CVK
The Maine Sunday Telegram reviews The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited, a book that analyzes how this archetype symbolizes the volatile and shifting interface of race and national identity in the antebellum period:

For her dissertation some years ago, Eve Raimon was reading all the anti-slavery fiction she could find. Plot devices were predictable, although narratives with a generally motherless, mixed-race slave were considered part of a larger literary genre of 19th-century sentimental or women’s fiction.

“This figure of the tragic (mixed race) mulatta appears again and again,” Raimon says. Some of the reading is “very dismissive and derogatory. It seemed to me the very prevalence of it deserved a more generous reading that took the figures’ time and place more into account.”