The History of Repeated Madness and Violence in The Mulatto by Victor Sejour and The Child Who Favored Daughter by Alice Walker

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Recommended: Issues of racism in the color purple by Alice Walker

Victor Sejour’s short story “The Mulatto” from 1837 and Alice Walker’s story “The Child Who Favoured Daughter” from her collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women in 1973 are fine examples of African American gothic representing the complexity of racism within society and the theme of female sexuality. The stories have several themes in common that they address in their distinct manner. For instance, the representation of the slave community surrounding the main characters in “The Mulatto” is cooperated whereas, in “The Child Who Favoured Daughter,” the protagonist appears to have chosen to stay aloof from the society he belongs to. Another difference is in their respective narrative strategies; “The Mulatto” allegorizes the plot, lacking the gruesome narrative details of slave treatment, which lies in contrast with Walker’s story that offers an intensively detailed account. Further, “The Mulatto” deals with the macro issue of subjugation of mixed race slaves while “The Child Who Favoured Daughter” explicates the internal struggle of Africans in a free land. This racial struggle and their respective histories of violence result into the protagonists’ present state of ultimate madness making the two stories a gothic tragedy. Though the two stories belong to African American gothic genre, a common ground of representation is the similarity between the two texts of the mal-treatment of women, resulting from male desire that leads to their tragic demise. The dismal conditions that cripple women and issues surrounding it, like incestuous desires support the plot of the stories illustrating often-reversed assumptions of slavery. Exploring the ineffectual kinships and the US taboo of interracial sexual relationships, these st...

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...nying altogether the possibility of proving their masters wrong.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Séjour, Victor. "The Mulatto." Translated by Philip Barnard. In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay.
See more at: http://southernspaces.org/2007/seeds-rebellion-plantation-fiction victor s%C3%A9jours-mulatto#sthash.zlNBWLx9.dpuf
Walker, Alice. “The Child Who Favoured Daughter.” In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women.
Daut, Marlene. “"Sons of White Fathers": Mulatto Vengeance and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour's"The Mulatto"” Nineteenth-Century Literature.
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Petry, Alice Hall. ”Alice Walker: The Achievement of the Short Fiction.” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter, 1989), pp. 12-27 .

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