IF WILLIAM WELLS BROWN'SClotel demon-
strates the need to reassess the work of the literary mulatta in the
sentimental tradition, elements of Harriet Beecher Stowe's mas-
terwork reveal comparable complexities. When read through the
prism of a neglected predecessor novel, Richard Hildreth's The
Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), the portrait of Cassy in
Uncle Tom's Cabin offers a countervailing narrative to the much
more familiar sentimental story of Eliza. A careful study of Hil-
dreth's prior text will broaden traditional understandings of
Stowe's conflicted deployment of the light-skinned female slave
character and the multivalent literary and historical forces work-
ing to reproduce the figure's radical instability. Hildreth's earlier
work interrogates both race and nation in ways that anticipate
Stowe's multifaceted portrait of the overlooked character of
Cassy. What remains underexamined is the anomalous nature
of Cassy's positioning as “tragic mulatta, ” which is emblematic,
ultimately, of a larger failure to acknowledge and assess the
liberational potential the female mulatta figure embodies—
intermittently and ambivalently but nevertheless consistently—
in antebellum fiction.

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