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Analysis of Passing by Nella Larsen Nella Larsen's published novel Passing (1929) is deft exploration of the overabundance of contradictions inherent in the black experience of middle-class life. The novel includes the failure of prestige within the black community to carry over into the wider society. Larsen in her novel concentrates on the perplexing inability of an elevated lifestyle, refined manners, and impressive achievements to overcome racial discrimination, objectification, and phobic hatred; and the replication of color prejudice and skin color hierarchy within an interracial context. For black elites, many of the social benefits that should reasonably have been attached to their class status were effectively negated by their racial identity. Larsen frames many of the contradictions she exposes between class and racial entitlements within the context of maternity. Larsen's continuous indirectness regarding her family background was symptomatic of her self-consciousness about her lack of pedigree in a social order where ancestral origins were so crucial to acceptance.
Passing contains no instance of biological or familial sisterhood; rather, it depicts the tense and duplicitous relationship between two women, Irene Redfield, a cultivated, privileged, light-skinned black woman and Clare Kendry, a childhood friend of Irene's who has spent her entire adult life passing for white. After the two are reunited, Clare aggressively pursues Irene's friendship, partly from a sense of personal nostalgia and partly because she feels increasingly consumed by her desire to reconnect with her people. Because Irene lives in Harlem and interacts regularly with fashionable black society, Clare uses her friendship with Irene to reenter black society, though she does so behind the back of her racist white husband. Irene resists and resents Clares presence in her life and in black culture, in part because Clares beauty, glamour, and innate vivacity arouse both jealousy (Irene thinks that Clare is having an affair with her husband Brian) and desire (Irene cannot resist her own sexually charged attraction to Clare). In the novels denouement, Clares husband discovers her true racial identity and rushes into a Harlem party to confront her. When he enters, Irene runs to Clare, who has been sitting at an open window in the seventeenth-floor apartment, and Clare falls (or is pushed by Irene) to her death.
In Passing, Larsen shifts her trenchant focus from the debilitating physical and psychological effects of pregnancy and childbirth to the superficial worlds arranged by women dependent upon a nuclear family to establish their social identities. After twelve years of separation, Irene has assumed her expected place in the black bourgeoisie, while Clare has crossed the color line into the white world. Then Clare becomes bored with her life as a white woman and wants Irene to act as her passport back into the black community. The ensuing series of events is told from the point of view of Irene, who from the beginning maintains serious reservations about Clares multifaceted potential to upset the delicate balance of the life Irene has very methodically constructed around her husband and children. The centrality of traditional literary representations in Passing has tacitly abetted the notion that the literature of passing is also culturally representative. Juxtaposition of literary, musical, cinematic, and journalistic representations renders visible the relation between cultural apparatuses and institutions and the racial passing narratives that are produced in and through them.
Such a method also works to underscore the imbrication's of racial discourse and modes of cultural representation, the latter of which are often treated as though they were racially transparent or neutral. Finally, analysis of texts from different decades makes it possible to read passing narratives in relation to the developing, ever-changing discourse of race, which they mediate and represent. Motherhood is the ideal vehicle for Larsen to use to explore the tensions of black middle-class culture because it affects the personal autonomy of the women she centers in her narratives. It forms the definitive trope of the domesticity through which women traditionally established a legitimate and respectable social identity, and it constitutes the pivotal point of conflict between romanticized fantasies of home-centered bliss and rational assessments of the social conditions to which ones child would assuredly be subjected.
Larsen's characters have very complicated responses to the prospect and experience of motherhood: they are emotionally conflicted about whether they should have children and how best to raise them, at least in part due to the troubled, superficial, or nonexistent relationships they have experienced with their own mothers. Passing features heroines whose dominant parental influences are their fathers. Larsen's novel continuously challenges domestic harmony and question the wisdom of motherhood for black American women. Critics are divided on the issue of whether Nella Larsen's heroines can truly be classified under the rubric of the tragic mulatto. Marita Golden is emphatic in her pronouncement: No tragic mulattoes here. These prim, proper colored ladies are driven by the impulse to shape their lives rather than suffer them. (Golden, 23) The tragic mulatto, then, is figured as a victim of circumstance, powerless to resist the multiple degradations of a racist society, despite her intimate ancestral connections with the dominant racial group.
Nella Larsen's women become exempt by virtue of their independent action to determine their own futures. Charles Larson implies that Larsen's version of the tragic mulatto figure is simply more culturally sophisticated than those of her literary predecessors, including Frances Harpers Iola Leroy. The depth of her characterization, as well as her superior narrative technique distinguishes the novels of Nella Larsen from earlier treatments of the stock female character. (Hutchinson, 46) In Hutchinson book, Larson is clearly arguing that the designation tragic mulatto elicits an image of a flat, one-dimensional, predictable character, and Larsen's take is a much richer and more compelling one. (46) Deborah McDowell cleverly sidesteps the argumentative issue by pointing out that, given that Larsen depicted heroines who can obviously be designated tragic mulatto's, to concentrate on that singular aspect of their representation diverts attention from the more interesting literary themes Larsen engages. In other words, in focusing on the problems of the tragic mulatto, readers miss the more urgent problem which Larsen tried to explore: the pleasure and danger of female sexual experience. (McDowell, 187) McDowell makes an excellent point. It is deceptively easy to subsume every issue explored within Quicksand and Passing under the umbrella of racial difference, but I contend that this is a trap snaring not only Larsen's readers but also her heroines. Helga Crane, Irene Redfield, and Clare Kendry all show a decided tendency to conflate their attitudes toward sexuality and desire with the mythical racially encoded dichotomy between pristine white women and, to borrow a term from Irene, having black ones, perpetuated by the dominant social order.
They mistakenly associate their ideological battles between sexual innocence and wanton carnality with the interracial mixture of their genetic inheritance. Anxiety over pure womanhood pervades the novels of Nella Larsen, and it is invariably wrapped up in confusion over racial identity. Deborah McDowell argues that Nella Larsen's narrative choices were largely influenced by the attitudes toward sexuality prevalent during the Harlem Renaissance. The community was divided between the two major movements involved in disseminating thought the artists and the intellectuals.
The artists, following the bold lead of the ages female blues singers, wanted to celebrate, or, in some cases, exploit the sensuality of black female sexuality, while the intellectuals, struggling against the projected lascivious nature that was a legacy of slavery, were committed to presenting a wholesome, chaste picture of black femininity. McDowell contends that, caught in this dilemma, Nella Larsen tried to hold the two virtually contradictory impulses in the same novel. Wanted to tell the story of the black woman with sexual desires, but was constrained by a competing desire to establish black women as respectable in black middle class terms. (McDowell, 187) Nella Larsen is subtle in her novel, occasionally deploying such referents as Negro society, Negro circles, and people of consequence, but preferring to describe personal attributes, such as religious affiliation, education, taste, or habits, to signal social status. Nella Larsen structures Passing by using a narrative strategy, ordering it into three sections (Encounter, Re-Encounter, Finale). Larsen concentrates mainly on the upwardly aspiring strata of blacks who felt the psychic dissonance caused by their ambitions and expectations for themselves coming into conflict with the limits and restrictions socially imposed upon them. Larsen proved to be remarkably astute cultural observer, encoding the transition in the black community from aristocratic status group to middle-class upward mobility in perfect accordance with retrospective analyses of the phenomenon.
Racial passing by African American writers, confronts the gaps within literary scholarship that pits an ideological critique of the complicity of racial passing with white supremacy against the narrative analysis of what the theme of passing offers to African American writers producing literature within the context of white literary and patronage institutions. This polarity within the critical literature has, with few exceptions, disallowed for the possibility that narrative strategies are themselves ideological, or that literary narrative is itself conceived in and through the ideological constructs of race, gender, class, sexuality, and national identities. Taking as its starting point the notion of home both as a symbolic and an actual location that marks the limits of raced and gendered agency even while offering a site for such agency, Nella Larsen represented racial passing in her novel. I believe that the ideological instability of passing translated into an unexpected degree of narrative flexibility for Larsen. The author used the passing plot to construct parodies and negotiating in the process the notion that the rejection of passing signifies the foreclosure of agency. Because the novels attention is focused on two women, the erotic ized gaze that is conventional when male-imagined narrators describe mixed-race -women -- is directed from a female center of consciousness toward the mysterious woman who passes permanently, and description therefore calls attention to itself.
Such literary representation of racial passing by Larsen elucidates how subjects negotiate agency, identity, and freedom within the terms of the dominant discourses that circumscribe their choices. Bibliography: Bernard, Emily. Remember Me to Harlem. New York: Knopf, 2001. Caught, Pamela. Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility.
Urbana: U of Illinois, 1999. Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Womans Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994. Ginsberg, Elaine K. Introduction: The Politics of Passing.
Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Hutchinson, George. Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race. American Literary History, 1997: p. 46 - 48. Golden, Marita.
Introduction to An Intimation of Things Distant, by Nella Larsen, 1987: p. 23. McCoy, Beth. Typography, Economy, and Losing Nella Larsen. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2001.
McDowell, Deborah. The Changing Same: Black Womens Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995: p. 187 - 188. McDowell, Deborah. Sexuality in Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Greenwood, FL: Penkevill, 1988. Tate, Claudia.
Nella Larsen's Passing: A Problem of Interpretation. Black American Literature Forum 14, 1980.
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