NELLA LARSEN

PASSING (1928)
 HARLEM RENAISSANCE
• an intellectual, social, and artistic movement which took place mainly in Harlem, New York
• the new African-American cultural groups across the urban areas in the Northeast and
Midwest United States affected by the African-American Great Migration
• spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s

• the idea of the New Negro, who through intellect and production of literature, art, and music could
challenge the pervading racism and stereotypes to promote progressive or socialist politics, and
racial and social integration
 NELLA LARSEN
(APRIL 13, 1891 – MARCH 30, 1964)
 NELLA LARSEN

… as a member of a white immigrant family, she [Larsen] had no entrée into the
world of the blues or of the black church. If she could never be white like her
mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that
Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld,
unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.
(Darryl Pinckney)
 PASSING
• first published in 1929
• set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s
• the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and
Irene Redfield

• praised for its complex depiction of race, gender and sexuality

 PASSING
• the title refers to the practice of "racial passing", and is a key element of the
novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack)
Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic
events

• discussion over the crossing of racial boundaries, the so-called "color line"
between blacks and whites
• anxiety was exacerbated by the Great Migration
 PASSING

• imposition in the early 20th century of the so-called one-drop rule (by which
someone with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African origin was considered
black) led to a hardening of racial lines that had historically been more fluid

• claims that 355,000 blacks had passed between 1900 and 1920
• the 1925 legal trial known as the "Rhinelander Case" (or Rhinelander v. Rhinelander):
"What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case."
 PASSING
• the tragic mulatto (also "mulatta" when referring to a woman) is a stock character
in early African-American literature
• feelings of exclusion was portrayed as variably manifested in self-loathing, depression,
alcoholism, sexual perversion, and attempts at suicide

• Race - "merely a mechanism for setting the story in motion, sustaining the
suspense, and bringing about the external circumstances for the story's conclusion.„

• Identification trouble
 PASSING
• Eugenics - assigns specific behavioral and physical traits to different distinctions of race, class,
gender, and sexual identity.
• Both physical and behavioral features of this ideology are discussed by the main characters in Passing,
Irene and Clare

• Sexuality - the objectification of the black women

• "sexual pleasure, especially for black women, leads to the dangers of domination in marriage, repeated
pregnancy, or exploitation and loss of status."
• Homoerotic subtext
 PASSING
• Jealousy - Irene feels "dowdy and commonplace" in comparison to Clare, who she sees as
"exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting.„
"She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing
that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be
crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she
imagined, was ever more completely sardonic."

• Whiteness
• Middle-class security
And gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar.
She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed. Did that woman, could that woman, somehow
know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?

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. They always took
her for an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican, or a gipsy. Never, when she was alone, had they
even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro.
She wished to find out about this hazardous business of "passing," this
breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's
chance in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but
certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did about
background, how one accounted for oneself.
…when I used to go over to the south side, I used almost to
hate all of you. You had all the things I wanted and never had
had. It made me all the more determined to get them, and
others. Do you, can you understand what I felt?