From ‘Bon’ to ‘Bond’: The ‘Tragic Mulatto/a’ and the Repetition of the Plantation Mythology

This essay performs a reading of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! by way of Hortense Spillers. Tracking Spillers’ analysis of Faulkner through various essays in the collection Black, White, and in Color, I pose a question of how the imaginary figure of the tragic ‘mulatto/a’ functions within the narrative repetition of the plantation romance. This question is oriented by Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies in exploring how the spectacularized violence of the scene of the plantation is both obscured and re-presented in the construction of ‘post-slavery’ subjects. Using Faulkner, Spillers elaborates the role of language as a key link between psychic and social reproduction: as the mythic patriarch writes a narrative in the blood of his descendants, so too do the civilization-founding crimes of incest and miscegenation echo in cultural memory. The figure of the mulatto/a, or in a more contemporary environment the ‘mixed-race’ person, thus presents a certain problem or site of anxiety for white subjectivity, recalling and repressing the inaugural violence of the age of the plantation.