The kind of “interracial” family drama that had the potential to muddle Theresa's decision to press forward with her revolutionary convictions is explicitly connected to the development of one of the most prominent “mixed race” tropes in all of Atlantic literary history: the tragic “mulatto/a.” The tragic “mulatto/a” is normally characterized as a “mixed-race” person who finds him- or herself depressed, suicidal, fratricidal, and/or patricidal due either to his lack of identity or to her innate, biological corruption (see Sollors, 1997, 240). According to the stereotype, these individuals are often confused about whether they are more “white” or more “black,” and they are often made to choose between their dual identities, passing either into “whiteness” (one of the most familiar presentations) or into “blackness.” Those characters who choose “whiteness,” even summarily so, are normally punished with death or worse, as in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or the President's Daughter (1853), while those who choose “blackness” are usually praised and esteemed, as in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892).