Quadoomed

            In Lydia Maria Child’s, “The Quadroons,” a character, Rosalie, is born with curse. As seen in the title, Rosalie is a quadroon: a person whose parents are a mulatto and a white person and who is therefore one-quarter black by descent. Amidst a time when multi-ethnicity was neither valued nor evidently common, Rosalie is suspended in an unshakeable web of multi-ethnicity. Her formative years are marked by ignorance of her place in society, due to the secluded cottage in which she was raised, out of reach of the walls “The edicts of society had built…of separation between her and them; for she was a quadroon” (Child 116).  This “separation” gets the best of Rosalie and her lover, when he leaves her for a woman of less ethnic diversity. After dying of a broken-hearted loneliness, Rosalie passes on her curse to her daughter Xarifa. Neither she, nor her mother could achieve complete happiness with their lovers because of their “proscribed race” (117). They were both doomed to the same fate, that which could only be broken by death.

            Rosalie and Xarifa represent the relationship between whites and slaves at this point in American history. The two races could not live side by side as equals, until there was a death to them both. This death could have been Child’s hope that in the future, as in death, everyone would be claimed by a power greater than themselves, which sees all humans as equals.