Nella Larsen Read online

  Unlike Deborah McDowell, who reads the envelope as a “metaphoric vagina,” I am more inclined to agree with Claudia Tate that it functions as a kind of foreshadowing device, an Eliotian “objective correlative” of Clare’s character “daring defiance of unwritten codes of social propriety.” 51 Beyond the letter’s metonymic significance, however, I would suggest that the unopened envelope—while broadly signifying the dangers of writing—functions, paradoxically, as a metaphor of concealment and safe enclosure. Thus the enclosed content of the envelope would figure, on one level, as the textual unconscious— that which is risky, unsafe, or menacing. Irene, as addressee, then, faces the challenge of opening the letter and confronting the potential dangers of the psychic unconscious.

  The structural parallels between Irene/the reader and Clare’s letter/Larsen’s text provide an early narrative clue on how to read Larsen’s novel. What the reader/critic subsequently recognizes is that, for Irene, Clare embodies a “performative” text, and more precisely, the performativity of what legal historian Eva Saks elsewhere describes as “the miscegenous body.”52 Clare (whose name means “light”) performs “whiteness” and suppresses “blackness” in the “miscegenous body”—a body in which the “races” (genus) are mixed (miscere ). The contents of Clare’s letters articulate the “black” text concealed within the “white” body, expressing her despair with “this pale life” and her “longing … for that other… .” At the heart of Larsen’s novel, then, is Irene’s readerly performance juxtaposed to Clare’s textual performance. Clare as text—as performative text—becomes a work of art and artifice (“one got … [an] aesthetic pleasure from watching her”), and, as such, an object of desire and knowing for Irene and the spectatorial reader. And it is here, in the realm of desire for knowledge (of Self and Other), rather than in latent lesbian desire, that I would locate Clare’s true seductiveness for Irene—as well as the seductiveness of the text for the reader.53 Like Balzac’s Zambinella, Clare functions as an illusion, an actress, a sign, a performer who epitomizes not only difference, but the unrepresentability of difference when it is coded as the miscegenous body. Clare’s body, figured in the body of the letter, remains an indecipherable text, an illegible sign, an object of knowledge to be “read,” repressed, and, finally, repudiated by Irene. Fundamentally coded as surface and artifice, Clare is produced primarily as “affect.” When, for example, Irene visits Clare at the exclusive Morgan, she discovers herself in a sitting-room, large and high, at whose windows hung startlingly blue draperies which triumphantly dragged attention from the gloomy chocolate-colored furniture. And Clare was wearing a thin floating dress of the same shade of blue, which suited her and the rather difficult room to perfection.

  Elsewhere, Clare “[sits] with an air of indifferent assurance, as if arranged for, desired.” In these passages, the combination of posture, costume, set, and props, as it were, contrives to achieve a spectacularly dramatic effect in which Clare gets featured stage center.

  The opening scene also alerts the reader to the importance of the materiality of the letter (and perhaps, belles lettres). Significantly, here it is not so much the signified (content) as the materiality of the signifier (form) that Irene “reads.” Yet even when the contents of the letter are revealed, Irene finds herself “puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them.” Thus, the illegibility of the letter simultaneously underscores Clare’s inscrutability, the elusiveness of the text, and Irene’s readerly incompetence. Later, that same inscrutability is written into “the look on Clare’s … face,” which Irene finds “unfathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers.” Importantly, the reader’s introduction to both Irene and Clare is framed by the act of reading and being read. And just as Clare becomes the text that Irene must learn to decipher, so Irene, in turn, becomes the text to be deciphered by the reader. What defines this moment, then, is a scene of reading in which the miscegenous text, a stand-in for the miscegenous body, results in “a crisis of representation.”54 At stake in this crisis of representation is the incongruity between the visible sign and the social and legal meaning of the body. While legally defined as black, both Irene and Clare possess “unmarked bodies” in that both lack the visible markers of blackness.

  This crisis of representation, moreover, is textually embodied in the form and structure of Passing. Through its narrative gaps and repressions, as well as its open-ended resistance to closure and resolution, Larsen’s novel performs as an early exemplar of black (post)modernist indeterminacy. Thus, in spite of its modernist affinities, Larsen’s narrative would seem to be best understood in terms of a contemporary (post)modernist perspective, both in the performance of its narrative strategies and structure as well as in the philosophical assumptions grounding its notions of personal and textual identity. As we shall see, the narrative retrospective is punctuated by gaps and ambiguities that ultimately function to expose the contingency of knowledge, to interrogate both racial essentialism and constructionism, and to decenter the autonomous and desiring subject.55 The repressions of this “writerly” text leave it to the reader, finally, to “fill in” the gaps and lacunae, thereby reconstituting the miscegenous text/body.56 What is at stake here is the readerly reconstitution of a fragmented and/or suppressed social (and textual) identity.

  Since the message of the letter (text) is only partially revealed, its full meaning is, in effect, repressed. Not only do the textual ellipses and narrative gaps represent the textual unconscious, but Irene’s own repressions as central consciousness leave it to the reader to fill in the textual occlusions. Mindful that the challenge in reading the text is prefigured by Irene’s encounter with Clare’s letter, the reader/ critic, like Irene, must attempt to elicit the mystery of its meaning—to uncover the secret of the text (figured in some respects by the secrecy of Clare’s passing). It is indeed only by filling in the gaps of Larsen’s elusive, elliptical, and equivocal novel—a mode of reading that is demanded by the strategies of (post)-modernism—that the critic/reader is potentially able to reconstitute the meaning of the miscegenous text/ body.

  Again, the reader must bear in mind that Clare is represented only through Irene, thus allowing Clare only secondary characterization. Metaphorically, Clare’s interiority is a gap within the text; her inner life (including her hidden identity) remains sealed in the envelope, whose contents (like Clare herself) are later destroyed by Irene. And like the envelope, which bears no return address, its sender is associated with no precise place or origins (although she travels and resides in New York, Chicago, and Europe). Clare, as we shall see, functions as a kind of textualized network of surfaces on which Irene reads (writes) her own psychic projection of otherness. Significantly, upon their first encounter, Irene is figured as a reader who “[fills] in the gap of her history,” while Clare—constructed as a surface that lacks depth and interiority—is rendered “silent.” But it is her aversive glance (“she had only to turn away her eyes, to refuse [Clare] recognition”) that restricts Irene’s knowledge of the Otherness that is Clare. For the reader, then, the meaning of Clare’s character remains buried in Irene’s unconscious and the textual unconscious.

  Structured by three chapters, “Encounter,” “Re-encounter,” and “Finale,” Larsen’s novel structurally mimes and formally thematizes a theatrical performance. The second “act,” as it were, opens with Irene ruminating over a missive she had received from Clare some two years earlier—“a letter that was, to her taste, a bit too lavish in its wordiness, a shade too unreserved in the manner of its expression.” Not only is Clare further textualized in this passage, but she is associated in Irene’s imagery with an aesthetics of theatricality or performativity (her face is an “ivory mask”) whose affect is excess: “It roused again that old suspicion that Clare was acting, not consciously, perhaps—that is, not too consciously—but, none the less, acting.” Clare’s excess is expressed not only in what is elsewhere describ
ed as her “theatrical heroics,” but in her dress, which “deliberate[ly] court[ed] … attention”; in her language, characterized by “all those superlatives”; in her smile, which is “a shade too provocative”; and in her appearance, which renders her “just a shade too good-looking.” But if Clare is a duplicitously performative text, associated with excess, Irene is arguably an unreliable narrator, associated with lack: Indeed, it is Irene’s psychic anxiety and repression that is reflected in the narrative’s gaps and anxieties. Put somewhat differently, if Clare signals a kind of psychic exhibitionism, Irene figures a psychic repression manifest both at the level of the body (sexual repression) as well as narrative (textual repression). But although the reader may indeed share Irene’s fear and fascination with the text (Clare) as an aestheticized object of knowledge, Irene’s repressive reading need not be the reader/ critic’s.

  Significantly, it is Irene who, at the outset of the novel, fears “being ejected”—or “outed,” as it were—from the racially exclusive Drayton Hotel tearoom.57 What soon becomes evident, however, is that Irene’s true “outing” is a consequence of her re-encounter with Clare Kendry, whose “daring” and “having” ways expose Irene to her own alterity, or “otherness.”

  Arguing that Clare, in fact, exists in terms of Irene’s own projections of “otherness” (“the unconscious, the unknowable, the erotic, and the passive”), Cheryl Wall figures Irene and Clare as psychological “doubles.”58 Similarly, for Thadious Davis, Clare embodies “the personal and psychological characteristics that Irene needs to become a complete person.”59 Further, Ann duCille figures Clare as “something more than … another doubling or dividing”; for duCille, Clare functions less as Irene’s “alter ego than her alter libido, the buried, long-denied sexual self.”60 Like these readings, my own assumes a relation of complementarity between Irene and Clare, in which the latter functions to disrupt Irene’s sense of identity by exposing her long-repressed self-difference.

  In her portrayal of these two women as mirrorlike images, Larsen frequently subverts the opposition claimed by Irene: “Actually they were strangers. Strangers in their ways and means of living. Strangers in their desires and ambitions. Strangers even in their racial consciousness.” Yet Larsen’s character development would suggest that although Irene poses as a proponent of race uplift who professes to be repelled by Clare’s passing, she remains intrigued, and “[wishes] to find out about this hazardous business [passing]… .” Upon meeting Clare’s husband, the racist Bellew, Irene “conceal[s] her own origins.” In denying her race, Irene, in effect, “passes,” thus reinforcing her identity with Clare. Further, searching for “some clue to [Clare’s] identity,” Irene feels that “about the woman was some quality, an intangible something, too vague to define, too remote to seize, but which was, to Irene Redfield, very familiar .” Clare possesses a “quality of feeling that was to [Irene] strange, even repugnant ” yet somehow “compelling” (italics mine). Later, Irene perceives that Clare has the ability to “put into words that which, not so definitely defined, was so often in her own heart …” At other times, Irene remarks that it was “as if she [Irene] had been in the secret of the other’s [Clare’s] thoughts,” and that it was “uncanny, the way Clare could divine what one was thinking.” Such a complex relation of psychic projection and introjection defines a relation of deep intersubjectivity between these characters, one in which Clare functions, on multiple levels, as a kind of doppleganger for Irene. Significantly, Clare addresses Irene as “ ’Rene,” thereby erasing the “I” in “Irene.” In doing so, Clare, in effect, exposes (I)Rene to her long-buried other self, one that threatens to disrupt the placid surface of her safe and orderly life. The clear affinity between these characters is signaled metaphorically at the outset of the novel in the scene of “encounter” at the downtown Chicago hotel when Irene notes that “the woman sitting on the other side of the table [holds] for [her] a fascination, strange and compelling.” In effect, this mirroring of the self (“on the other side of the table”) sets the stage for Irene’s ambivalent negotiation of the difference and identity between herself and a figure toward whom she feels both aversion and attraction.

  Irene’s ambivalence invokes the logic of a contemporary psychoanalytic discourse of identification and difference. Essential to Irene’s sense of “permanence, safety, and security” is the repression of her own otherness—the alterity and self-difference that is embodied by Clare. This complex relation of difference and identity—and difference in identity— suggests that, for Larsen, the mulatto/passing subject becomes a trope not only for difference or otherness, but more precisely for self-difference, or the otherness of the self.

  Larsen, in effect, externalizes the internal drama of difference and identity that is staged in her first novel, Quicksand. If, in her earlier novel, the protagonist Helga Crane seeks to reduce her multiplicity and self-difference to sameness (which leads to her certain death), in Passing, the central characters are figured as fractured and self-divided, such that each represents not only the other of the self, but the otherness of the self. In other words, in her second novel, Larsen fractures and externalizes the equivocal drama of identity that is internalized by the protagonist of her first.

  Like Clare’s letter (and Larsen’s novel), “race” proves to be a subtle and elusive text, not easily read. As argued above, the passing plot would seem to fundamentally destabilize the color line; nevertheless, like other Harlem Renaissance black writers, Larsen seems, at times, to support an essentialist view of blackness, thereby affirming Samira Kawash’s proposition that the narrative of passing is “necessarily constructed around the presumption of the existence of fixed and irrevocable racial identities because it is only in relation to such a conception of race that passing is possible in the first place.”61 At the outset of the novel, Irene seems to challenge a biologically constructed notion of race:

  Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot.

  Yet her dismissal of the physical markers by which some purport to read racial difference seems contradicted by her later conviction that Clare possesses “Negro eyes”: “Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing. And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic.”62 Irene’s husband, Brian, also suggests that there is something peculiar and unique (and therefore essentializing) about race. Reflecting on the phenomenon of racial passing, Brian concludes that “they [passers] always come back. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.” Answering Irene’s query, “But why?,” Brian replies, “If I knew that, I’d know what race is.” It is for this reason that in response to Hugh Wentworth, the white novelist and friend who ponders over “the trick” of how to “pick some of ’em [the passers],” Irene explains that “[n]obody can [detect who is passing]. Not by looking.” Her explanation here is significant because it suggests that racial difference lies neither in physical “appearance,” nor from anything “[done] or said,” but rather in “ways [that are not] definite or tangible.” Clearly, for Irene, “race” or “racial difference,” while discernible by the freemasonry of the race, is something that is neither palpable nor definable. If Larsen’s passing plot, then, destabilizes the notion of race, her characters essentialize race, and if Clare demonstrates the construction of race through racial performativity, Irene would seem first biologically and later metaphysically to essentialize race by abstracting notions of race and race difference from history and culture.

  As suggested above, the passing novel also enables the reader to examine the construction of whiteness from a racial location. If it is true, as Ruth Frankenberg argues, that one of the prerogatives of whiteness is to make “itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparency,” then it is the African American passing novel that “marks” an
d “names” whiteness and white privilege.63 These stories of passing implicitly pose the question asked by turn-of-the-century novelist Charles Chesnutt, “What Is a White Man?”—or, in white novelist George Washington Cable’s subsequent elaboration, “What is a white woman?” 64 In de-scribing the markers of whiteness as appropriated by the passing subject as racial Other, novelists such as Larsen in-scribe whiteness as a system or configuration of signs to be manipulated in the assertion and performance of whiteness.

  Clearly, for the author, whiteness is attached not only to social privilege but to a materialist ethic: John Bellew, Clare’s white husband, “turn[s] up from South America with untold gold.” Thus, not only is the flagrantly racist Bellew attached to lucre, but suggestively to the imperialistic exploitation of a land and its natural resources in the pursuit of money and wealth. And furthermore, although curiously associated with “latent physical power,” Bellew is constructed as something of a male hysteric, manifested in his blatant and unrestrained racist vituperation, as well as in his enervated and effeminate demeanor (he possesses “a soft mouth, somewhat womanish, set in an unhealthy-looking dough-colored face”). Bellew’s effeminacy and hysteria must also be read in terms of the racist, albeit affectionate, epithet that Bellew confers on his wife, Clare, who is, unbeknownst to her husband, of African American descent. Humorously, Bellew explains why he calls his wife “Nig”: “When we were first married, she [Clare] was as white as … a lily. But I declare she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger.” In response to Clare’s question, “My goodness, Jack! What difference would it make if, after all these years, you were to find out that I was one or two percent colored?,” he answers, “Oh, no, Nig … nothing like that with me. I know you’re no nigger, so it’s all right. You can get as black as you please as far as I’m concerned, since I know you’re no nigger. I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be” (italics mine). In order to secure his own white masculinity, potentially destabilized by his desire for the “exotic other” figured by Clare, Bellew must draw the (color) line while, at the same time, fetishizing the object of his fear and desire—the “blackness” of “Nig’s” body.65