page_title: The Quadroons
section_title: Plot summary
hierarchical_section_title: The Quadroons / Plot summary
caption_attribution_description: Print; Prints
context_page_description: "The Quadroons" is a short story written by American writer Lydia Maria Child and published in the Liberty Bell in 1842. The influential short story depicts the life and death of a mixed-race woman and her daughter in early nineteenth century America, a slave-owning society.
  Child originated the trope of the "tragic mulatta", which became well-known in the anti-slavery literature of the time, was taken up also by many other writers. Years later, Harriet Jacobs's autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl featured the same theme, but with important changes, effectively giving her an agency Child's main characters never had.
context_section_description: The setting of the story is a cottage in Augusta, GA, before the Civil War. The two main characters, Rosalie, a "quadroon", and her husband Edward, a "Georgian," are living together in "a marriage sanctioned by Heaven, though unrecognized on earth" Rosalie, as a partly African-American woman, cannot legally marry a White man, but they live together as if they are man and wife, and she makes no legal claim on her common-law husband. They have a daughter named Xarifa, who grows up sheltered.
  Edward develops political ambition, and for leverage he marries a wealthy white woman, the daughter of an important politician, essentially destroying the marriage between him and Rosalie. He asks her to be his mistress but she declines, finding it morally repulsive. Rosalie and Xarifa live alone in the cottage until Rosalie died of heart break from losing Edward. Xarifa had been taken care of by teachers including George Elliot, a young man hired by her father, but Edward becomes an alcoholic due to the guilt he feels after Rosalie's death. His drinking becomes his downfall: he falls off his horse when drunk, and dies--without a will, but his wife makes no change and continues to provide for his daughter.  
  Xarifa and her harp teacher fall in love and plan to move to France together, but Xarifa was sold before this could occur: "Rosalie, though she knew it not, had been the daughter of a slave; whose wealthy master, though he remained attached to her to the end of her days, had carelessly omitted to have papers of manumission recorded". Because Rosalie's mother had never been manumitted, her daughter and her granddaughter are still legally the property of the owner's family. Xarifa was auctioned off to the highest bidder, who is a man who tries to "win her favor, by flattery and presents", but she refuses to become his lover. Xarifa and George plan an escape but are betrayed by another enslaved person who is a double agent, and George is shot and killed in the attempt. Afterward, Xarifa's owner, having lost his patience, rapes her and she takes her own life--for the tragic mulatta, sexual violence and death are the only options.
caption: Cottage
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