Nella Larsen Read online

  Although the passing novel, as suggested above, enables some writers to emphasize the uniqueness and particularity of black culture, most black writers also represent passing as a strategy that interrogates the color line and the entitlements attached to whiteness as a marker of social status and economic privilege. While Anglo-American writers who treat these issues (e.g., Stowe, Twain, Faulkner) both critique and at times narratively reproduce the racial (and sometimes racist) arrangements and practices inscribed in the legal fiction and social custom of racial classification codified in court decisions such as Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), African American writers have historically deployed passing and the passing subject as narrative devices by which to critique racist and hierarchal social structures and practices while, at the same time, promoting the value of blackness.

  It has by now been amply demonstrated that the modern African American novel as a genre owes a great debt, formally and thematically, to the slave narrative. What is not so frequently acknowledged is that this genre is similarly indebted to the passing narrative, arguably the successor to the slave narrative as the most identifiable black literary form of the early twentieth century. And while never as popular as the slave narrative, the narrative of passing inscribes several of the same themes and motifs as its more illustrious predecessor. The passing narratives contest and constitute part of the critique of race and racial difference that is first formally articulated in the slave narratives. Like the slave narrative, it is a genre that is both political and moral in its appeal to the reader. If the slave narrative functions as a critique of slavery (and to some extent northern racism), the passing narrative functions as a critique of postbellum social structures based on racial segregation, white privilege, and black subordination. And if the slave narrative articulates the fundamental humanity of blacks, the passing novel advances its claim to the civil equality of African Americans. Finally, the passing narrative, like the slave narrative, is a form that both explicitly and implicitly challenges hierarchical and discriminatory social, political, and economic practices.

  Further, the narrative of slavery and the narrative of passing replicate certain formal and structural patterns: Structured by border crossings—social, personal, and sometimes literal—both can be classified as “border” narratives. If the slave narrator crosses the geographical border from South to North, the passing narrator transgresses the racial boundary from “black” to “white.” If the slave crosses the Mason-Dixon line, the passer crosses the color line, the one in an attempt to secure physical freedom, the other to secure social freedom. More frequently, however, the passing protagonist reverses the slave’s journey of geographical “leavetaking” to one of racial “homecoming”—psychically if not always physically.

  Historically, the slave narrative and the passing narrative have appealed to both black and white writers, but these forms have also attracted both black and white readers. If it is true, as some critics maintain, that the slave narrative “educate[d] white America about its ‘exotic’ and unknown ‘other,’ ” the passing narrative not only educated whites ethnographically about black life, it has constructed and critiqued “whiteness” for both its black and white readers.30 While its exoticism offered whites a lens into an aspect of black life rarely witnessed by outsiders, its social critique locates the passing narrative within the tradition of protest and exposé that characterizes much of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century black literary discourse.

  Moreover, just as the slave narrative emerged as a countergenre to the southern “plantation tradition,” so the narrative of passing arose in dialectical response to a body of postbellum literature seeking to reinscribe the color line in the popular literature of the period. Southern novelists like Thomas Dixon, Robert Lee Durham, and Thomas Nelson Page typically portrayed blacks, especially mulattoes, as “dangerous” and “threatening” to civilization and the southern way of life.31 The passing narrative, on the other hand, often reveals the violence, brutality, and inhumanity of whites toward blacks, as well as the pathos of the mulatto’s plight.

  The passing narrative, like the slave narrative, emerges from a precise historical period and, as such, compels both readers and critics alike to take into account the social and cultural history that is formally inscribed in the genre. The motivation and investment in passing was a direct consequence of slavery and its aftermath, which legally defined race as an instrument to insure the social privilege and material property attached to “whiteness.” As David Roediger demonstrates, to be white in the early and mid-nineteenth century meant to be “not black,” and to be “not black” meant, as Ruth Frankenberg explains, to be “not slave.”32 (Thus, the idea of the “white slave” in the United States, as critic Werner Sollors notes, constituted a “cultural oxymoron.”33) And finally, the mergence of race with social and legal status, as critical race theorist Cheryl Harris explains, marked the distinction between “who was subject to enslavement” and “who was free.” Whiteness thus became a “valuable” and “valued” property, the “quintessential property for personhood,” and “inherent in the concept of ‘being white’ was the right to own or hold whiteness to the exclusion and subordination of Blacks.”34 Thus, according to Harris, the social construction of race turns on the “ideological and rhetorical move from ‘slave’ to ‘free’ [and] ‘Black’ and ‘white’ as polar constructs—moves, I might add, to which the slave narrative and passing narrative implicitly respond.” 35 Since stories of “passing” are, however, also stories of racial intermixing, these narratives threaten the ideology of (white) racial purity and privilege. In fact, it is the offspring of racial fusion, as Eva Saks notes, that “produced the phenomenon of ‘passing’ … for white” that is inscribed in the passing narrative.” 36

  Fundamentally transgressive in ideology, the passing narratives not only explore the social, psychological, and economic motivations for passing, they also perform acts of literary trespass in exposing the cultural and legal fiction of race. Plessy vs. Ferguson, whose consequences can be ignored neither in the social institution of passing nor in the narrativization of that experience in the novel of passing, not only legally codified the color line, relegating blacks for the next half century to a status of “separate but equal,” it also secured the “one drop” rule by which “blackness” was defined. In fact, it was this conception that race was biologically determined, and expressed through what Saks calls “the metaphor of blood,” that not only instituted segregation in the form of Jim Crow laws, it also essentialized the notion of race in American jurisprudence. And it was this notion that the infusion of “one drop” of “black blood” was racially determinative that rendered what Joel Williamson describes as “invisible blackness.”37 In literature, it is the function of the passing subject, through whose veins supposedly flow the “contamination” of “black blood,” to expose the fiction of race and racial classification as well as to represent the desire of all African Americans for full access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. As a form, then, the passing novel destabilizes social and personal identities, creating a fluidity and mobility that transgresses the boundaries of race inscribed by law and custom, and, at the same time, this genre denounces a social system based on racial hierarchy and exclusion.

  Under the guise of genteel bourgeois domestic fiction, Larsen’s passing plot enables the writer to interrogate notions frequently associated with the social sciences, or what subsequently became known as “scientific racism.” And although Passing did not appear until the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, the novel engages an ongoing historical discourse of race and race difference that continued to inform the emergent “scientific” disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and ethnology, discourses advancing ideas of fundamental racial difference, often couched in notions of social Darwinism and evolutionism designed to provide a rationale for policies aimed at justifying an expanding U.S. imperialism as well as “resolving” what was popularly regarded on
the home front as the “race problem.”

  Just as modern cultural anthropologists like Franz Boas and Melville Herskovits countered the racialist theories of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social science discourse, so Larsen’s passing plot calls into question popular theories contrived to reify notions of race and race difference. Larsen’s ironic appropriations and allusions to the discourses of miscegenation, genetics, heredity, eugenics, and genealogy engage popular Victorian pseudoscientific, legal, and religious theories of race and racial difference. Frequent sardonic allusions in Larsen’s text to “Ham,” “blood,” “fingernails,” and so forth, as well as narrative anxieties around issues of the body, color, and reproduction, reflect Larsen’s interrogation of popular scriptural justifications of slavery as well as theories of scientific racialism popularized by Louis Agassiz, Josiah C. Nott, Sir Francis Galton,38 and their successors, who sought—through arcane mathematical calculation, theories of mono-and polygenesis, phrenology, amalgamation, atavism, and so forth—to discover outward racial signs or markers designed to classify race and essentialize racial differences.

  The passing plot itself turns centrally on the notions of personal and racial identity—and whether it is produced by biology and genetics (nature) or environment and training (culture). Like other black women novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, Larsen addresses in her fiction issues of gender, sexuality, and class as they intersect with race to produce the race-marked middle-class female subject. Further, as Cheryl Wall, Thadious Davis, Judith Butler, and others have argued, Larsen’s treatment of the passing female subject and her social location draws on the notion of performative identity.39 By rewriting modernist notions of a constative, immutable, unified notion of selfhood with a conception of identity that is fundamentally performative, the narrative of passing interrogates the idea of a transcendent or essentialized identity. Many contemporary theorists reject essentializing notions of identity that have been enlisted historically to justify and rationalize racial, gender, sexual, and national hierarchies whereby women, blacks, gays, and colonials have been subjugated. Nevertheless, in contemporary literary and theoretical discourse, the relation between essentialism and constructionism remains a site of critique and debate. As we shall see, Larsen, in effect, narratively theorizes the current postmodernist debate around essentialism vs. constructionism. And like some other narratives of passing, Larsen’s plot betrays a certain duplicity in that it seems to challenge the idea of innate racial difference while, at the same time, making a case for racial uniqueness.

  Critics have interpreted Larsen’s title, and the trope of “passing” itself, in several different registers. For Mary Helen Washington, passing becomes “a metaphor for the risk-taking experience,” as well as “a symbol or metaphor of deliverance,” albeit it “an obscene form of deliverance,” since it requires denial of roots and genealogy. 40 For Cheryl Wall, passing becomes “a metaphor of death and desperation,” referring not only to “the sociological phenomenon of blacks crossing the color line,” but also to “the racial identity and the denial of self required of women who conform to restrictive gender roles.” 41 Deborah McDowell suggests that passing is a metaphor that implies “false, forged, and mistaken” racial, sexual, and narrative identities. 42 As these and other critics suggest, Larsen’s title, functioning as the novel’s central trope, would seem to refer ambiguously to both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, both of whom play the passing game—although for the former, the decision to pass is merely “occasional.”

  Despite the painstaking and illuminating work of Thadious Davis and Charles Larson, Nella Larsen remains, in many respects, what Mary Helen Washington once described as “mystery woman of the Harlem Renaissance.” 43 The gaps and ambiguities in her biography are similarly reflected in her novel Passing, which remains, in some respects, the “mystery text” of the Harlem Renaissance.

  Critical efforts to unmask Larsen’s text have yielded multiple readings, ranging from a focus on race, to psychology, class, gender, (lesbian) sexuality, to an approach based on the intersectionality of many of these categories of analysis. Many critics, including Claudia Tate, Cheryl Wall, Mary Dearborn, Charles Larson, and Deborah McDowell, argue that Larsen deploys a cover story based on race to conceal a deeper, more complex narrative. For Tate, Larsen’s narrative draws its power not “from its surface content [race], but from its vivid imagery, subtle metaphors, and carefully balanced psychological ambiguity.” Viewing passing as “more a device to sustain suspense than merely a compelling social issue,” Tate contends that “racial issues … are, at best, peripheral to the story.”44 Cheryl Wall argues that Larsen’s text was subject to popular misreadings, concluding that “[r]eaders were so sure they knew the story Larsen was telling they misread the story she actually told.” Larsen, in effect, deployed the convention of the tragic mulatto, argues Wall, to “mask her … subversive concerns … about gender questions.”45 Similarly, for Mary Dearborn, race functions only on the symbolic level, since “the problems Larsen’s heroines suffer derive from their identities as women.”46 Each of the foregoing interpretations valorizes Larsen’s text not for its engagement with issues of race and identity, but for its modernist aesthetics on the one hand, and its construction and critique of gender and gender ideology on the other.

  Similar to critics before her, Deborah McDowell seeks to reveal a “dangerous subplot” underpinning a safer, more conventional surface story of race. In her influential reading, McDowell interprets Larsen’s novel as a story of lesbian sexuality that “passes” itself off as a story of race: “Though superficially, Irene’s is an account of Clare’s passing for white and related to issues of racial identity and loyalty,” maintains McDowell, “underneath the safety of that surface is the more dangerous story … of Irene’s awakening sexual desire for Clare.” 47 Charles Larson, too, maintains that “the racial theme” is not “the most important”; rather “the racial question … is the framework for Larsen’s … novel, the context she used to develop her major theme of marital instability.”48 In thus overwriting the story of racial passing with a modernist aesthetics of form or an ideological reading of gender, sexuality, and domesticity, contemporary critics seek to revise and expand earlier, more traditional race readings. By relegating the story of race passing to the status of symbol or “cover” story, however, these critical accounts risk eclipsing or segregating race from other important elements of the narrative.

  Contrary to many of the writers above, my own analysis will strategically recenter race in order to demonstrate precisely how Larsen’s novel critiques and embraces the notion of race as an essentialist constuction. From a critical perspective, what seems clear, as Jennifer Brody and Ann duCille suggest, is that Larsen’s simultaneous engagement with the interarticulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality ultimately produces a text whose horizon of meaning must inevitably exceed any univocal reading.49

  Larsen takes as her subject middle-class black women who, like the author herself, often discover themselves marginalized by their mulatta, or biracial, status. And although most critics now agree that Larsen’s novel reflects Irene Redfield’s rather than Clare Kendry’s story, Clare, like her creator, has remained something of an enigma for the reader. Yet Clare Kendry has little in common with earlier nineteenth-century portraits of the tragic mulatta. And while Clare as mulatta may indeed function as a “narrative device of mediation” (Hazel Carby) or “rhetorical device” (Ann duCille), Larsen refuses her character the sentimental incarnation of the tragic mulatta whose plight necessarily enlists the sympathy of the reader.50 Further, unlike the mulatto characters of earlier abolitionist and black protest fiction, Clare is devoid of race consciousness, expressing neither commitment nor solidarity to race. (Rather, it is Irene who is identified as the “race woman” by virtue of her discourse on “race uplift.”). Although humorously fashioning herself as “deserter,” Clare manifests neither signs of racial self-hatred nor a deep-seated desire to be
white. And while it is true that Clare ultimately expresses boredom and disillusionment with her “pale existence,” her story fails to conform to the convention of the tragic mulatta who typically experiences guilt and remorse resulting from racial “desertion” or “abandonment.” As Irene later describes her,

  … it wasn’t … that Clare cared at all about the race or what was to become of it. She didn’t. Or that she had for any of its members great, or even real, affection… . Nor could it be said that she had even the slightest artistic or sociological interest in the race that some members of other races displayed. She hadn’t. No, Clare Kendry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it.

  Thus, unlike the more conventional black portrayal of the tragic mulatta who anguishes over her desertion of the black “race,” Larsen’s Clare, “determined … to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham,” decides to cross the color line in order to “get all the things [she] wanted and never had had.” Having gained entry into a white world of wealth and privilege through marriage to an affluent banker, Clare returns only to escape, in the excitement and gaiety she discovers in Harlem, the sterility of a staid white environment. Her “return,” so to speak, seems motivated no less by her “having” nature (“Clare always had a … having way with her”) than her previous decision to pass. In short, while implicitly calling into question a system of racial and gender privilege, Larsen’s character would seem to represent what Barbara Christian calls “the not so tragic mulatta” who is neither racial repentant nor racial rebel.

  Larsen’s novel refuses to easily surrender its meaning to the questing reader or probing critic. And read as a (post)modernist text, it makes certain demands on the critic and reader, demands that are signaled symbolically in Larsen’s revision of the conventional tragic mulatto as modern passing subject as well as formally in its critical self-reflexivity, narrative ellipses, and dramatic equivocations. The opening of the text, a personal retrospective occurring long after the events rehearsed have transpired, is signified by the opening of a letter. At the outset of Part One (“Encounter”), Irene receives a missive from Clare, a childhood friend whom she has accidently encountered while they were both socially passing in the rooftop tearoom of the fashionable, whites-only Drayton Hotel in Chicago. Here, the reader is introduced to Irene, who muses over a letter addressed in a handwriting she recognizes to be that of her mysterious friend. This “scene of reading,” as it were, establishes a structural equivalence between Irene and the reader on the one hand and Clare’s letter and Larsen’s text on the other.