IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, I traced the layered
significations associated with the “tragic mulatta” in the reform
literature of Lydia Maria Child and found that her depictions of
intermarriage in general and the mulatta figure in particular
functioned as a rhetorical device that at once excoriated the
workings of the slavocracy, destabilized the naturalness of racial
hierarchies, and provided an occasion to envision an egalitarian
future of racial reconciliation—a utopian world of racial diver-
sity in which the interracial family could embody the potential
for a multiracial nation. At the same time, the contemporaneous
drive for national incorporation, unity, and expansionism led
the reformer toward an uncritical acceptance and celebration
of prevailing dominant culture ideologies of Anglo-American
supremacy.

In this chapter, I look at the work of William Wells Brown,
next to Frederick Douglass one of the premier antislavery ac-
tivists of the mid-nineteenth century. Like Child, Brown made
extensive use of the “tragic mulatta” character, most notably in
the first novel published by an African American, Clotel; or,
The President's Daughter (1853). Unlike Child, however, Brown
used the device not as a means of positing an as yet unrealized
multiracial Eden but rather in an effort to unsettle the very

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