroon" plot is that it revealed the point at which the imaginationand sympathyof the pre-CivilWar Northernpublic could be won forthe antislaverycause; this is preciselywhat has been obscuredby the oversimplifiedand unfair view that the octoroon'sappeal was based purely upon racial hypocrisy in author and audience. Specifically,it should be recognized that the appeal of the "tragic octoroon" situation was not based primarilyupon a racially snobbish feelingthat a white person in chains was more patheticthan a black one. Rather,the plight of the octoroonevoked a number of widely differing, though related,responses from Northern audiences. 3 J. H. Nelson, The Negro Character in American Fiction (Lawrence, Kans., 1926), pp. 83-84. 4 Brown, P. 45. 66 American Quarterly First,the "tragicoctoroon" situation flattered the Northernaudience in its sense of self-righteousness,confirming its belief in the moral inferi- orityof the South. The octoroon,to the North,represented not merely the product of the incidental sin of the individual sinner,but rather what mightbe called the resultof cumulativeinstitutional sin, since the octoroon was the product of four generationsof illicit, enforcedmisce- genation made possible by the slaverysystem. The veryexistence of the octoroon convictedthe slaveholderof prostitutinghis slaves and of sell- ing his own childrenfor profit.Thus, the choice of the octoroon rather than of the full-bloodedblack to dramatizethe sufferingof the slave not onlyemphasized the pathosof the slave's conditionbut, more importantly, emphasized the repeated pattern of guilt of the Southern slaveholder. The whiterthe slave, the more undeniablywas the slaveholderguilty of violating the terms of the stewardshipwhich apologists postulated in justifyingslavery. The octoroonbecame the visible signof an incremental sin,the rootsof whichcould be seen by Northernaudiences as particularly and pervasivelySouthern. If the "tragic octoroon" plot passed lightly over the sufferingof the black fieldhand, it neverthelessmade up forthis deficiencyby the intensityof its condemnationof his white master.Seen in this light, it might be said that the pre-CivilWar popularityof the "tragic octoroon" foreshadowedthe North's post-CivilWar eagernessto punish the formerslaveholder and its relative reluctance to help the formerslave. The accusationsagainst the Southernslaveholder implicit in the plot of the "tragic octoroon" were of major significancein the propaganda war carried on between abolitionist and proslaverywriters. Proslavery writers,finding the Yankee
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