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Modern Language Studies

Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”
Author(s): Lori Harrison-Kahan
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 109-138
Published by: Modern Language Studies
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WINNER 2002 NEMLA WOMEN’S CAUCUS PRIZE

Her “Nig”:
Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

Lori Harrison-Kahan’

In a scene from Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, a white man, John Bellew, enters
his Chicago hotel room to find his wife, Clare, taking tea with two of her childhood
friends. To the astonishment of the two women, Bellew greets his wife with an un-
usual pet name: “Nig.” When Clare asks her husband to explain his form of address
to the stunned women, he replies, “When we were first married, she was as white
as-as-well 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” (171). The moment is rich in dramatic irony, for unbeknownst to Bellew,
his wife and her two friends are African Americans who are passing as white.

Although Bellew calls his wife “Nig” as a “joke” (171), the interpellation works
to erase Clare’s given name, which connotes clearness, light, and whiteness. That
Clare responds to this nickname seals the process of subjection.2 In Black Skin,
White Masks, Frantz Fanon notes the power of interpellation to constitute and de-
form the black body through a racialized naming such as “nigger” or “Negro.” In
Fanon’s famous example of racial interpellation, the cry “Look a Negro!” pairs the
derogatory naming with the fixing of the look. The simultaneous gaze (“Look”)
and naming (“a Negro”) freeze the black man into “an object in the midst of other
objects” (lo09). In Passing, Clare’s husband warns her that if she “don’t look out”-

I thank Cara Delay, David Eng, Darren Gobert, Ann Pellegrini, and Rachel Prentice for
reading and commenting on versions of this paper.

Modern Language Studies 32.2 @Northeast Modern Language Association

110 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

that is, if she does not return the gaze herself-she, too, will be permanently fixed
as a racial object, his “Nig.”

Clare, however, is not the only one to respond to Bellew’s hailing. Irene Red-
field, one of two friends present at tea, is also interpellated by Bellew’s strange pet
name for his wife. Deeply troubled by the unexpected epithet, Irene vows to end
her friendship with Clare, for fear of also encountering the racist Bellew. She tells
her husband, “I’m really not such an idiot that I don’t realize that if a man calls me
a nigger, it’s his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it
again” (184). Irene’s husband, Brian, must remind her that Bellew didn’t “call you
a nigger. There’s a difference you know” (184). But for Irene, there is no difference;
in responding to Bellew’s hailing even though it was not meant for her, Irene not
only becomes a racial subject, but her subjectivity merges with Clare’s. Just as she
“could not separate individuals from the race,” she could not separate “herself
from Clare Kendry” (227).

This merging of the two protagonists is further marked by Irene’s own nick-
name. Bellew’s pet name for his wife is echoed in Clare’s persistence in calling Irene
by her childhood nickname, ‘Rene. Clare’s nickname for her friend removes the “I”
from Irene’s name and replaces it with an apostrophe to draw attention to its ab-
sence. The nickname thus mimes the disappearance of Irene’s subjectivity, which
has become inseparable from Clare’s own. In a complementary move, Larsen has
also taken away Irene’s “I” by giving us a narrative from Irene’s point of view that
is in the third person instead of the first person.3 In many ways, Passing is the story
of Irene’s attempt to reclaim her “I,” to become a self-making subject instead of a
fixed object, or stereotype.

2 The theory of interpellation as the basis of subject formation originates with Louis Alth-
usser. To illustrate how ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, Althusser used an
exemplary scenario in which a police officer hails a suspect with the “commonplace ev-
eryday” refrain, “Hey, you there!” The individual who is so crudely hailed, recognizing
that “hail was ‘really’ addressed to him,” will then turn around and, “by this mere one-
hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, become a subject” (174). The interpel-
lations that I will discuss in Passing work in a similar way, and, thus, they can be read
through the lens of Althusserian subject formation. According to the Althusserian model,
Clare and Irene come into being through a process of “subjection,” whereby each recog-
nizes that “the hail was ‘really’ addressed to” her, and thus answers to the hailing. The pro-
cess of hailing involves a relational formation of identity; in turning toward the other in
response, Clare and Irene turn toward their identities as subjects.

3 Arguing that Passing addresses the aphanisis, or fading, of the subject behind the signifier
“nigger,” Nell Sullivan explains, “The first person would be inappropriate for Irene’s story
because the I as an empowered, integrated subject position eludes Irene. She always de-
fines herself in relation to the desire of the Other, and thus an unmediated representation
of her voice would be incongruent with her essential lack” (377).

Lori Harrison-Kahan 111

In this paper, I consider how the act of passing itself plays an important role in
the formation of subjectivity for Larsen’s female protagonists. Although Fanon’s
black man becomes a racial object of the gaze and a racial subject through the pro-
cess of interpellation, Larsen’s passing protagonists resist such fixity, constructing
their ambiguity through performances of identity. However, for Larsen’s protago-
nists, the resistance to fixity does not end there. While their ambivalent perfor-
mances destabilize the gaze, as performers they still remain objects to be looked at,
even if they are self-creating objects. To remedy this situation, Irene and Clare take
on the role not only of the gazed upon, but also that of the female spectator. Each
does “look out,” returning the gaze, so as not to be “turned into a nigger.”

As my reading of Larsen’s novel will show, racial passing is not only about the
performance of whiteness: it also offers the opportunity for spectatorship. African
Americans who passed in(to) the white world were able to gaze upon whites in a
reversal of the typical Harlem Renaissance scenario where whites sought out the
spectacle of black life. The performative culture of the Harlem Renaissance engen-
dered a new conception of the gaze as simultaneously sexualized and racialized. In
using passing and spectatorship to refigure female subjectivity and resist stereo-
typical representation, Larsen’s novel draws specifically on the cultural themes of
its time, which have particular resonance in contemporary theories of sexual and
racial difference. This paper illustrates how the feminist paradigms of performance
and the gaze work together in Passing, mobilizing stereotypes in order to avoid fix-
ity.

Passing Between
Even a brief summary of Passing’s plot poses problems because the novel relies on
textual ambiguities, which appropriately reflect the ambiguous identities of its
protagonists. Passing tells of the acquaintance between two middle-class, light-
skinned African-American women of the 192os: Irene Redfield, genteel and proper
(some might even say repressed), who occasionally passes for white, but who
claims loyalty to her race and to her dark-skinned husband and children; and her
childhood friend, Clare Kendry, id to Irene’s superego, who has permanently
crossed the color line and married a wealthy white man unaware of his wife’s racial
identity. Desiring to return to her roots while still keeping her identity a secret
from her husband, Clare uses her acquaintance with Irene to infiltrate bourgeois
Harlem, where the black and white elite gather for charity dances, teas, and cock-
tail parties. After detailing a series of encounters between the dual protagonists,
first in Chicago and then in Manhattan, the novel ends abruptly with the sudden
death of Clare. She falls from the penthouse of a Harlem apartment building, im-
mediately after her husband, discovering her “true” race, has crashed the party that
Clare and the Redfields are attending. One of the central ambiguities of the text is
the cause of Clare’s death, which can be read alternately as an accident, caused by
the shock of her husband’s unmasking; a suicide; a murder at the hands of the en-

112 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

raged Bellew; or a murder at the hands of the jealous and paranoid Irene, who sus-
pects that Clare is having an affair with her husband, Brian.

Because Passing is one of the few Harlem Renaissance novels written by a black
woman writer and featuring non-stereotypical black female protagonists, it has
become an exemplary text for examining the intersections of identity. Recent crit-
icism of Passing that draws attention to its undercurrent of forbidden sexuality has
further enhanced the novel’s position as a privileged text in studies of intersection-
ality. In her provocative and groundbreaking reading of Passing, Deborah McDow-
ell argues that the novel itself passes because black female sexuality and same-sex
desire are overshadowed by the narrative of racial passing.4 McDowell claims that
Larsen flirts with the suggestion of lesbian eroticism between the two women.
While the novel appears to be “an account of Clare’s passing for white […] under-
neath the safety of that surface is the more dangerous story-though not named
explicitly-of Irene’s awakening sexual desire for Clare” (McDowell xxvi). The
word “underneath” implies that racial passing provides a convenient cover for
what McDowell deems to be the “more dangerous” narrative of sexual desire. In
this paper, however, I take McDowell’s claims in a slightly different direction to ar-
gue that Passing itself can be read as moving back and forth between sexual and ra-
cial passing-just as passing protagonists move between masculinity and
femininity, black and white, or heterosexuality and homosexuality. Since the nar-
ratives of racial and sexual difference are continually eclipsing each other in Pass-
ing, neither one can be read as the text’s “true” story.

While racial passing is certainly the story that is “named explicitly” in Larsen’s
novel, sexual passing is not always “underneath […] the surface.” In fact, race does
not explicitly enter the narrative until the second chapter. In the opening chapter
and in the first few pages of the second chapter, racial passing is displaced by what
appears to be an implicit narrative of same-sex desire. If we were to begin reading
the text without a context-and it is not inconceivable that a potential reader
could approach the text without knowing that it was by an African-American writ-
er and about African-American women, that it was a product of the Harlem Re-
naissance, or that the term “passing” usually connotes race-we would be initially
in the dark about the presence and importance of race in the narrative. Other than
fairly pointed (in retrospect) references to the characters’ light skin color, there are

4 Judith Butler expands on McDowell’s reading, using it to examine the intersection of race
and sexuality. Butler notes that Irene’s identification with Clare collapses into a desire that
is simultaneously racial and sexual: in wanting to be like Clare, in desiring her white iden-
tity, Irene wants to have Clare. According to Butler, Irene displaces her illicit desire for
Clare by imagining that it is her husband, Brian, who responds to Clare’s seductive na-
ture, thus conjuring the aforementioned affair. For other readings of the sexual subtext,
see duCille 193-219; Blackmer 98-116; Blackmore 475-84; and Johnson 157-64.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 113

no direct references to the characters’ racial identities in the first few pages of the
novel. Nor is the setting, which is so vital to the novel and its context, disclosed as
Harlem in the first two chapters. The text informs us that Irene lives in New York,
but it purposely avoids greater specificity since the Harlem setting would provide
a geographic clue to her race.5 In the first of many descriptions of Clare, Irene re-
calls her friend as a “pale small girl” whose “drunken father” (143) was a janitor.
While this description certainly provides a distinct class signifier, we cannot de-
duce from it Clare’s race, and, if anything, the adjective “pale” suggests that Clare
is white. Irene also remembers the death of Clare’s father in which Clare “star[ed]
down at the familiar pasty white face of her parent with a sort of disdain in her
slanting black eyes” (144). This description is similarly ambiguous, since the
“pasty” whiteness of Bob Kendry’s face can be attributed to either his race or to his
death. The description also contains the first of many references to Clare’s “black
eyes,” but the word “slanting” warns us that her blackness should not be read
straightforwardly. In another reference to skin color, Irene’s cheeks are described
as “warm and olive” (145). In hindsight, Irene’s “warm and olive” skin becomes a
sign of her mixed blood, but at this early point in the novel, she can still be read as
white, even if she is not as “pale” as Clare.

Some may argue that it is impossible to read Passing without a specific racial
context. The epigraph, after all, contains lines from Countee Cullen’s poem “Her-
itage,” from the collection Color, and thus situates the text as a novel about African-
American identity. For McDowell, the epigraph immediately discloses the racial
narrative, “invit[ing] the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpre-
tation” (Introduction xxiii). However, if we use the epigraph as a prescription for
our reading of Passing, the opening lines of the novel contain a somewhat contra-
dictory prescription: to place not race but ambiguity at “the center of our critical
interpretation.” The novel opens with a description of Clare’s nearly indecipher-
able handwriting. Irene carefully examines the envelope she has received from her
friend: “its almost illegible scrawl [that] seemed out of place and alien. And there
was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which
bore no return address to betray the sender. [… ] Furtive, but yet in some peculiar,
determined way a little flaunting” (143). Irene is about to open this letter, just as we
have opened the text. In this passage, the signs of mystery and ambiguity are evi-
dent. Since the envelope contains “no return address to betray the sender,” we do
not know where this missive is coming from, nor do we know the identity of the
writer. Irene, having received similar pieces of mail before, knows that Clare is the

s Irene uses the same technique when she passes for white during her first encounter with
Bellew. When he asks her if her husband is a doctor in “Manhattan or one of the other
boroughs” (173), she replies “Manhattan,” leaving the more specific location, Harlem, un-
said.

114 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

sender; similarly, in our rereading of the novel, the opening passage signifies quite
differently.

Thus, the opening lines of Passing warn us of the trick the text will play on us
if we fail to pay careful attention to its ambiguities. The words used to describe
Clare’s handwriting are the same words that characterize Clare herself: “sly:” “fur-
tive,” “determined,” “flaunting.” Like her illegible handwriting, Clare is difficult to
read. The contradiction between “furtive” and “flaunting” foreshadows the contra-
dictions contained in the text itself. “Out of place and alien” describes Clare’s rela-
tionship to the white world she has successfully passed into and to the black world
she hopes to return to. It also describes the incongruous presence of this “white”
woman in Irene’s black life or the equally strange presence of this “seductive” (169)
woman in her heterosexual life. Just as Irene senses danger in opening the enve-
lope, we too approach the narrative with a sense of danger. Although McDowell
claims that Larsen disguised sexuality beneath race because racial passing was the
safer story, the dangers of racial passing are evident throughout the text-from
Irene’s fear of being expelled from the Drayton Hotel to Bellew’s violence in his use
of ‘Nig’ and in his enraged entrance at the end of the novel.6 For critics, the real
danger in reading Passing is the possibility that one narrative could completely
overshadow the other.

Without clear references to race, the text appears to be about an intimate rela-
tionship between two women. Irene knows that the letter she has received from
Clare will contain “an extravagantly phrased wish to see her again” (145). We im-
mediately deduce that this story is about an unrequited attachment-whether pla-
tonic or romantic. When Irene finally does open the envelope, its contents read like
a love letter:

For I am lonely, so lonely…cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have
never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many things in my life….
You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright
pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of…. It’s like an
ache, a pain that never ceases…. [… ] and it’s your fault, ‘Rene dear. At least partly.
For I wouldn’t now, perhaps, have this terrible wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that
time in Chicago. (145)

On the surface, Clare’s letter appears to be about jilted love. Clare expresses her
“longing” and “terrible wild desire” to be with Irene, her loneliness at being with-
out her. She alludes to the intimacy of their relationship by using a term of endear-

6 On the physical and emotional dangers of racial passing, see Williamson loo-lo8. In Life
on the Color Line, Gregory Howard Williams also describes the physical dangers his father
faced as late as the 1950s when he passed for white “in defiance [… ] of rigid racial lines”:
“More often than not he received a busted lip or black eye from those who challenged his
crossing of the color line” (147).

Lori Harrison-Kahan 115

ment: “‘Rene dear.” She describes her feelings in terms of the physical pain of
heartbreak. Clare responds to the lack of reply from Irene as if she is indeed a jilted
lover: “Every day I went to that nasty little post office place. I’m sure they were
thinking that I’d been carrying on an illicit love-affair and that the man had
thrown me over” (194). In response to Clare’s letter, “brilliant red patches flamed
in” Irene’s cheeks. Since blushing is typically associated with sexual embarrass-
ment, these “red patches” appear to be a result of the sexual humiliation she expe-
riences after reading Clare’s extravagant words. It only becomes evident later that
Clare’s desire for Irene can be read as racially, instead of sexually, motivated-
though this is not to say that the two are unconnected.

Just as the novel’s narrative ambiguity is reflected in its textual strategies, the
conflation of identification and desire yields an ambiguity that is manifest both in
the words of the letter and in its form. Because the letter is not entirely legible,
Irene is described as “puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words
or making instinctive guesses at them” (145). In the letter, the references to race are
hidden, many of them expurgated from the text by the ellipses, which indicate the
most illegible of Clare’s words. The description of “carelessly formed words” not
only draws our attention to the ambiguity with which this narrative is written, but
also allows for the uncertainty of interpretation. It allows for the possibility that
some of what appears in the text as Clare’s letter could be manufactured by the un-
reliable narrator who cannot decipher fully the text, but instead “mak[es] instinc-
tive guesses” at the words.

The letter’s reference to “that time in Chicago” causes Irene particular angst:
“The words stood out among the many paragraphs of other words, bringing with
them a clear, sharp remembrance, in which even now, after two years, humiliation,
resentment, and rage were mingled” (145). We learn later that Irene blushes in re-
sponse to the racial humiliation she experienced when she visited Clare’s Chicago
home and was affronted by the racist Bellew. The second chapter contains the
flashback of Irene’s trip to Chicago that incited the humiliation. The scene begins
innocently enough with Irene taking a taxicab to the Drayton Hotel to escape the
heat of the city. It does not necessarily raise any eyebrows until a few pages into the
chapter, when Irene, finally, explicitly mentions race. Wondering if the woman
staring at her has determined that she is “a Negro,” Irene informs us that she has
been passing. And, indeed, she has, for without explicit references to race, readers
may very well assume that Irene is white.7

With Irene’s revelation that she has been passing for white, a story that ap-
peared to be about an illicit love between two women is now complicated by the
addition of race. Moving from its racially inflected title and epigraph to a story of
unrequited love and then to a disclosure of racial identity, the structure of the nov-
el creates a back-and-forth movement between racial and sexual passing. While
the conventional model of passing involves a permanent crossing of the color line,
the acts of passing practiced by Larsen’s protagonists are less definitive. Clare may

116 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

be the character who permanently crosses the color line, but she finds herself
homesick for the black world she left behind and constantly moves back and forth
between whiteness and blackness. Irene, on the other hand, disdains passing and
claims loyalty to her race, but she occasionally passes for white, and thus also
moves between two worlds. This movement between whiteness and blackness is
heightened by Clare and Irene’s fluctuations between heterosexuality and homo-
erotic desire and by the text’s movement between racial and sexual passing.

Narrative and textual passing in Larsen’s novel are facilitated by disavowed de-
sires and identifications. The text’s alternating avowals and disavowals of its racial
and sexual narratives are complemented by Irene’s ambivalent feelings towards
Clare. Irene continually denies her desire for whiteness and her desire for Clare; in
denying these twin desires, she represses the text’s implicit homoeroticism, leading
to what McDowell calls a “burial” of the “erotic subplot” (xxx). With her opening
of the letter, we get the first of Irene’s many disavowals: “She was wholly unable to
comprehend such an attitude towards danger as she was sure the letter’s contents
would reveal; and she disliked the idea of opening and reading it” (143). Irene hes-
itates, knowing full well what the letter contains, but she opens it anyway. Later,
however, this dangerous piece of mail becomes “Clare Kendry’s appealing letter”
(191). While “appealing” refers to Clare’s plea to see Irene, the adjective also sug-
gests that the letter was alluring to its recipient. The bivalence of the word “appeal-
ing” is evidence of Irene’s ambivalence. She repeatedly vows to have nothing to do
with Clare-as she did after her disturbing encounter with Bellew-but she is un-
able to resist Clare and her “extravagantly phrased wish[es].” Upon being informed
by her maid that Clare has unexpectedly arrived at the Redfield residence, Irene re-
plies, “‘Oh dear! Tell her […] that I can’t-No. I’ll see her. Bring her up here”‘ (193).
Irene tries to repress, or bury, her interest by refusing to see Clare, but then, in the
next sentence, requests that her friend be brought up to her bedroom.

McDowell’s uncovering of the lesbian subtext in Passing has certainly influ-
enced and even enabled my own interpretation. However, I argue that racial pass-
ing does not continually overshadow sexual passing. The text moves-or passes
between-race and sexuality, just as the characters themselves pass between black-
ness and whiteness and between heterosexuality and homoeroticism. Larsen or-

7 In describing the experience of teaching Larsen’s novel, Sarah Chinn writes that her “stu-
dents, whatever their race or ethnicity, are always taken aback” by the revelation of Irene’s
race: “They certainly had not guessed Irene’s identity as ‘a Negro’; the novel seemed to
lead from its outset in other directions. They often report feeling deceived, as though the
text had perpetrated an act of passing upon/against them, as though Larsen does not trust
her readers enough to let them in on the secret from the very beginning” (53). This is es-
pecially true because white is the default setting when it comes to defining a character’s
unspecified race.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 117

chestrates her novel’s “passing” through a series of eclipses that signal the novel’s
dual plots of race and sexuality. For example, just as Clare’s “ivory lids” slide down
over “black eyes” (221), Clare’s whiteness (or at least her ability to pass as white)
eclipses her blackness. Yet so too are the whites of Clare’s eyes eclipsed by the dark-
er skin of her lids; such unstated reverse motifs function like the ellipses in Clare’s
letter. The image of Clare’s eyes provides a metaphor for our reading of “race” in
the novel: an optical illusion, it enables two contradictory meanings, depending on
whether we read whiteness or blackness as negative space.

The racialized description of Clare above displaces the sexualization of her
eyes, the same eyes that captivate and “caress” Irene. Similarly, Hugh Wentworth-
Larsen’s fictional stand-in for white writer Carl Van Vechten-observes another
racial eclipse at the Welfare League dance, noting that “‘gentlemen of color’ have
driven a mere Nordic from [Clare’s] mind” (205). A racialized reading of Clare’s
choice in partners eclipses the possibility of a same-sex partner. The obscured nar-
rative of homoeroticism is surreptitiously revealed by the conversation that follows
Wentworth’s observation. Irene explains Clare’s choice by arguing that black men
are better dancers than white men, to which Wentworth replies: “Not having
tripped the light fantastic with any of the males, I’m not in a position to argue the
point. But I don’t think it’s merely that. […] Take Hazelton there, for example.
Dozens of women have declared him to be fascinatingly handsome. […] Do you
think he’s-er-ravishingly beautiful?” (205). Having modeled Wentworth after
Van Vechten, Larsen winks at the knowledgeable reader here, alluding to the fact
that this white devotee of black culture was known to have engaged in affairs with
men. Hugh Wentworth’s seemingly casual reference to the possibility of two men
dancing together and his interest in Hazelton’s good looks-marked by the hesita-
tion and the extravagant phrase “ravishingly beautiful”-contain a veiled reference
to the gay subculture of the time period.

These examples work as eclipses of white by black-or black by white-and as-
sert the plot of racial passing; at the same time, these eclipses in the narrative em-
ploy racial passing as a cover for sexual passing. Passing’s female subjects emerge
from this dual strategy. Irene and Clare never “are” black or white, and their desire
cannot be defined solely in terms of heterosexuality or homoeroticism. Instead,
they are constantly negotiating multiple positions. Their identity is a continual,
rather than finished, process. Instead of passing as white or as straight, they pass
between binary positions. In using twin protagonists, one who chooses to live her
life as black and the other as white, the novel appears to be a testament to the du-
ality of black identity, the DuBoisian “double-consciousness.” But this doubling
gets progressively more complex, as the women move between black and white
worlds and the text moves between sexuality and race. Passing connects racial and
sexual passing by conjoining interpellation with the gaze as the basis of an identi-
fication-turned-desire between Clare and Irene, producing subjects who are, in the
words of Norma Alarcon, “multiply interpellated.” The differing interpellations

118 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

that Clare and Irene experience in the text attest to the complexity and multiplicity
of their identities as women, as women of color, as women of color with the ability
to pass for white, as sexual subjects, as possible sexual “suspects,” and as members
of the middle class. Although their multiplicity is often constituted through the in-
congruity of their performances, the role of the gaze illuminates and destabilizes
the dichotomies of the text. Ambiguously constructing themselves to be gazed
upon while returning the gaze as active spectators, Irene and Clare are depicted as
both subjects and objects.

Gazing at Her Nig
Since the Harlem Renaissance is viewed primarily as a period of racial uplift, the
historical context of Passing may be in part responsible for the initial critical ten-
dency to privilege the novel’s story of racial identity over its narrative of same-sex
desire. However, the culture of the novel’s time period in fact testifies to the com-
plexity of identity, which was experienced in terms more complicated than “black
and white.” Queer readings of Passing, like McDowell’s, do not simply co-opt the
text for contemporary political and theoretical purposes. Jazz Age Harlem not only
provided a forum for black writers and artists, but it also nurtured a lesbian and
gay subculture, evident, for example, in the writings of Wallace Thurman and the
blues songs of female jazz singers like Ma Rainey.s The multi-layered cultural back-
ground of Larsen’s novel was thus formative for our contemporary understandings
of both black identity and queer identity. Depicted by writers and artists as a cul-
ture of spectacle to underscore the constructed nature of racial and sexual differ-
ence, the setting of the Harlem Renaissance illuminates how performances of
identity, like passing, constitute the historical subjects of the text and how the gaze
of the spectator is important not only to objectification but also to the process of
subject formation.

Although most interpretations of the gaze, stemming from the work of Laura
Mulvey in feminist film theory, focus on the gendered hierarchy it reflects, the
melding of black and white in Jazz Age culture speaks to a racial gaze as well.9

8 On the lesbian and gay subculture of this period, see Carby 746-58; Chauncey 227-67; and
Garber 318-31.

9 On the male gaze, see Mulvey, Visual 14-26 and “Afterthoughts” (122-30). In response to
Mulvey, Mary Ann Doane has shown that the gaze, on one hand, creates the possibility of
agency for one who looks, regardless of gender; on the other hand, the gaze also offers
potential agency for the so-called object, who may have the ability to resist and control
the gaze by manipulating her performance. Traditional understandings of the male gaze
and of female spectatorship are further problematized by the possibility of a lesbian and/
or black female spectator. See, for example, Gaines 12-27. For a discussion of black spec-
tatorship, see Diawara 66-76. For a discussion of black female spectatorship, which has
particular relevance to my reading of Passing, see hooks 307-20.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 119

Langston Hughes illuminates the cultural dynamics of the time when he writes of
the whites who flocked to Harlem:

flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed
and sang [… ], the strangers were given the best ringside table to sit and stare at
the Negro customers-like amusing animals in a zoo. The Negroes said: “We can’t
go downtown and sit and stare at you in your clubs. You won’t even let us in your
clubs.” But they didn’t say it out loud-for Negroes are practically never rude to
white people. (225)

Hughes’s depiction of such voyeuristic pleasures reveals the importance of the gaze
for understanding, what he calls, “the vogue of the Negro.” Though many blacks,
including Hughes himself, enjoyed the attentions and patronage of whites, ine-
quality and hypocrisy did not go unmarked, even when masked by benevolence.
The “vogue of the Negro” was not a threat to white society as long as blacks re-
mained objects to be stared at, denied the ability to return the look. In the cabarets
of Harlem, the entertainment sought by whites was not only provided by the stage
performers, but also by the black customers themselves, as Hughes points out. To
white pleasure-seekers, all black life in Harlem was a spectacle that, in the words of
one historian of the time period, “represented the exotic, the sensual and the free”
(Dumenil 161).lo

In many ways, the white gaze that descended upon black cultural life in Harlem
presented a double bind. Was this gaze sympathetically intrigued and enlivened by
the spectacle of color, or was it a self-serving and exploitative gaze, one that fixed
blacks, imprisoned them like “amusing animals in a zoo”? The controversy sparked
by a novel written by Carl Van Vechten, a white patron of the Harlem Renaissance,
may best exemplify the difficulty-impossibility even-of correctly reading the
ambivalent white gaze. Van Vechten’s novel, with its scandalous title Nigger Heaven
(1926), was praised by some black writers, including Hughes, Larsen, and James
Weldon Johnson, for its positive portrayal of middle-class black intellectuals like
the female protagonist, Mary Love. But it was attacked by others, including W.E.B.

10 For a good historical account of the white influx to Harlem in the 1920s, see Anderson
168-8o. Scenes of curious whites invading the “forbidden” space of black Harlem occur
throughout the literature of the Harlem Renaissance from the works of Hughes and Lars-
en to Wallace Thurman and George S. Schuyler. Many of these texts expressed blacks’ un-
ease with being fixed by the white gaze, but opportunities to break free of the gaze were
only available to those who could pass as white and thus return the stare by entering the
white world. The irony of this reversal is that blacks who gained entrance to the cabarets
of the white world by turning white themselves often found boredom and disillusion-
ment, as, we can suppose, is the case with Clare who returns for excitement to the black
world of Harlem. For another example, see the case of Max Disher in George Schuyler’s
Black No More, 28-9.

120 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

DuBois, for upholding the caricature of the primitive black, in figures such as the
Scarlet Creeper, Randolph Pettijohn, and Lasca Sartoris. Whether Van Vechten’s
portrayal of Harlem was “neither truthful nor artistic,” as DuBois asserted, or an
accurate depiction of “a whole rainbow of life above nioth Street,” as Hughes main-
tained, the novelist did succeed in capturing one of the most important themes of
the Harlem Renaissance in the book’s central metaphor.’1 Conceiving of New York
as a theater, Van Vechten’s male protagonist, Byron Kasson, describes Harlem as its
“nigger heaven,” the uppermost balcony reserved for black spectators. In this ex-
tended metaphor, life consists of performers and spectators, and, in a novel that
makes much use of the gaze, Van Vechten brings together those who appear on the
stage for their livelihood, like the one-time actress Adora Boniface, with those who
perform on the stage of everyday life, like the flamboyant pimp, the Scarlet Creep-
er, and Dick Sill, the character who passes for white. By characterizing the Harlem
Renaissance as a culture of performance, Van Vechten accurately portrays how the
theatricality of the artistic movement offered an opportunity for black intellectuals
to argue for the social construction of race.12

In the original plans for Passing, its author intended to title her manuscript
“Nig” in honor of Van Vechten’s novel, which proved inspirational to Larsen de-
spite the controversy surrounding the book and, in particular, its title.” Like Nig-
ger Heaven, Larsen’s novel examines the theatricality of everyday life among the
black middle class. Larsen, however, specifically privileges the trope of passing to
examine how her female protagonists depend upon performances of identity to
constitute their subjectivity and to resist representation as objects to be looked at.
Through the figure of Irene, Larsen has given her black subject an oppositional
gaze that reverses the scenario of white voyeurism. Irene’s entrance into the white
world comments ironically on the white influx to black Harlem, the climb upwards

1 DuBois’ and Hughes’s views on Nigger Heaven are quoted in Anderson 219-20. Van
Vechten seems a particularly apt figure for this consideration since he was the basis for
Larsen’s Hugh Wentworth, whom we actually see gazing upon blacks, particularly Clare
Kendry, in the course of the novel.

12 Drawing upon the writings and performances of cultural figures like Van Vechten and
Larsen, Ann Douglas has noted the Harlem Renaissance’s potential to offer insight into
the performative nature of American identity. “Constructed identity is at bottom an affair
of masks and role-playing, part of the politics of theatricality” (344), writes Douglas. Har-
lem in the 1920os exemplified the politics of performance through its “obsession with as-
cribed, shoplifted, and stolen selves […], the root of its decisive, creative and very
American ‘will to personate”‘ (344).

13 On Larsen’s original plans to name her novel “Nig,” see Davis 287. Although Larsen sub-
sequently decided not to use the provocative title, she did persist in dedicating the book
to Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, on whom the characters of Hugh and Bianca
Wentworth are based.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 121

to the topmost gallery of the theater (a climb that is echoed at the end of the novel
when the protagonists make the fateful trip to the rooftop apartment). Rising to
the roof of the hotel, where she has gone to escape the heat of Chicago below, Irene
compares the experience to “being wafted upward to another world, pleasant, qui-
et and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left behind” (147). In
contrast to the hot and “sizzling” hell below-where the sun’s rays were like “mol-
ten rain,” the sidewalks burned, and dust stung the “seared or dripping skins of
wilting pedestrians” (146)-the roof of the hotel is a white heaven for Irene. From
her new vantage point, she “gazes down” at the people in the street below, “think-
ing how silly they looked” (148). Irene has come to this whites-only space not only
to gaze upon others, but specifically upon white others. Irene exercises her subjec-
tivity in becoming a spectator. Riveted by both a desire for and an identification
with whiteness, her gaze finally rests on what she takes to be a white woman. Iron-
ically, the woman turns out to be a fellow passer, her childhood acquaintance,
Clare Kendry.

Although Clare may be object of the gaze for both male and female characters
in the novel, this scene forces us to rethink the “male gaze” as a female gaze and
allows for the resistance of an oppositional look. In addressing the absence of race
in feminist theories of the gaze, bell hooks conceives of the black female spectator
in terms of an oppositional gaze: “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face
of structures of domination that would contain it” (308). For hooks, the opposi-
tional gaze “opens up the possibility of agency” (308) for those who are usually de-
nied agency as subjects and spectators. This phenomenon, of a supposedly fixed
object who looks back in an attempt to resist the fixity of the gaze, is exemplified
in Passing. For almost three full pages of the novel (which is significant given that
the entire work is just one hundred pages), Clare and Irene trade gazes. First, it is
Clare who attracts Irene’s attention, compelling her to describe the stranger in
rich, sensual tones: “An attractive-looking woman, was Irene’s opinion, with those
dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the ivory
of her skin” (148). This description sets up a contrast between black and white that
characterizes Clare throughout the novel. Although some readers might be quick
to attribute Clare’s beauty to her whiteness, her ambiguity is responsible for her
good looks. Her eyes are “almost black,” but not quite; her skin is white, but like
ivory, may be of African origin. Clare’s intriguing appearance and her sexuality-
marked here by the “scarlet flower” of her mouth–draw Irene. Soaking up every
detail of Clare and her movements, Irene, “conscious that she had been staring,”
turns away, only to become “acutely aware that someone was watching her” (149;
italics mine), that she was now the object of another’s gaze: “Again, she looked up,
and for a moment her brown eyes politely returned the stare of the other’s black
ones […].Oh well, let her look!” (149).

In this moment, racial passing eclipses sexual passing. Irene does not allow her-
self to consider that her observer might be returning her desirous gaze; in search

122 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

of an explanation for Clare’s “intense interest” and “continued inspection,” Irene
alights upon race as an excuse for the “queer” behavior. She grows concerned that
the stranger has found out her secret, that she was somehow aware that “here be-
fore her very eyes […] sat a Negro” (150). In anger at having her transgression
found out, Irene dares to return the gaze. This time, sexual attraction once more
emerges from the eclipse, only to be dismissed again, as the novel’s sexual and ra-
cial passings meet in another battle with the gaze as their weapons:

But she looked, boldly this time, back into the eyes still frankly intent upon her.
They did not seem to her hostile or resentful. Rather, Irene had the feeling that
they were ready to smile if she would. Nonsense, of course. The feeling passed,
and she turned away with the firm intention of keeping her gaze on the lake […].
Almost immediately, however, her eyes were back again. […] [S]he had been
seized by a desire to outstare the rude observer. Suppose the woman did know or
suspect her race. She couldn’t prove it. (150)

Like the protagonists themselves, the potential for same-sex desire literally “passes”
in this scene, as the feeling that Clare’s eyes could be smiling (the relatively inno-
cent adjective “smiling” is at times replaced with, or appended by, the more erotic
“caressing”) “passed,” dismissed by Irene as “nonsense.” With each effort to remove
her gaze from Clare, Irene finds herself “seized by desire,” even if the desire only
manifests itself as the determination to stare back at her observer. In order to jus-
tify her own gaze, Irene must disguise it as a vindictive one that dares her observer
to unmask her, one that insists on race as its explanation.

Of course, neither racial suspicion nor sexual desire is the explicit reason given
in the text for Clare’s gaze (though the physical attraction that initially provoked
Irene’s gaze cannot be explained away as easily). Clare has recognized Irene as her
childhood friend-and, hence, has also recognized her as a fellow passer. Clare’s
gaze then is one of recognition and identification. Thus, the alternating eclipses of
racial passing by sexual passing and vice versa allow for the formulation of lesbian
spectatorship (in the exchange of gazes between two women who certainly identify
with, if not explicitly desire, each other), as well as for the dangerous oppositional
gaze of the black female spectator who dares to look back at the white gaze (even
if, in this case, the gazer only appears to be white). The scene also positions the pro-
tagonists as participants in the racial masquerade since both Clare and Irene are
passing as white, reversing the voyeurism of the Harlem Renaissance by inhabiting
a whites-only space. One irony of this moment is that, while Irene faults white peo-
ple for their inability to identify blacks, she herself has failed to detect the visual
signs that might identify Clare.’4 In Passing, the gaze’s failure to constitute a racial
subject and the ambivalent performances that are captured by that look work to-
gether to expose the construction of identity. In ensuring that her identity is mo-
bile, rather than static, the passer thus becomes a figure who defies both realness
and readability-a figure of identity’s ultimate illegibility.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 123

From Tragic Mulatta to Female Passer
In the last decade of the twentieth century, feminist scholarship experienced an
important shift; early feminist critics had largely addressed gender in terms of rep-
resentation, but the work of Judith Butler and other theorists paved the way for ex-
tended analyses of gender as performance. Along with this move came a change in
feminist theorists’ understanding of the gaze, which no longer created a strict di-
chotomy between female object and male subject. However, as black feminist crit-
ics such as Barbara Christian have noted, black women’s writing had already
engendered a turn from representation to performance, or stereotype to character,
at the turn into the twentieth century. As a novel of female passing, Larsen’s text
participates in this crucial move. Passing is not only the theme of the novel or its
textual strategy, but it is a way of being and of becoming for both the female pro-
tagonists. The trope of passing, despite its often tragic endings, was used by Larsen
as a strategy of self-making, a way to constitute female identity in resistance to ste-
reotypical representations. For black women, these stereotypes were usually of the
exotic and the primitive; and, in the case of light-skinned women like Clare and
Irene, the stereotypes usually took the form of the tragic mulatta, the woman
whose ambiguous relationship to both blackness and whiteness meant that she was
doomed to meet an unpleasant and untimely end. Larsen places Clare and Irene
within the tradition of the tragic mulatta, only to consider how they upset the con-
vention, mobilizing the stereotype to reinvent themselves as autonomous agents.’5

In order to discuss the re-invention of the black female protagonist as a female
passer, it is first necessary to consider what was problematic about the representa-
tion of mixed-race women in the century preceding Passing. In placing black wom-
en writers within a literary tradition that had been previously denied them,
Christian explains that novelists such as Frances E.W. Harper, Jessie Fauset, Nella
Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston had the difficult task of proving “that the black
woman is a woman” (252). In other words, the representation of the black woman
as tragic mulatta, deprived of agency and of her female subjectivity, was part of a
history of exoticism and primitivism that Larsen was reacting against. Even a novel
sympathetic to the tragedy of racism, T.S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922), concerned
Larsen because its “black hero believed in the superiority of whites and in the
primitivism of blacks” (Davis 152). In her introduction to Quicksand and Passing,
McDowell faults several male writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Claude
McKay, Arna Bontemps and Van Vechten, for advancing the representation of

14 In convincing herself that the woman who returns her gaze cannot possibly recognize
that she is a Negro, Irene thinks, “White people were so stupid about such things for all
that they usually asserted 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” (150). For a reading
of this passage in terms of the failure of visible signs to make race “real,” see Wiegman 21.

124 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

black women as “mainly’primitive exotic’ sex objects” (xv). In reply to such stereo-
typical depictions, Larsen chose to make her female characters multi-dimensional,
to give them a psychic, as well as a physical, existence. The primitive and exotic rep-
resentations of black women in American literature may have also compelled Lars-
en to base her characters on genteel, middle-class African Americans, rather than
the lower-class blacks who appear in works such as McKay’s Home to Harlem.

Larsen most directly addresses the primitivism of African Americans in art in
her novel Quicksand when Helga Crane reacts violently to her savage depiction in
Axel Olsen’s painting. While Olsen insists that his portrait is the “true Helga
Crane,” Helga contends that “it wasn’t herself at all, but some disgusting sensual
creature with her features” (88-9). Helga resists representation through the white
male gaze by simultaneously rejecting Olsen and his painting; Olsen may see her
as a woman “with the warm impulsive nature of […] Africa” and the “soul of a
prostitute” (87), but Helga would rather constitute herself through the female gaze,
here represented by that of the maid, Marie, who concurs with Helga that the
painting “wasn’t, at all, like her,” but instead “bad, wicked” (89). Olsen views Hel-
ga’s refusal of him (his proposal of marriage only takes place after the suggestion
that she become his mistress) and of his picture as a “tragedy.” In fact, in rejecting
Olsen, Helga makes a decisive move that links her to the tragedy of the mulatta fig-
ure who typically turns down a white suitor and returns to the fold of the black
community, the trajectory that Helga’s life will eventually take after this incident

15 Although the theme of passing is not interchangeable with the tradition of the tragic mu-
latta (because the mulatta, though she may have the option to pass, does not necessarily
cross the color line), the two tropes are inextricably linked. The passing figure often acts
out, and acts upon, the double consciousness that the figure of the tragic mulatta merely
represents. Despite this direct relationship between the two tropes, critics, such as Marita
Golden, refuse to label Larsen’s characters as tragic mulattas because their “intelligence
and genius for rebellion make them ill suited” for such a “proscribed” role (vii). Similarly,
Ann duCille points out that neither Clare nor Irene, can be read as the “typical, passive,
conventional tragic mulatto,” calling Clare “part vamp, part flapper, and part femme fa-
tale” (216, 214). For Wall, Clare “breaks the mold” (123-4) of the tragic mulatta because
her reasons for passing, only alluded to in the text, remain ambiguous and because Clare
is not a figure who draws upon the reader’s sympathies, like, for example, Rena Walden
in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars. While I agree that there is nothing
“typical” about the depictions of Clare and Irene in Larsen’s text, I also think it is impor-
tant to place both protagonists in the tradition of the tragic mulatta if only to consider
how they do “break the mold,” how they reinvent themselves and the convention by com-
bining the fate of the tragic mulatta with the less passive fate of the female passer. See also
Tate 142-146; and McLendon, who argues that Passing is, in fact, “a parody of the formu-
laic tragic-mulatto tale” (95). In a comparable example, Hortense Thornton argues that
Quicksand has been reduced to a tragic mulatto story by male critics who fail to read the
more important story about sexism in the text (285-301).

Lori Harrison-Kahan 125

in Denmark. In Harlem, in Copenhagen, in Chicago, and in the South, Helga must
fight her representation as sexual object, but her attempts to reinvent herself as
sexual subject inevitably fail, despite her resistance to the male gaze and her new
willingness to assert her sexuality first with Dr. Andersen and then with the Rever-
end Pleasant Green. Resolving to leave Pleasant Green and their children at the end
of the novel, Helga cannot act upon that resolve, for she finds herself once again
victim of her own sexuality, which, according to Hazel Carby, was “reduced to its
biological capacity to bear children” (Reconstructing 174). Helga succumbs to the
fate of the tragic mulatta, dying a metaphorical-and perhaps literal-death in the
end, entrapped by marriage and childbirth. Sexuality became both her means to
power and her downfall.

Because the double consciousness is an inadequate description of the psychic
state of the black female subject, whose gender also contributes to her marginal
status, the black female protagonists of both Passing and Quicksand are subject to
a multiplicity of identifications that exceeds duality. Larsen’s work suggests that it
was politically expedient to reinvent the category of the tragic mulatta as a more
complex figure. Although he may be correct in stating that Helga’s life is a “trage-
dy,” Axel Olsen is incorrect in his declaration that his portrait captures Helga’s
“true” self, for there is no “true” self to capture, but rather a “plurality of self”
(Alarcon 366). Unlike the tragic mulatta, the female passer displays a certain
awareness of this plurality and an ability to manipulate her identity in performanc-
es that reflect and contribute to her multiple subjectivity. While Helga herself does
not succeed in this regard, her successors, if we are to read Passing as a sequel to
Quicksand, use the malleability of identity to a certain advantage. Clare, unlike
Helga, is not bound by her womb, going so far as to deny her own daughter. For
Clare, categories once thought to be biological, such as motherhood and race, are
social constructs to be dismantled.

While Clare resists conforming to many aspects of the gender and racial roles
prescribed for her, she appears to adopt and adapt other aspects of those same
roles. Both strategies work to reveal the construction of racial and gender catego-
ries. Reluctant to visit her daughter, Margery, whom she has shipped off to board-
ing school in Switzerland, Clare insists to Irene that “Children aren’t everything,”
laughing as if it is a “secret joke” (210). She decides not to “risk” having any more
children out of a lack of interest in motherhood and out of a “fear that [they] might
be dark” (168). Since her denial of her daughter also stems from her fear that her
biological kin may reveal her “true” race, it reveals her belief that race is, perhaps,
not wholly constructed. Here, racial and gender difference again intersect. Al-
though it appears that Clare is rejecting her gender role as a mother, she also resists
motherhood out of fear that her children’s color will reveal her “true” race.

Yet, in other respects, Clare appears to embody feminine and exotic stereo-
types. When she makes her first appearance in the text, she is described as a “sweet-
ly scented woman in a fluttering dress of green chiffon whose mingled pattern of

126 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

narcissuses, jonquils, and hyacinths was a reminder of pleasantly chill spring days”
(148). Clare is described as a womanly woman, sweet, scented, and floral. Under-
neath this description, however, there are some signs that Clare is not “essentially”
feminine. Her voice, for example, is “slightly husky” (148). The oxymoronic “pleas-
ant […] chill” suggests that she exudes coolness, not warmth. The most feminine
aspects of Clare are her scent and her outfit. It quickly becomes evident that Clare
specifically puts on and plays up her femininity. Like Luce Irigaray’s feminist mim-
ic, she turns the female masquerade into a strategy of resistance. In fact, Clare’s
femininity functions as a cover for her assumption of whiteness.

Clare’s performance of hyper-femininity may mask her subversive act of pass-
ing, but, as if to counteract the ambivalence of her various identifications, each as-
pect of her identity becomes an exaggerated performance. Irene describes Clare’s
appearance in hyperbolic terms throughout the novel. For example, on the night
of the Welfare League Dance, Irene sees

Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, in a stately gown of shining black taf-
feta, whose long full skirt lay in graceful folds about her slim golden feet; her glis-
tening hair drawn smoothly back […]; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels. Irene,
with her new rose-colored chiffon ending at the knees and her cropped curls, felt
dowdy and commonplace. She regretted that she hadn’t counselled Clare to wear
something ordinary and inconspicuous. (203)

Next to Irene, who does not exude excess but is instead “ordinary and inconspicu-
ous,” Clare appears to flaunt her femininity in a way that draws attention to its ex-
cess. But, significantly, Clare’s colors are also described in hyperbolic language:
even down to her feet, she is “golden”; the black of her gown is “shining”; her dark
hair is “glistening”; her dark eyes are compared to “jewels.” To mark the excess of
Clare’s appearance, Larsen repeatedly uses the qualifier “too.” When Irene first sees
Clare, she notes that Clare’s smile is “just a shade too provocative for a waiter” (149;
italics mine). The sentiment is repeated two years later when she meets Clare again
and comments that she “was just a shade too good-looking” (198; italics mine).
While the “too” indicates the excess of Clare’s feminine being (especially since
“good-looking” and “provocative” are typically associated with one’s sexual attrac-
tiveness), “shade” also suggests color, alleging that Clare’s race, as well as her sexu-
ality and femininity, are performed in an excess that may be even more dangerous.

The description of Clare on the night of the dance is further evidence of Irene’s
ambivalent feelings toward her friend. Although Irene at first compliments Clare’s
appearance, she quickly regrets that she failed to advise Clare to dress less extrav-
agantly. Irene must suppress her appreciation of Clare: she “choked [back her] ex-
clamation of admiration” (203). While Irene admires Clare’s excess, she, in the next
breath, criticizes her for it. “All those superlatives!” she complains (and exclaims),
as Clare exuberantly expresses her child-like excitement about attending a dance
in Harlem. While envying Clare’s ability to flaunt her performances of identity,

Lori Harrison-Kahan 127

Irene recognizes that it may be more politic to exercise caution and subtlety. (Sim-
ilarly, in passing between race and sexuality, texts like Passing tend to do so surrep-
titiously, sometimes so surreptitiously that their subtleties go overlooked.) In fact,
there is a method behind Irene’s ambivalence. On one hand, she encourages Clare
to make a spectacle of herself in order to draw attention away from Irene’s own per-
formances. On the other hand, she recognizes that if Clare’s excessive performance
should lead to her unmasking, Irene’s performances would be exposed as well.

While Clare’s spectacular performance of femininity can be read, in psychoan-
alytic terms, as compensation for an essential “lack,” it is also designed to compen-
sate for her lack of clear racial definition-and thus attests to her “lack” of true
race. The text suggest that Clare acts out both her whiteness and her blackness by
pointing to the flamboyant nature of her performances. Instead of passing between
white and black, Clare becomes simultaneously too white and too black. Clare’s
performance of femininity is so over-the-top that it threatens to undermine her
passing, rather than serves as a protective cover for her assumption of whiteness.
Clare’s flaunting of her femininity becomes the flaunting of race–or rather, of the
illusion of race. Her racial identity is not simply “passed” over, but, on the con-
trary, becomes the focus of conversation. Hugh Wentworth, for example, wants to
know the “name, status, and race of the blonde beauty out of the fairy-tale” (204-
205). In describing her as a “fairy-tale” beauty, Hugh recognizes-even without be-
ing able to guess at her race or status-that her identity is but a fiction.

Clare does not so much “pass,” as she parades her passing. As her amusement
over the fact that Bellew calls her “Nig” warns us early on, Clare takes pleasure
from testing the limits. Confirming Irene’s description of her as “risky” (175), Clare
herself admits that she is “not safe” (210). Instead of hiding her secret, she invites
its disclosure. She confesses that she takes risks with the hope that her husband will
find out about her race because the dissolution of her marriage would set her free
(234). In flaunting her whiteness and her blackness through her performances of
femininity, Clare participates in her own exoticization as tragic mulatta. While she
may mobilize the stereotype in an effort to take control of it, the heightened per-
formance ultimately produces a public spectacle in her final confrontation with
Bellew. Thus, Clare’s flaunting of her excessive femininity and her excessive race is
at once the source of her power and her undoing. Passing may be a strategic means
for marginalized others to access a subjectivity typically denied them, but, at the
same time, it can prove dangerous and deadly. It suggests that there is no subject
position other than this role; once the performance is disabled (as it is for Clare
when she is unmasked at the end of Passing), the only alternative is death, a final
passing.

In contrast to Clare, Irene, on the surface, appears to be dedicated to mother-
hood and her race, but several subtle clues suggest that she is similarly invested in
challenging essentialism and that this appearance is part of her well-constructed
disguise. Irene-even more so than Clare-employs “essential” womanliness as a

128 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

guise. For example, just prior to her fateful encounter with Clare in Chicago, Irene
had been searching for gifts for her two sons, appearing to fulfill the role of the de-
voted mother. However, the text also informs us that she had “characteristically
[…] put it [the buying of the gifts] off until only a few crowded days remained of
her long visit” (146), suggesting that putting the needs of her sons last is more typ-
ical than not for Irene. In fact, with her task only half fulfilled (she had purchased
a mechanical aeroplane for Brian junior, but “the drawing-book, for which Ted
had so gravely and insistently given her precise directions, had sent her in and out
of five shops without success” [146]), her concerns quickly turn to her own well-
being and “safety” (147). She retreats to the roof of the Drayton, where her
thoughts shift from shopping for her dark sons to the more pleasant experience of
passing for white.

Irene’s own subversion of identity is also made clear by the fact that she moves
back and forth between an avowal and a disavowal of her identification with Clare
throughout the novel. The scenes that emphasize multiple subjectivity, the merg-
ing of the protagonists, and identity confusion occur when Irene is passing for
white. Although she may proclaim her discomfort and even horror at Clare’s de-
ception, first at the Drayton and later in the encounter with Bellew, Irene protests
too much, for it becomes obvious that she desires and identifies with Clare for the
boldness of her passing. After encountering Clare on the roof of the Drayton, Irene
finds that she cannot tear herself away from her childhood acquaintance because
she has a curious desire to “find out about this hazardous business of ‘passing”‘
(157).

Irene curiously desires the subjectivity that Clare exerts through passing. Al-
though Cheryl Wall states that Clare’s reasons for passing remain ambiguous (123-
4), Clare does explain, however vaguely, the impetus for her crossing of the color
line to Irene: “I was determined to get away, to be a person and not a charity or a
problem, or even a daughter of indiscreet Ham. Then, too, I wanted things. I real-
ized that I wasn’t bad-looking and that I could ‘pass”‘ (159). In stating that she
“wanted things,” Clare acknowledges that her passing is motivated in part by ma-
terialistic desire. She also explains that she was able to pass not because she was
light-skinned, but rather because she “wasn’t bad-looking.” Since Clare’s beauty
derives from her ambiguity, she is able to pass not because she is white, but because
she is enigmatic. Most importantly, Clare’s desire “to be a person”-that is, a sub-
ject-is directly connected to her decision to pass.

Despite the fact that Irene both envies and desires the subjectivity Clare gains
through passing, she herself is constantly engaged in similar performances of iden-
tity that, perhaps, go unacknowledged as performances. One of the many interpre-
tive ambiguities in Passing is who represents the “real” passer of the novel, since the
title seems to pass back and forth between the two main characters. Influenced by
Irene’s indirect and unreliable narration, most readers of the text make the obvious
association between Clare and the title, while others point out that Irene is guiltier

Lori Harrison-Kahan 129

of passing, even though she does not permanently cross the color line. As several
critics have observed, Irene passes by mimicking white ideals in leading a middle-
class life. “Irene ‘passes’ not by adopting a white identity […] but by adopting
white values, including white standards of beauty,” writes Nell Sullivan (374). Mary
Mabel Youman concurs that the title is ironic and refers to Irene not Clare; while
Clare may be the “literal ‘passer”‘ who “returns to her birthright,” Irene “has sold
her soul and’passed’ into white inhumanity” (241).16 While these critics have cho-
sen to privilege either Clare or Irene as the novel’s passer, I believe that there is no
single “real” subject of Passing, instead, the confusion over the novel’s protagonist
reflects the debate over “true” identity.'” The text deliberately resists such definitive
resolution in order to maintain its ambiguity.

That both Clare and Irene are participants in the masquerade is evident from
the scene in which they first meet at the Drayton, where Irene expresses the fear of
being unmasked. Clare is similarly described in terms of her masquerade through-
out the novel. At one point, shortly after developing the suspicion that Clare and
Brian are having an affair, Irene notes that Clare’s “ivory face” was “a little masked.
Unrevealing” (220). The use of the term “mask” is repeated in the scene in which
Irene encounters Bellew while shopping with her darker friend, Felise Freeland.
Here, Irene is described in terms of her masquerade: “Instinctively, in the first
glance of recognition, her face had become a mask. Now she turned on him a to-
tally uncomprehending look, a bit questioning” (226-27; italics mine). Irene is put-
ting on a performance for Bellew, pretending that she does not recognize him. She
dons the mask in response to the white gaze and, at the same time, denies Bellew’s
recognition (of her as white) by countering his hailing with an oppositional look.
Irene tries to construct herself enigmatically, a strategy that is echoed in the am-
biguous narration of this scene. It is unclear, for example, whose “glance of recog-
nition” the text refers to: Irene’s of Bellew or Bellew’s of Irene. Does she put on a
mask in response to his gaze, or does she combine her mask with her gaze? Simi-
larly, the word “look” has double meaning: it refers at once to the gaze-Irene’s
“cool appraising stare” (227)-and to the look she creates, her masquerade. The
“totally uncomprehending” and “questioning” look she turns on him is intended

16 In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone notes that the assimilation practiced by
members of the black bourgeoisie is “a kind of ‘passing’ at the fantasy level” (4). Judith
Berzon offers a fuller explanation of this sort of passing in her chapter “The Mulatto as
Black Bourgeois” in Neither White Nor Black.

17 McLendon agrees; she explains that even the title of the novel is “ambiguous in that it re-
fers both to Clare’s actions, retaining the usual meaning of the word, and to Irene’s ac-
tions, implying psychological passing or escapism. In short, passing may be regarded as
any form of pretense or disguise that results in a loss or surrender of, or a failure to satisfy
a desire for, identity, whether racial, cultural, social or sexual” (96).

130 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

to give her a look that is incomprehensible, a question. Although she tells Felise
that Bellew is the “only person that I’ve ever met disguised as a white woman”
(227), in this chance encounter she also wears a disguise, a mask, as a black person,
suggesting that, for Irene, both identities are part of a performance.,’

Passing offers its challenge to essentialism by positing all forms of identity as
performances. Whether they are explicitly passing as white or not, Clare and Irene
are always performing. As Irene herself points out, the performances of identity are
not necessarily conscious ones: “It roused again that old suspicion that Clare was
acting, not consciously perhaps-that is not too consciously-but, none the less,
acting” (182). Perhaps the only time when Irene is not in the position of the per-
former is when she is observing Clare’s performances. For Irene, the preferred po-
sition-recall her discomfort in the scene at the hotel-is that of the gazer rather
than the gazed-upon because it eliminates the threat of being unmasked herself. In
order to disguise her own passing, Irene would prefer to keep Clare in the spot-
light, so as not to draw attention to her own performances; this is another one of
the tricks of the text-by giving us a narrative from Irene’s point of view in the
third person, it appears that we are always seeing Clare through Irene’s eyes and
thus that Clare is the one on stage.Yet, the scene I examined in which the two char-
acters first encounter each other clearly shows that both Clare and Irene, spectators
and objects of the gaze, are also manipulators of the gaze. Not only do they chal-
lenge the visible signs of identity through the act of passing, but, at the same time,
the merging of these protagonists suggests that female subjectivity may be elastic
because these women are at once subject and object.

Like Clare’s handwriting, which, Irene informed us in the opening paragraph,
is “almost illegible,” “furtive,” and “flaunting” (143), Larsen’s female passer resists
legibility through her ambiguity, reversing over a century of stock representation.
The simultaneous acts of disguising and exposing, expressed by the paradoxical
pairing of “furtive” and “flaunting,” make Larsen’s female protagonists unreadable
and unknowable, instead of fixed and knowable. What matters to Clare and, by ex-
tension, Irene is not so much whiteness, but the performance of whiteness-the
act of passing itself-because it is through this performance that they are able to

18 Notably, Irene’s incongruity in the scene extends beyond race to gender and sexuality.
While the scene gives Irene an opportunity to resist Bellew’s interpellation, this time, of
course, he hails her as “Mrs. Redfield!” (226). Ironically, the one appellation Irene resists
is “Mrs. Redfield,” the name that hails her as a married woman, while she yields to the
nicknames ‘Rene and Nig. While the scene is ostensibly about race and Irene’s refusal to
be hailed as white, it is also about her resistance to being interpellated as a wife. Further-
more, while Felise Freeland’s dark skin may divulge Irene’s race by association, Felise’s
presence may divulge Irene’s sexual secret as well. The two are walking down the street
“clinging to each other,” and Irene has already expressed her admiration for Felise’s “looks
and brains” (216), going so far as to assert a preference for Felise over Clare.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 131

construct their own identities as subjects. The object of the gaze not only gains
agency through an oppositional look (or through the possibility of a female gaze)
but also by controlling her performance of identity so as to confound the spectator.
Passing fools the gazer, and therefore turns the one-who-is-looked-at into a sub-
ject, rather than an object. As tragic mulattas, mixed-race women were fixed in
their representation and fated to die, but as passers, they become subjects-or,
rather, are in the process of becoming subjects. The textual and thematic ambigu-
ities of the novel work on several levels: first, by configuring identity in terms of
both black and white, operating dialectically; and secondly, by pointing to the in-
tersections of identity, by refusing, for example, to be read in terms of race or sex-
uality alone. Just as the characters within the novel have trouble reading each
other, we, as readers, are unsure how to read them. Passing, like Clare and Irene,
defies clear legibility by maintaining its textual and narrative ambiguity through-
out.

Nella Larsen’s “Nig”
Although the story goes that Larsen chose “Nig” as the working title for her manu-
script in honor of Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven, she also may have been honor-
ing-perhaps unknowingly-another predecessor, probably the first African-
American woman to publish a book in the United States. Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig
(1859), which details the plight of a free mulatto girl growing up in Massachusetts,
also took the racial epithet as its title. Upon re-introducing the novel, which virtu-
ally disappeared after its initial publication, to the American public, Henry Louis
Gates, Jr, commented on the symbolism of its title, an ironic inversion of the abu-
sive nickname used by the family to whom the protagonist is indentured: “Wilson
allows these racist characters to name her heroine, only to invert such racism by
employing the name in inverted commas, as her pseudonym of authorship. […]
Transformed into an object of abuse and scorn by her enemies, the’object,’ the her-
oine of Our Nig reverses this relationship by renaming herself not Our Nig, but
‘Our Nig,’ thereby transforming herself into a subject” (li). In Gates’s view, Wilson
has successfully appropriated the racial slur through the act of renaming, turning
herself, as the book’s pseudonymous author, into a speaking subject and the white
characters she writes about into objects. Heir to Wilson’s brand of subversion,
Larsen, too, uses the word “Nig” to ironic effect in Passing, as the opening to this
paper, in which the ignorant Bellew plays the fool before the reader, reveals. 19
“Nig

” as “borrowed” from Van Vechten, also functions as an appropriation of the
term from a white writer by a black writer, though Larsen’s failure to follow
through with the title speaks to a history of unsuccessful attempts to appropriate
the racial epithet and diminish its verbal violence.

19 On Larsen’s use of irony in Passing, see Little 173-82, and Youman 235-41.

132 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

Although we know little of Larsen’s motivation for changing the title, her deci-
sion to name the novel Passing speaks to the central concerns of her text.20 Erasing
the term “Nig” and replacing it with “Passing,” Larsen has effected a renaming that
is echoed in the actions of her protagonists. Larsen allows the racist Bellew to name
her heroines, only to subvert his interpellation by having her protagonists reposi-
tion themselves as subjects through their performances and their spectatorship.
Irene and Clare transform themselves into subjects not through the simple act of
renaming, but by resisting the constraints of blackness-and of identity-alto-
gether. The act of passing represents the racial and sexual ambiguity constructed
by the novel’s female protagonists as they pass among different identities. While
Wilson’s title and signature serve to establish her character’s subjectivity, the sub-
jectivities of Larsen’s main characters are more complex and more ambiguous. A
modernist text that bears little aesthetic and generic resemblance to Wilson’s sen-
timental novel, Passing is narrated from the consciousness of Irene, but in the third
person; the complexity and ambiguity of her subjectivity deprives her of the ability
to speak for herself. Even Clare, whose consciousness we are given no access to, can
speak in her own voice in the course of her novel through her letters, whether their
reader can decipher her illegible scrawl or not. The ending of the novel under-
scores Irene’s inability to fully turn her consciousness into subjectivity.

If the active pronoun “I” eludes Irene throughout the novel, she is, at the very
least, re-constituted as a subject through the feminine possessive pronoun. Jacque-
lyn McLendon has observed that the pronoun “her” is used ambiguously in Pass-
ing. For example, tied to Clare by what she considers to be the loyalty of race, Irene
tells us that she would not betray Clare, because she “couldn’t run the risk of ap-
pearing to defend a people that were being maligned, for fear that that deference
might in some infinitesimal degree lead the way to the final discovery of her secret”
(182). The possessive pronoun, “her,” before “secret” is purposely ambiguous, for
Clare and Irene essentially share the same secret (McLendon lo2). Bellew’s unin-
tended hailing of Irene as “Nig” may interpellate her as a racial subject, but it is also
the moment that attests to the merging of her subjectivity with Clare’s; the inter-
pellation thus turns Irene not only into his Nig, but-more importantly-into her
Nig.

Just as Irene’s identity is constituted in response to Clare’s interpellation
(whether it be Clare’s actual hailing of Irene as “‘Rene” or the hailing of “Nig” that
was meant for Clare), she is also constituted as an object through Clare’s female

20 An account of the title change can be found in Thadious Davis’s biography of Larsen.
Davis informs us that an editor at Knopf suggested the new title “because ‘Nig’ might be
too inflammatory for a novel by an unproven writer, while ‘Passing,’ and the phenome-
non’s connection to miscegenation, would incite interest without giving offense. Larsen
did not object” (306-7).

Lori Harrison-Kahan 133

gaze. At times, in Passing, it seems that men are barely spectators at all, and that
the male gaze is nonexistent. In contrast to the extended exchange of gazes be-
tween Irene and Clare on the hotel roof, Brian’s gaze fails to capture his wife: “He
continued to stand beside the bed, seeming to look at nothing in particular. Cer-
tainly not at her. True, his gaze was on her, but in it there was some quality that
made her feel at that moment she was no more to him than a pane of glass
through which he stared” (216). If the power of the male gaze is to constitute the
woman as object, Brian’s unseeing gaze fails to do this; in contrast to Clare’s look,
which made Irene overly conscious of her body earlier, Brian’s gaze renders her in-
visible. Brian’s gaze also reminds us of the merged subjectivity of the protagonists;
because he looks at his wife as if “she was no more than a pane of glass,” Irene be-
comes clear-or Clare. In the world of Passing, women are constituted through
the female gaze. Passing offers us an important narrative of women constructing
not only themselves, but also each other-as Larsen does in creating two black fe-
male protagonists with a psychological depth that is perhaps unprecedented.

Echoing “Nig,” Clare’s use of the nickname ‘Rene speaks to this important re-
construction of female identity. In answering to Nig, even though she is not direct-
ly hailed, Irene allows herself to be racially interpellated. However, if we take “Nig”
to be the predominant sign in the text of racial subjectivity, “‘Rene” becomes the
predominant sign of Irene’s sexual subjectivity. Significantly, Clare exerts her fe-
male subjectivity by using her maiden name, Kendry. When Clare omits to men-
tion her married name, referring only to her husband as Jack, Irene wonders if
“that […] had been intentional” (163). The use of “Kendry” asserts both Clare’s ra-
cial and sexual independence from Bellew. Although she allows her husband to call
her Nig, she does not take his name in marriage, as would be conventional. In the
same way, Clare gives Irene back her childhood name-“though nobody calls me
‘Rene any more, it’s good to hear the name again” (151)-so that the two come to-
gether on a nominative plane that predates their marriages, giving them the pre-
tense of sexual independence and perhaps figuring same-sex desire as regression.
“Nig” is clearly a racial interpellation, but the introduction of Irene’s nickname
into the text is also presented in racial terms. When Irene is first confronted by
Clare on the roof of the Drayton, a whites-only hotel where they are both passing,
she wonders, upon hearing the nickname familiar from her youth, “What white
girls had she known well enough to have been familiarly addressed as ‘Rene?” (151).
Irene’s query eclipses another question that would shed light on the novel’s under-
lying sexuality: With what girls, white or black, was Irene intimate enough to be so
familiarly addressed?

Just as complexities arise from Bellew’s calling his wife “Nig,” Irene’s nickname
has multiple meanings as well. A gender-neutral name, as opposed to the unam-
biguously female name, Irene “‘Rene” operates as a gender interpellation, suggest-
ing a sexual ambiguity mirrored in the racial ambiguity of the figures who pass for
white. Furthermore, ‘Rene is a variation on the French name Rent, meaning re-

134 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

born, signifying the reinvention of-and reawakening to-identity undertaken by
those who pass, as well as the “renaissance” experienced by African Americans,
particularly those of Irene’s class, during this time. These two nicknames-Nig
and ‘Rene-alternate with each other throughout the text, as do racial and sexual
passing, ultimately battling it out on the final pages of the novel in which Irene
momentarily reclaims her “I.”

The final scene in the novel reverses the earlier scene in which Clare and Irene
re-encountered each other on the roof of the Drayton Hotel. The hotel roof was a
“white heaven” to Irene, but the Freelands’ Harlem penthouse represents a micro-
cosm of what Van Vechten called a “nigger heaven”-a “free land” for blacks. Be-
cause this scene takes place during winter, not the heat of summer, Irene, Clare,
and Brian are escaping the cold as they ascend to the top of the building from the
snowy “whiteness” (236) below. The setting at the Freelands also emphasizes the
turn the novel has taken in relation to freedom. Shortly before they make the climb
to the penthouse, Clare had expressed her desire to “come up” to Harlem to live,
where she’d be “able to do as I please, when I please” (234). This wish contrasts with
her earlier desire for the freedoms afforded by whiteness. In her letter to Irene,
Clare wrote of “the other that I once thought I was glad to be free of” (145), and,
in conversation with her friend, she also explained that her passing was motivated
by a desire to be free, “to be a person and not a charity or a problem.” Freedom,
once associated with whiteness, now seems to be affiliated with blackness.

As a result of Clare’s desire to return to blackness, Passing can be read as a story
of newfound racial pride. However, the novel in fact ends with an affirmation of
racial incongruity. Clare is the one who is punished for her passing, even though
she comes to regret her acts. Clare’s death leaves us with only a single protagonist,
Irene, who, we can assume, will continue to pass between two worlds. In fact,
Clare’s death allows Irene to continue passing. The death that ends Passing is a con-
ventional narrative device, but this death remains unresolved-and, if it is indeed
a murder, unsolved. In falling from the penthouse roof, Clare suffers a fall, or ex-
pulsion, from this paradise into the darkness below. While the ground she falls to
may be white, the snow will melt, revealing that it was only a cover. Irene frees her-
self of Clare, but she is similarly expelled from this “nigger heaven” when she fol-
lows the party in pursuit of her fallen friend: “Down, down, she went” (240).

In identifying with Clare, Irene eventually must come to acknowledge her own
performances through Clare. At the end of the novel, Bellew enters the Christmas
party at the Freelands with the purpose of unmasking his wife, but the unmasking
of Clare will also be the unmasking of Irene. Here, Bellew’s discovery of Clare’s
“true” identity, once again, interpellates Irene: “So you’re a nigger,” he cries. “A
damned dirty nigger!” To prevent her own unmasking, Irene must do away with
Glare in the moment that she is unmasked, simultaneously doing away with the
part of herself that is Clare. The ambiguous ending thus asks to be read as a mur-
der, the act of murder also being an acknowledgment of Irene’s own masquerade.

Lori Harrison-Kahan 135

In the final moments of the text, Irene momentarily regains her subjectivity, per-
haps even separates it from Clare’s. When Clare falls from the roof, Bellew’s epithet
becomes the affectionate “Nig”: “There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound
not quite human, like a beast in agony.’Nig! My God! Nig!'” With Clare out of the
way, this final cry of “Nig” no longer hails Irene-nor, for that matter, can the term
of endearment, “‘Rene,” which represented her intimate relationship with another
woman. Irene temporarily reclaims her “I” on the final pages of the novel when she
exculpates Bellew of Clare’s death; in response to the inquiry of the police officer,
Irene says, “r’m quite certain that he didn’t. I was there, too. […] I-” (242; italics
mine), and she breaks off with this final word, “I,” unable to articulate further. She
is a subject without a voice who simply fades into darkness.

The racialized portent of the final moment in the novel-the possibility that
Bellew pushed his wife in an act of racial violence-is quickly eclipsed by Irene’s
response to Clare’s fall and the possibility that she was responsible for the “acci-
dent.” Irene’s mixed emotions of loss (“Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair,
the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole
torturing loveliness” [239]) and of relief-that she had “passed” sexually by remov-
ing her object of desire-are, in turn, eclipsed by the racial narrative, particularly
the suspicion that Bellew is responsible for his wife’s death. Even the narrative of
sexual passing, though, is similarly disguised by a narrative of sexual jealousy since
Irene presumably imagines an adulterous affair between Brian and Clare to cover
up her own desire for Clare. In this context, her relief, then, can be read as assur-
ance that her marriage will not be ruined, thanks to Clare’s timely death. Here, we
have the final imagistic eclipses of the novel, once again operating in contradiction
to one another: Clare’s “black” body eclipsing the white snow, or alternatively,
Clare’s “white” body eclipsing the darkness of night. These final images suggest
that racial and sexual passing succeed in canceling each other out, allowing pass-
ing-and Passing-to fade, quite literally, from sight as Irene loses both voice and
vision.

Although Irene just misses the mark of becoming a subject at the end of Pass-
ing, she has not only done away with the possibility of being hailed as “Nig,” but
she has also avoided interpellation by the law, in the form of the police officer, who
fails to suspect her of being responsible for Clare’s death.21 Encapsulated in the
ending of Larsen’s Passing, we see the central, unresolved dilemma of the passing
trope. Passing may be a strategy of ambivalence, but it is also an ambivalent strat-
egy: it simultaneously affirms the subject and threatens subjectivity. Nella Larsen

21 The appearance of the police officer also brings us back to Althusser’s exemplary scenario.
In Althusser’s illustration of interpellation, the police officer, as representative of ideolo-
gy, also stands for the law and the subject is, then, always a “suspect.” For a reading of the
role of the law in Althusser, see Judith Butler, Psychic Life lo6-31.

136 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

envisioned a narrative of passing that offered her female protagonists an active role
in their own identity formation. While this role aims to resist the fixity and tragedy
of the mulatta’s representation, the power of female self-making is illusory. The
passing subject ceases to exist when the performance is disabled. To continue to
“pass,” Irene can only pass into silence-a silence akin to that of Clare, who has
passed into death.

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swick: Rutgers UP, 1986.

McLendon, Jacquelyn. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.
Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1995.

Mulvey, Laura. “Afterthoughts on’Visual Pleasure and Narrative’ Cinema Inspired by King
Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946).” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham.
New York: New York UP, 1999.

1- . “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1984.

138 Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s Passing

Schuyler, George S. Black No More. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1931.

Sullivan, Nell. “Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Fading Subject.” African American Review 32.3
(1998): 373-87.

Tate, Claudia. “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation.” Black American Litera-
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Thornton, Hortense E. “Sexism as Quagmire: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” CLA Journal 16
(Mar. 1973): 285-301.

Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1926.

Wall, Cheryl. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP,
1995.

Williams, Gregory Howard. Life on the Color Line. New York: Plume, 1995.

Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. New York:
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• Issue Table of Contents

Modern Language Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 1-158
Front Matter
Charlemagne’s Unspeakable Sin [pp. 1-14]
From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature [pp. 15-33]
Was Huck Greek?: The “Odyssey” of Mark Twain [pp. 35-44]
Publication and Reception of Wordsworth’s “The River Duddon” Volume [pp. 45-67]
Reading “Mira’s Will”: The Death of Mary Leapor and the Life of the Persona [pp. 69-89]
“In Our Circumstance and Course of Thought”: The Problematics of Conceptual Scheme in “Hamlet” [pp. 91-108]
Winner 2002 NEMLA Women’s Caucus Prize
Her “Nig”: Returning the Gaze of Nella Larsen’s “Passing” [pp. 109-138]
Winner 2002 NEMLA Graduate Student Caucus Prize
The Subject of Abolitionist Rhetoric: Freedom and Trauma in “The Life of Olaudah Equiano” [pp. 139-156]
Back Matter [pp. 157-158]

Decoding Essentialism: Cultural Authenticity and the Black Bourgeoisie in Nella Larsen’s
Passing
Author(s): Candice M. Jenkins
Reviewed work(s):
Source: MELUS, Vol. 30, No. 3, Personal and Political (Fall, 2005), pp. 129-154
Published by: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)
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Decoding Essentialism:
Cultural Authenticity and the Black
Bourgeoisie in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Candice M. Jenkins
CUNY, College of Staten Island

[T]he Negro is not born per se but reborn out of the detritus of
American racialism. It is not so much a matter of deracination as re-
racination, the production of the Negro as a marker of the universal
and the cosmopolitan such that even the ‘whitest’ individual (the mu-
latto) might proudly proclaim, ‘I am a Negro American.’

-Robert Reid-Pharr
“Cosmopolitan Afrocentric Mulatto Intellectual” (52)

Adrian Piper’s 1992 essay “Passing for White, Passing for
Black” recounts her experiences as a self-identified African
American woman with “white” skin, and the resultant alienation
from both whites and blacks which she has experienced throughout
her life. At one point in the essay, she describes what she calls the
“Suffering Test of blackness” (236), administered by primarily
working-class, darker-skinned blacks, who “recount at length their
recent experiences of racism and then wait expectantly, skeptically,
for me to match theirs with mine” (236). Piper’s initial compliance
with these expectations is based on the assumption that these ac-
quaintances hoped to bond via shared experience, but she soon dis-
covers otherwise:

I realized I was in fact being put through a third degree. I would share
some equally nightmarish experience along similar lines, and would

MELUS, Volume 30, Number 3 (Fall 2005)

CANDICE M. JENKINS

then have it explained to me why that wasn’t really so bad, why it
wasn’t the same thing at all, or why I was stupid for allowing it to
happen to me. So the aim of these conversations was clearly not mu-
tual support or commiseration. (236)

Piper’s fair skin here provides, for some blacks, evidence of her
racial inauthenticity; her experience of racism as a “white-looking”
black person, rather than indicating her similarity to other blacks,
instead is dismissed as inevitably less severe or is used to mark her
as foolhardy for willingly subjecting herself to such treatment.

Piper recounts an entirely different experience with middle-
class blacks, however. Noting that it wasn’t until her college years
that she “reencountered the middle- and upper-middle-class blacks
who were as comfortable with [her] appearance as [her] family had
been” (238), Piper goes on to suggest that this group of blacks had
an entirely different reaction to and attitude towards her racial
identity: “Suffering Test exchanges almost never occur with mid-
dle-class blacks, who are more likely to protest, on the contrary,
that ‘we always knew you were black!’-as though there were
some mysterious and inchoate essence of blackness that only other
blacks have the antennae to detect” (238). Interspersing a quote
from Frances Harper’s 1893 novel, Iola Leroy, in which a white
Southerner claims that “tricks of the blood” betray white-looking
blacks to a practiced (white) eye, Piper implicitly aligns these in-
clusive assertions on the part of middle-class blacks with exclu-
sionary statements made by racist whites near the turn of the twen-
tieth century, when hysteria about miscegenation and interracial
proximity was reaching its peak in the South.1

Piper’s juxtaposition of these two parallel assertions suggests
that both are based in an erroneous assumption about black homo-
geneity, the presupposition of “an essentializing stereotype into
which all blacks must fit”-while in fact, as she goes on to insist,
“no blacks, and particularly no African American blacks, fit any
such stereotype” (238). For Piper, then, middle-class blacks who
claim an innate ability to recognize her otherwise invisible black-
ness are not only as caught up in restrictive stereotype as are work-
ing-class blacks who assume that Piper could not possibly be
“really” black because of her light skin, but they are also as limited
as racist whites, relying upon an overly narrow understanding of

130

DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN’S PASSING

blackness in order to situate white-skinned blacks like Piper within
the group. Indeed, Piper’s inclusion of the quote from Iola Leroy in
her discussion of middle-class blacks implies that this stereotypical
assumption about blackness is based in not just cultural but bio-
logical essentialism: middle-class blacks claim a special ability to
see how Piper’s body is physically “marked” by her race in the
same way that the novel’s racist Southerner claims the ability to
see the “tricks of blood” which “always betray” the passing mu-
latto.

There may be more at stake, however, in this seemingly essen-
tialist racial ascription practiced by the middle-class blacks that
Piper describes. In fact, what Piper reads as biological essential-
ism, and the presupposition of an essential black sameness, may in
fact be quite the opposite: an acknowledgement of differences, par-
ticularly color and class differences, among blacks, and a strategic
deployment of racialized knowledge as a means of solidifying oth-
erwise tenuous community boundaries. With this in mind, I turn
now to the subject of this article, namely, an analysis of the com-
plex politics of racial ascription in Nella Larsen’s fiction. My dis-
cussion begins by calling attention to Adrian Piper’s work because
Piper’s essay, different though it may be in context and content,
brings up issues about middle-class black identity that Larsen’s
writing attempted to address some sixty-three years earlier.

Both of Larsen’s short novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing
(1929), include heroines whose racial identities are ambiguous to,
if not directly contested by, other characters. While Quicksand’s
central character is a biracial woman whose ancestry and light
complexion are a continual source of complication for her
throughout the narrative, Passing takes the issue of racial ambigu-
ity much further. It tells the story of an embattled friendship be-
tween two black women who are both fair enough to “pass” as
white; Irene Redfield, with a visibly black husband and child, does
so rarely, while Clare Kendry makes her life as a white woman.
More importantly, however, in Larsen’s text these “ambiguously
raced” figures are frequently recast as black by other characters in
the narrative, through an assertion of their alleged similarity to
those same characters. The basis for this supposed similarity seems
initially to suggest an essentialist logic, employed by Larsen’s mid-

131

CANDICE M. JENKINS

die-class black characters in order to recuperate mulatta figures
from whiteness, just as Adrian Piper’s middle-class associates
seem to make recourse to essentialism in order to claim Piper her-
self as black. In this essay I’d like to suggest, however, that such a
gesture towards racial essentialism, and its accompanying recu-
peration of the ambiguously raced figure, actually indicates a more
complicated, and perhaps more justifiable, political effort.

I use “ambiguously raced” and “mulatta” advisedly here; even
as I claim a kind of synonymity between these two terms, the two
do not present an exact equivalence. Certainly, a character might
be ambiguously raced and not mulatta at all, or vice versa; some
mixed-race people look quite unambiguously black. More impor-
tantly, a figure’s status as racially ambiguous is often dependent on
the perspective of the observer; figures whom I might call “am-
biguous” are unambiguously white to some eyes. Still, I choose to
use these terms roughly synonymously because they seem to apply
in similar ways to characters in Larsen’s fiction; even though char-
acters who can pass for white are not always mulatta, and even
though mulatta characters cannot always pass, in both instances
how these characters “read” racially in Larsen’s work varies in dif-
ferent settings. In other words, that the “truth” of a character’s ra-
cial identity depends wholly on who is making the judgment may
be all the evidence necessary to demonstrate that character’s racial
ambiguity, her position in the muddied space between “black” and
“white.”

While this article will focus primarily on Larsen’s Passing, I
would suggest that both of her novels point out how ambiguously
raced figures are simultaneously necessary and unsettling to no-
tions of black identity. They accomplish this in part by construct-
ing a series of tensions between the notion of an intangible black
“essence” and a rigidly concrete code of black behavior and cus-
tom, which mulatta figures are seen repeatedly to embody and to
violate. Not coincidentally, in both texts Larsen situates these ra-
cial issues within narratives of domestic disruption and conflict:
Helga Crane, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand, is uncontained
by marriage until the disastrous conclusion of the novel, and Clare
Kendry, the ambiguously raced figure in Passing, not only exists
outside of a traditional black bourgeois family structure, but re-

132

DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN’S PASSING

peatedly defies the confines of this structure, suggesting an overlap
for Larsen between ambiguous racial character and sexual or fa-
milial impropriety. This overlap marks a thematic convergence be-
tween erotic or domestic indiscretion and racial disloyalty, located
in the transgressive bodies of ambiguously raced characters in both
texts. In violating a black moral code (whose larger content is rep-
resented metonymically by the trope of the patriarchal family), the
mulatta disrupts a perceived black racial sanctity, invalidating the
racial authenticity she may have gained through other blacks’ ef-
forts to reclaim her. As such, she operates as a kind of cultural
turncoat, whose perceived miscreance on an intimate level trans-
lates into traitorous assault upon her community at large.

Clearly, then, part of my contention in this essay is that in both
Quicksand and Passing, but particularly in the latter, the ambigu-
ously raced figure is understood as a threat to the physical and psy-
chic boundaries of race. Such a contention is hardly new, or even
controversial. Rather than focus on the way this figure challenges
the boundaries of whiteness, however, as most other critics of Lar-
sen’s writing have, I am interested in how the mulatta unsettles
blackness and notions of an internalized black authenticity, par-
ticularly in the middle-class community of the New Negro Renais-
sance that is interrogated in Larsen’s work.2 Because her physical
body cannot always be understood as black, the ambiguously raced
figure elucidates an alternative conception of blackness, a concep-
tion which, although it initially appears essentialist, ultimately re-
lies upon a shared practice of will for coherence. This reconceptu-
alization of blackness has a particular urgency in Larsen’s work, I
suggest, because in the historical moment during which Larsen’s
novels take place, the middle-class blacks she writes about were
estranged from an assumed black “authenticity,” and because black
bourgeois social and cultural spaces in that historical moment were
commonly integrated by whites. At the same time the mulatta,
whose recognizability as black is vital to the bourgeois (re)-
definition of racial identity, is also disruptive to that definition, be-
cause of her frequent association with erotic excess and domestic
indiscretion in Larsen’s texts. Her moral transgressiveness inter-
sects with, indeed, is the source of, her racial transgressiveness. In
its challenge to other characters’ desire for lucid sexual and racial

133

CANDICE M. JENKINS

boundaries, the body of the ambiguously raced figure is thus an
unsettled and unsettling presence in the black bourgeois social
sphere.

Black Bourgeois Community

In his analysis of attitudes about racial authenticity during the
New Negro Renaissance, J. Martin Favor writes that during the
period, “the rural folk [.. .] in the process of becoming urban pro-
letariat, are [understood as] the basis of African American experi-
ence [. … F]olk experience forms the core of the New Negro’s
identity” (12). As Favor notes, this belief predates the New Negro
Renaissance, perhaps beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois’s seminal
The Souls of Black Folk, which sought to document a section of the
black community that Du Bois himself considered to be most “hu-
man and real” (108). Still, by the late 1920s, when Larsen’s novels
were written, this valorization of the folk was well established, as
was a sense that “the middle class-or at least the nonfolk-are
excluded from what is ‘fundamentally or distinctly’ African
American” (Favor 21). This middle-class estrangement may well
have been deliberate on the part of some bourgeois blacks, how-
ever, since “folk” is equated with stereotypical “primitivism” in
many minds of the period. A description of Alain Locke and
Charles Johnson by New Negro Renaissance historian David Lev-
ering Lewis successfully captures this link. Lewis writes, “Locke
and Johnson made a perfect team because at bottom, both wanted
the same art for the same purposes-highly polished stuff, prefera-
bly about polished people, but certainly untainted by racial stereo-
types or embarrassing vulgarity. Too much blackness, too much
streetgeist and folklore-nitty-gritty music, prose, and verse-
were not welcome” (95). The alignment, in this passage, of words
like “stereotypes” and “vulgarity” with words like “streetgeist” and
“folklore” is certainly insidious, in that the sign of “blackness,”
also invoked, ultimately comes to correspond with the worst of
primitivist stereotype-at least when that blackness is truly “au-
thentic.”

Larsen represents this correspondence in her portrayal of Quick-
sand’s Anne Grey, who despises whites while imitating white pat-

134

DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN’S PASSING

terns of behavior; Grey is, apparently, secretly dismissive of the
black folk culture that she claims to celebrate:

While proclaiming loudly the undiluted good of all things Negro, she
yet disliked the songs, the dances, and the softly blurred speech of the
race. Toward these things she showed only a disdainful contempt,
tinged sometimes with a faint amusement. (48)

Anne’s distaste for black folk culture, I suggest, is at least in part a
function of her allegiance to black bourgeois propriety and disci-
plinary narratives of what Kevin Kelley Gaines calls “uplift ideol-
ogy”: specifically, the belief among middle-class blacks in the late
nineteenth century that “rights and freedom would accrue to those
[blacks] who had achieved the status of respectability” (Gaines
16). Because this allegiance drives status-conscious blacks in Lar-
sen’s work to eschew “racial stereotypes or embarrassing vulgar-
ity,” it also (less explicitly, to be sure) enables their detachment
from black authenticity, precisely because those stereotypes are
associated with true “blackness,” “streetgeist and folklore.” To re-
main culturally authentic, Larsen’s middle-class blacks would need
a redefinition of black authenticity, one that could more easily ac-
commodate their own class position.

Such a redefinition was also necessary in light of the unusually
integrated setting of 1920s Harlem, one in which white and black
Americans socialized together freely and collaborated with one
another culturally and artistically.3 This bi-racial setting created a
particular conundrum for the avowedly African American subject
during the period. In an arena where sociocultural interaction
might involve as many whites as blacks, and where blacks and
whites are often physically indistinguishable, the need to articulate
new conceptualizations of racial belonging could take on a signifi-
cant political urgency, particularly for a group of people already
distanced from aspects of blackness most considered “real.” As
Robert Reid-Pharr notes, Harlem Renaissance authors, including
Larsen, “were caught up in the question of how to rectify the sup-
posed Africanity of the black community with the reality of its
cosmopolitanism”; according to Reid-Pharr, such authors’ re-
sponse to this question was a renewed interest in the “novel of
passing,” a novel “in which one can be black without acting or

135

CANDICE M. JENKINS

looking black” (81). Larsen’s Passing certainly supports this the-
ory, and in both of her novels, putatively black, middle-class char-
acters express what appears to be racial essentialism, as well as a
reliance upon rigid codes of moralist behavior, as markers of their
own blackness. I will suggest, in the remainder of this essay, that
such renegotiations of black identity were attempts to grant mid-
dle-class African Americans a greater power over the imagined
boundaries of their community.

“A thing that couldn’t be registered”

After receiving a letter from her mother’s brother containing a
considerable sum of money, Quicksand’s Helga, now with an
“out” from her life in Harlem, ruminates on her ties to black peo-
ple: “It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her
race, closed up with that something in the racial character which
had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in
fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?”
(54, 55). The most obvious answer to this question, because she
shares phenotypic characteristics with other blacks, is also the one
most easily discounted by the sense of something “inexplicable,
alien” to racial character. The mundanities of facial features and
hair texture, or of skin color, are likely not the indefinable and un-
familiar characteristics that bind Helga to other blacks. Rather, this
bond is allegedly based in something intangible, “something
broader, deeper, that made folk kin” (55). This intangibility recalls
Alain Locke’s 1925 assertion that a “deep feeling of race is at pre-
sent the mainspring of Negro life” (11, my emphasis). Locke at-
tributes this feeling to blacks’ “reaction to proscription and preju-
dice” (11), but similar to Larsen’s character, goes no further in ex-
plaining how such a feeling operates, or might be quantified.

Helga’s sense of the “inexplicable” in black racial character also
seems related to the assertions of black writer Charles Gibson, who
claimed in a 1931 article in Psychoanalytic Review that “there is an
undescribable [sic] something which enables a Negro to spot [a
fair-skinned black person “passing” for white] sometimes at a
glance” (qtd. in Robinson 719, my emphasis). Gibson’s recourse to
“passing” is instructive, for the sense of blackness as consisting of

136

DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN’S PASSING

an “[in]describable something” becomes most coherent when all
other physical markers of racial identity-skin color, hair texture,
facial features-are invisible. As Elaine Ginsberg has written, the
very notion of “passing” might be understood to imply that “iden-
tity categories are inherent and unalterable essences: presumably
one cannot pass for something one is not unless there is some
other, pre-passing, identity that one is” (4). Or, as Samira Kawash
puts it, “[c]ommon sense dictates that passing plays only with ap-
pearance and that the true identities underlying the deceptive ap-
pearances remain untouched” (126).

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that in Larsen’s second novel,
Passing, where both major characters can pass for white, racial be-
longing is also addressed as an intangible “something,” a kind of
mysterious essence. In that text, Clare Kendry, the fair-haired and
fair-skinned daughter of a half-white janitor, is married to a white
man who does not know she is black. Irene Redfield, Clare’s
childhood friend, encounters Clare during a visit to Chicago. Ironi-
cally enough, Irene too is “passing” at the moment of their meet-
ing, enjoying a cool drink in the restaurant of a segregated down-
town hotel, and in the first moments of the encounter her own ra-
cial character is placed under the scrutiny of Clare’s as-yet-
unrecognized gaze:

[G]radually 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 be-
fore 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 [. .. .] Never, when she was
alone, had they even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Ne-
gro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly
know. (150)

Of course, the woman staring does know, precisely because she too
is black, and shares a history with Irene; Irene’s disdain for white
ways of recognizing black people depends upon the erroneous as-
sumption that this seemingly “white” woman will rely on pheno-

137

CANDICE M. JENKINS

type to judge Irene’s racial membership. Indeed, in her smugness
Irene falls into the very trap of white judgment that she ridicules;
Irene’s belief that Clare is white is based on Clare’s physical ap-
pearance, though it is formed as Irene herself exploits the unreli-
ability of appearance to secure her own entrance into the Drayton.
Thus Clare, who recognizes Irene as her former playmate well be-
fore the other woman is aware of their connection, is ironically bet-
ter equipped to “read” Irene’s blackness than Irene is to read
Clare’s. Certainly, the “text” of Clare’s reading is still Irene’s
physical manifestation, but rather than looking for tell-tale markers
of black ancestry as Irene assumes she will, Clare looks for evi-
dence that Irene is, in fact, the ‘Rene she remembers from child-
hood.

Clare, here, functions as the “knowing spectator” that Samira
Kawash has determined to be a “necessity” of passing, what gives
passing meaning as passing (145). Irene and Clare soon change
roles, however, with Irene serving as the unhappy spectator to
Clare’s passing performance; it is in these instances when Larsen’s
text seems most to imply an intangible black racial essence. The
most striking of such scenes is an afternoon tea at Clare’s home,
which includes a third childhood acquaintance, Gertrude Martin.
Gertrude, also a black woman who looks white, is married to a
white man just as Clare is, but unlike Clare, her husband knows her
racial background. The full import of this distinction is made clear
when Jack Bellew, Clare’s husband, arrives to join the group for
tea. Writes Larsen, “The first thing that Irene noticed about
[Bellew] was that he was not the man that she had seen with Clare
Kendry on the Drayton roof’ (170). Disconcerted by this evidence
of Clare’s marital indiscretions, Irene is further amazed when
Bellew affectionately calls his wife “Nig.” Prodded by Clare to
explain this curious moniker, Bellew says good-naturedly, “‘Well,
you see, it’s like this. When we were first married, she was as
white as-as-well, 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”‘ (171). All
present enjoy this little joke, none more than Irene, who in recog-
nizing its true irony laughs far longer than is prudent for the cir-
cumstances.

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DECODING ESSENTIALISM IN LARSEN’S PASSING

Kawash’s reading of Irene’s hysterical laughter in this instance
as “a moment of breakdown in the structuring order of race” is per-
suasive, and an indication of the “chaos glimmering just beneath
the surface of order and regularity” (156). I might suggest, how-
ever, that Irene’s inarticulate hysteria is generated not simply by
the joke’s inadvertent exposure of Clare’s racial instability, but by
Irene’s own fragile racial positioning in this moment-the threat to
Irene’s blackness imposed by Bellew’s hostile whiteness and her
silence in the face of this hostility. This threat is made clear when,
after Irene regains her composure, Bellew details his dislike of
blacks at some length. Irene later recalls the encounter: “[M]ingled
with her disbelief and resentment was another feeling, a question.
Why hadn’t she spoken that day? Why, in the face of Bellew’s ig-
norant hate and aversion, had she concealed her own origin?”
(182). There is a linguistic connection to be made here, between
speaking and existence, between silence and ceasing to exist. Ju-
dith Butler argues in a different context that speech has often been
granted the power to “reinvok[e] and reinscrib[e] a structural rela-
tion of domination” (Excitable 18). In other words, “speech is fig-
ured as having the power to constitute the subject” (Butler, Excit-
able 19). By refusing to speak in the moment of Bellew’s on-
slaught, Irene’s black self is literally disappeared from the room,
leaving only her “white” body to signify for her. Without her voice
to constitute her blackness, however, that body can only “speak”
whiteness, producing a crisis of identity for Irene, a self-identified
“race woman,” which cannot easily be resolved.

Philip Brian Harper’s discussion of Francis Harper’s 1893 novel
Iola Leroy calls attention to a similar contradiction: “[S]ince lola’s
skin color does not correspond to her racial identification [. . .] that
racial identification remarkably takes on the status of a secret-one
whose revelation will always come as a shock precisely because it
disrupts the standard association between skin color and racial
identity” (14). Harper goes on to suggest that “racial identification,
which is normally taken to be a matter of public knowledge, is for
lola actually a private matter the publication of which will exten-
sively affect her private life” (15). Harper’s argument points to the
ways in which a certain kind of black articulation is required of
fair-skinned African Americans who wish to be understood as

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such. Western reliance on the visual, what Robyn Weigman calls
“the cultural training that [. .] teaches the eye not only how but
what to see” (22), as a self-evident proof of racial identity col-
lapses when the object of vision is a body that cannot be pheno-
typically recognized as black. And because whiteness is under-
stood as “neutrality” or “invisibility” in American racial parlance,
such a body must reveal its secrets, deliberately make public what
has become private, in order to be read as “raced” at all.4

While Harper is right to suggest that the publication of a “se-
cret” racial identification would deeply impact the private life of
the person whose secret is exposed, there is still more at stake in
Larsen’s text, namely, the secrets of those other fair-skinned
blacks, like Clare, with whom Irene considers herself allied. In
other words, because Irene’s own stabilizing self-revelation would
jeopardize the meaning of Clare’s racial silence, Irene too must
remain silent. In spite of her discomfort, Irene accepts this as
obligatory to her sense of race-based morality: “She had to Clare
Kendry a duty. She was bound to her by those very ties of race,
which, for all her repudiation of them, Clare had been unable to
completely sever” (182). The sense of indelible racial connection
that Helga Crane speaks of thus resurfaces here. Oddly enough,
however, these ties that Clare seems unable to escape have little to
do with regard or interest, as Irene notes:

And it wasn’t, Irene knew, 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 slight artistic or sociological interest in the race that
some members of other races displayed. She hadn’t. No, Clare Ken-
dry cared nothing for the race. She only belonged to it. (182)

In the absence of such connections, why does Clare belong? For
that matter, why does anyone? While racial membership cannot,
evidently, be discerned based on phenotype, it also seems to have
little to do with outward expressions of enthusiasm or concern.
Certainly if Clare, who has for years made her home among
whites, can still be considered a member of the black race, then
race must be not only deeply internal, but utterly unrelated to be-
havior or allegiance.

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Of course, the “truth” of blackness has always been difficult to
define, in part because “race” itself is a kind of social fiction that
has meaning only so long as participants in it agree that it does. As
David Lionel Smith has written, “Race is a commonsense notion. It
falls apart under rational scrutiny” (180). Furthermore, according
to Smith, blackness in particular has been nearly impossible to
categorize, even though large numbers of people either consider
themselves or are considered to be black:

Unfortunately, no one has ever succeeded in producing an adequate
definition of [blackness]. Black people can have white skin, blue
eyes, and naturally straight hair; they can be half, three-quarters,
seven-eighths or more white; they can even deny or not know they are
black. Claim what they will or look as they may, they are still by law
and custom black. (180)

It is the “custom” side of the law and custom synergy which seems
most at stake in Larsen’s two texts-for it is certainly not defer-
ence to legal strictures which leads Helga Crane to claim that she
shares with other blacks “[t]ies that were of the spirit. Ties not only
superficially entangled with mere outline of features or color of
skin. Deeper. Much deeper than either of these” (95). Neither does
law explain why, in the words of Irene Redfield’s husband, Brian,
blacks passing for white “always come back” to the black commu-
nity; “But why?. .. Why?” Irene demands of him, to which he re-
plies, “If I knew that, I’d know what race is” (185). That neither he
nor we seem able to grasp it suggests that Larsen is deliberately
playing upon this racial haziness, that, in fact, the amorphous char-
acter of race is key to its representation as a kind of “essential”
quality in her fiction.

The meaning of this seeming essentialism among Larsen’s mid-
dle-class black characters may be more complex, however, than it
appears at first glance; in fact, I would argue that such recourse to
a kind of internalized black spirit or sentiment is effected more in
the service of a politics of racial reclamation than as essentialism
per se. Even if, for Larsen’s characters, the quantifiability of
blackness seems almost an impossibility-even if instead, charac-
ters seem to intuit where they belong racially, and understand this
belonging instinctively-this so-called intuitive knowledge and

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understanding can serve a political purpose. They are one means of
establishing and maintaining the boundaries of race for bourgeois
blacks in Larsen’s fiction, precisely because only blacks seem ca-
pable of gaining that knowledge, reaching that understanding. In
this sense, Larsen’s characters perform what Gayle Wald has
called “racial ascription as a radically social practice (albeit one
that cloaks itself in the mantle of essence)” (13). For by restricting
the ability to recognize blackness, even among people who are fair
enough to be taken for white, to only other blacks, Larsen’s char-
acters make it possible to delimit the boundaries of blackness on
their own terms. Or, as Wald puts it, such a restriction “entailed
[. . .] owning that prerogative to name and possess usually assumed
by whites” (8).

A case in point in Passing is Irene’s conversation with Hugh
Wentworth, a wealthy and well-known white guest at the Negro
Welfare League dance that Irene is helping to host. Facetiously
discussing whether Clare, who has insisted on attending against
Irene’s wishes, is a black woman or not, the two end up in an ex-
change about racial character.

Her smile changed to a laugh. “Oh, Hugh! You’re so clever. You
usually know everything. Even how to tell the sheep from the goats.
What do you think? Is she?”

He blew a long contemplative wreath of smoke. “Damned if I
know! I’ll be as sure as anything that I’ve learned the trick. And then
in the next minute I’ll find I couldn’t pick some of ’em if my life de-
pended on it.”

“Well, don’t let that worry you. Nobody can. Not by looking.”
“Not by looking, eh? Meaning?”
“I’m afraid I can’t explain. Not clearly. There are ways. But

they’re not definite or tangible.”
“Feeling of kinship, or something like that?”
“Good heavens, no! Nobody has that, except for their in-laws.”
“Right again! But go on about the sheep and the goats.”
“Well, take my own experience with Dorothy Thompkins. I’d met

her four or five times, in groups and crowds of people, before I knew
she wasn’t a Negro. One day I went to an awful tea, terribly dicty.
Dorothy was there. We got talking. In less than five minutes, I knew
she was ‘fay.’ Not from anything she did or said or anything in her

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appearance. Just-just something. A thing that couldn’t be regis-
tered.”

“Yes, I understand what you mean. Yet lots of people ‘pass’ all the
time.”

“Not on our side, Hugh. It’s easy for a Negro to ‘pass’ for white.
But I don’t think it would be so simple for a white person to ‘pass’ for
coloured.

“Never thought of that.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Why should you?” (206)

The irony of Irene’s using “the sheep and the goats” as metaphoric
stand-ins for blacks and whites is, of course, that sheep and goats
can be distinguished from one another fairly easily by their physi-
cal appearance. Not so for the black and white people Irene and
Hugh discuss. In fact, Hugh’s reliance on the visual is subtly de-
rided in the passage. Hugh’s inability to determine Clare’s racial
identity recalls Irene’s earlier mental assessment of whites’ racial
awareness: “White people were so stupid about such things for all
that they usually asserted that they were able to tell” (150). Irene’s
comment to Hugh that he is usually “so clever” thus also strikes an
ironic note, suggesting that, to the contrary, Hugh’s whiteness re-
duces him to naivete in this instance. What’s more, Irene’s seem-
ing reassurance to him that “nobody” can tell soon becomes an-
other indictment of whites’ tendency to attempt mere visual dis-
cernment; her added “not by looking” implies that Hugh is as mis-
guided as other whites in his efforts to master the elusive “trick” of
detection by using his eyes alone.

This naive reliance upon the visual is precisely what Sarah
Chinn implies when she writes that “[w]hite spectators cannot hold
the passing body still enough to read accurately the messages in-
scribed on it. They assume a stasis of identity that is evidentiarily
transparent and limpidly legible” (64). Chinn suggests that the
black observer, of which Larsen’s Irene is the best example, suc-
ceeds in detecting the passer by “accumulat[ing] readings over
time, paying attention to detail, never assuming [she] know[s]”
(64); similarly, Amy Robinson argues that for the in-group specta-
tor of the figure passing for white or for straight, “the eyes are
named as the privileged vehicle of intuitive knowledge” (720,
721). In other words, for these critics the difference between white

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and black spectators of the passing body, and the resultant differ-
ence in ability to detect the one who passes, is based in differing
angles of vision, different modes of reading the physical signals
(the “messages inscribed”) that this body provides to the practiced
eye. I would propose, however, that Irene’s own language seems to
base her knowledge of racial identity on something more intangi-
ble than merely looking, even the looking of an adept observer. In
the passage quoted previously, she returns to the vocabulary of
ambiguity when she suggests that “there are ways” of distinguish-
ing between those who are white and those who merely look it.
Irene’s realization that Dorothy Thompkins is white is based not on
“anything in her appearance” but on “just-just something,” a
thing that not only could not be registered, but nearly cannot be
articulated, as Irene’s stutter on the word “just” indicates.

Ultimately, the fact that this mysterious black “something” can
only be discerned, and effected, by other black people is made evi-
dent by Irene’s rejoinder to Hugh that passing happens success-
fully in only one direction. The logic behind this claim is fairly
straightforward: a black person who looked white might be able to
conceal the elusive black “something” from a community of white
eyes trained only to look for physical markers, and who see even
those markers only according to their desire or whim (witness John
Bellew’s dismissal of Clare’s visible darkening). A white person,
however, would find it almost impossible to affect that alleged
black intangibility that already no white person can quite grasp,
and that every black person seems able to sense, to understand, to
“just know” after a mere five minutes of personal conversation.
When this concept is followed to its most obvious conclusion, a
tautology develops: because whites are not black, they lack the ca-
pacity to decide whether they are black; because they cannot intui-
tively “understand” blackness, they can never know whether they
do, in fact, understand blackness. The very inscrutability of black
racial character makes it something that whites can never grasp.

Samira Kawash explains this tautological relationship from a
slightly different perspective in her discussion of passing narra-
tives. Kawash suggests that the fetishized “one drop” of black
blood-which in US legal and cultural history has determined the

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blackness of even the whitest-looking individuals-ultimately re-
duces to a meaningless determinant of difference:

[I]nsofar as this drop of blood is nothing but a mark, the essential dif-
ference between black and white is [. . .] only the fact that black may
be distinguished from white. Every other difference may disappear;
black and white may be identical in everything, and still the differ-
ence between black and white remains as simply the insistence that
they are not the same. (148)

In other words, racial difference resides only in the possibility of
making the distinction, rather than in any actual difference between
black and white-or, as Kawash suggests, “race [. . .] is not a noth-
ing-at-all, but a something that says nothing” (155).

Still, this something-saying-nothing serves a purpose in Lar-
sen’s novel because, as already noted, it allows bourgeois blacks to
control the boundaries of their community from within. In this
sense, Irene’s mysterious ability to separate the sheep from the
goats, the “fay” from the fowl, if you will, serves as a means of
protecting black collective identity from whiteness-not the white
cosmopolitan participation in black social spaces that took place
during the New Negro Renaissance, but a longer history of racist
exclusionary practices that relegated any body that could be
marked as black to a position of stigmatized oppression. For ex-
ample, in the aforementioned passage from Iola Leroy quoted in
Adrian Piper’s essay, a white Southerner comments that “There are
niggers who are as white as I am, but the taint of blood is there and
we [whites] always exclude it[.]” He smugly concludes that
“[T]here are tricks of blood which always betray them [… ..] I can
always tell” (Harper 229). It is this presumptive power to identify
and exclude, claimed historically by whites, that blacks in Larsen’s
texts resist by themselves claiming the ambiguously raced figure
away from whiteness. This interpretation does enact an ironic re-
versal subjecting the figure which Robinson calls the “hegemonic
reader” (the white spectator) to “the interpretive authority of the in-
group” (731), but I would argue that just as importantly, it rein-
states the power of the in-group in relation to that group’s own
members.

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CANDICE M. JENKINS

In other words, while the appearance in Larsen’s characters of a
mystifying ability to recognize other blacks, even those who are
visibly indistinguishable from whites, does seem superficially to
locate black identity in the realm of the intuitive, the instinctive-
giving middle-class blacks a safer kind of access to that primitivist
authenticity which the “mysterious [. . .] dark hordes” (Quicksand
95) of the black poor and working class were already believed to
possess-its more profound purpose seems to be reinstating blacks
with the power of reading and “recognizing” their own community.
Ralph Ellison wrote in “The World and the Jug” that “being a Ne-
gro American involves a willed (who wills to be a Negro? I do!)
affirmation of self as against all outside pressures-an identifica-
tion with the group as extended through the individual self. …
And those white Negroes. .. are Negroes too, if they wish to be”
(178). Ellison’s attention to the power of will suggests, in part, that
racial belonging is a choice, a decision that must be made by each
person who would consider herself black-and his reference to
fair-skinned “white Negroes” is another reminder that a phenotypi-
cally “white” body must willfully reveal the “secret” of its racial
identification in order to be African American.

Indeed, in the book chapter from which this article’s epigraph is
drawn, Robert Reid-Pharr also uses Ellison’s words, to argue in a
different context that in this period, racial categorization was a
matter of conscious ideological realignment (52). More impor-
tantly for my purposes, Reid-Pharr avers that during the Harlem
Renaissance, “much of the effort on the part of black writers was
to erase the prior distinction that had once existed between the
black and the mulatto,” suggesting the constructedness of the racial
grouping we now uncritically understand as “black” (55). Prior to
1920, “mulatto” was a separate category from “Negro” on the US
census (46).5 Given the temporal proximity of this institutional dis-
tinction to Larsen’s historical moment, it should not be surprising
that her characters, particularly the primarily fair-skinned bour-
geoisie who would only recently have become “Negro,” should be
concerned with the practice of reclamation as a possible reaffirma-
tion of racial membership. The choice outlined by Ellison is thus
not simply an individual one. If Larsen’s work is any indication, a
collective choice is also required, the choice to claim figures like

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Clare Kendry as black, precisely because the exercise of such a
choice is an empowering one for other black people, replacing the
majority’s power to exclude and stigmatize with the will of the
marginalized to include and valorize. The strength of will implied
by Ellison’s words lies not simply in what the particular mulatto or
mulatta proclaims about her own identity, but also in how other
members of the group choose to repossess that seemingly “white”
individual as a way (ironically) of marking their own blackness.

Not coincidentally, white racism’s alleged power to mark black
bodies as racially “tainted” and imperfect is the same power which
has taken as its prerogative the negative stereotyping of black fa-
milial and sexual character. This may explain what I have already
identified as the overlap between racial and sexual transgression in
Larsen’s fiction, and it suggests, furthermore, a possible link be-
tween black reclamation of the power to name and black efforts,
following uplift ideology and the cultural impulse towards bour-
geois propriety so evident among Larsen’s characters, to sanitize
blacks’ intimate reputation. That this latter recuperative effort has
such restrictive consequences for blacks, particularly black
women, may indicate the limits of all racial projects which begin
as a reaction to white misappropriations of black identity. Still, the
reassertion of a black power to identify racially seems in many
ways to be a largely worthwhile effort, a complex project of self-
determination, one which is only undermined by the obsessive re-
course to decorum exhibited by figures like Quicksand’s Anne
Grey and Passing’s Irene Redfield. Nowhere is this more evident
in Larsen’s fiction than in responses to the sexual indiscretions of
the ambiguously raced figure, who, even as she is a key player in
black bourgeois renegotiations of racial ascription, refuses to par-
ticipate in codes of moral behavior that have equally to do with the
meaning of blackness in Larsen’s texts.

Recuperating the Transgressive Body

Ambiguously raced characters such as Clare Kendry, far from
being less black as a result of their fair skin, are even stronger rep-
resentatives of black identity in the ascriptive refiguring of race
effected by the black middle class. This is because in the absence

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CANDICE M. JENKINS

of physical markers, the recognizability of their blackness is en-
tirely dependent upon the “will” to blackness (their own or that of
other blacks) to which Ellison refers. As such, they are the ultimate
evidence that bourgeois blacks possess the recuperated power to
categorize; the reclamation of ambiguously raced characters as
black is thus a necessary part of bourgeois recastings of racial au-
thenticity. This reclamation also presents a problem, however, be-
cause the ambiguously raced figure frequently behaves in a manner
by which other bourgeois blacks in Larsen’s fiction cannot abide;
disrupting codes of morality which, I argue, are also constitutive of
“blackness.” To put it differently, in Larsen’s fiction the mulatta is
a kind of cultural “traitor” because she refuses to play by the ra-
cialized rules of the group which goes to such great pains to claim
her.

When J. M. Favor suggests that “discourses of black identity
have as some of their basic premises rules for the expression of
sexuality that determine one’s standing as a racial being” (96), he
anticipates Gayle Wald’s claim that cultural pressures exist “to
maintain and/or secure sexual and gender ‘respectability’ as a
means of racial self-assertion” (18). Both statements remind us
that the central aim of the black bourgeois social sphere in Lar-
sen’s moment, “respectability,” might itself be understood as a
marker of blackness.6 To demonstrate a deliberate resistance to
codes of respectability is thus to disregard racial community, at
least in the bourgeois context about which Larsen writes. The am-
biguously-raced women in Larsen’s fiction betray black bourgeois
culture by challenging racialized attempts to confine black
women’s sexual expression to the black nuclear family structure,
what Frank Hering calls “the fantasy of idealized domesticity”
(38). In doing so, they present an appearance of sexual impropriety
that the decorum-obsessed community of bourgeois blacks cannot
tolerate.7

Thus it should be no surprise that in the novel Passing, charac-
ter Clare Kendry is a source of both fascination and aversion for
Irene Redfield, the textual representative of bourgeois “uplift”;
Clare’s seductive behavior disrupts racialized respectability in
multiple ways.8 In part, this disruption arises from her sexual
availability to white men: not only is she married to the racist

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Bellew, but she dallies with still other white men on the side, if her
indiscretions at the Drayton Hotel are any indication. Clare may
perform this sexual liberation while living as a white woman, but it
is precisely her affiliation with “blackness” which makes her be-
havior threatening-witness, for example, Irene’s mental note,
once she has recognized Clare as black, that the latter woman’s
flirtatious behavior towards a male server is inappropriate: “Again
that odd upward smile. Now, Irene was sure that it was too pro-
vocative for a waiter” (152). The emphasis created by the comma
after “now” makes it clear that Irene’s suddenly confident disap-
proval is based in Clare’s blackness, which only takes shape in the
temporal space following their introductory conversation, the pe-
riod of Irene’s racial recognition (and reclamation) of Clare.

Further, Clare’s sexually daring interactions with whites seem
to parallel her perceived availability to already-married black men,
a group just as socially forbidden by black bourgeois community.
The sexual and domestic propriety embraced by uplift-driven,
race-conscious figures such as Irene Redfield absolutely prohibits
those behaviors that would threaten the safe function of the black
nuclear family and its attendant patriarchal stability, the “security”
that Irene clings to throughout the novel. This social prohibition
suggests that Irene’s suspicion of Brian and Clare’s sexual in-
volvement is based at least in part on an assumption about Clare’s
political disloyalty. Of course, no concrete evidence is given in
Passing for the adulterous indiscretion, and beginning with Deb-
orah McDowell’s groundbreaking analysis of the novel as a cov-
ertly lesbian text, numerous critics have suggested that Irene’s sus-
picions only expose her sublimated desire for Clare.9 Whether or
not Irene’s suspicions are founded, however, or based in her own
desires and jealousies, there remains a sense in the text that Clare
would be capable of such betrayal, empowered as she is with the
“ability to secure the thing that she wanted in the face of any oppo-
sition, and in utter disregard of the convenience and desire of oth-
ers” (201). Clare’s potential for an adulterous involvement with
Brian is emblematic of the potential for racial “infidelity” that re-
sides in the mulatta figure more generally in Larsen’s work. The
sense throughout Larsen’s novels that these figures are capable of
“taking quietly and without fuss the things which [they] wanted”

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CANDICE M. JENKINS

(Quicksand 129) is a reference to selfishness, yes, but a selfishness
which translates into disregard for black codes of social convention
more generally.

In the case of Passing, however, the disregard for racialized
codes of propriety which so unsettles Irene’s rigidly ordered world
is still not enough to free Irene from the racial bond she imagines
herself to share with Clare. Even when she encounters Bellew
while in the company of a visibly black friend, she is unable to ex-
pose Clare by allowing him to recognize her. Afterwards she be-
rates herself for a missed opportunity to rid herself of Clare once
and for all:

Irene was thinking: “I had my chance and didn’t take it. I had only to
speak and to introduce him to Felise with the casual remark that he
was Clare’s husband. Only that. Fool. Fool.” That instinctive loyalty
to a race. Why couldn’t she get free of it? Why should it include
Clare? Clare, who’d shown little enough consideration for her, and
hers. What she felt was not so much resentment as a dull despair be-
cause she could not change herself in this respect, could not separate
individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry. (227)

Separation becomes particularly difficult when the individual in
question performs such productive metaphorical work in certifying
Irene’s own blackness. Irene is unable to relinquish the power of
racial naming that her connection to Clare gives her. This leaves
Irene in a terrific quandary. To embrace this transgressive mulatta
figure is to redefine cultural authenticity, to reaffirm the strength of
racial will-at the same time as it is to allow the existence of an
abhorrent intimate misconduct which is understood as racially
treacherous.

It is no wonder, then, that the novel concludes in Clare’s death,
ostensibly at Irene’s hand. Irene, representative of a bourgeois
black community driven to maintain sexual and racial decorum at
any cost, destroys Clare because the latter woman’s misconduct
proves too much for Irene to tolerate (38). This misconduct betrays
a “respectable” reconceptualization of blackness, and insofar as the
mulatta’s sexual transgressiveness recalls the common primitivist
stereotype about black erotic passion and excess, it also reifies a
stigmatized version of blackness that many bourgeois blacks long

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to escape. Only in death can Clare and figures like her continue to
symbolize a recuperated black power of recognition sans the
messy transgressiveness that their actual bodies enact. As I con-
clude I would suggest, however, that the definition of blackness
troubled by the mulatta’s so-called sexual indiscretion is rendered
vulnerable to such betrayal precisely because of its reliance on
conventional markers of respectability. In other words, the mu-
latta’s cultural “betrayal” is made possible by a conceptualization
of allegiance that limits black intimate character to a breathtak-
ingly narrow field of expression: the bourgeois patriarchal family
structure. Not only does such a limited field exclude queer desire
and other “alternative” forms of black intimacy, it reinscribes the
racist hegemony which stigmatized black sexual character in the
first place, as Kevin Gaines so aptly points out in his critique of
uplift ideology (5-6, 13-14).

Perhaps more importantly, the “willed affirmation” of blackness
that Ellison outlines-a profoundly humanist project, the decision
to claim others and to affirm the ways that we belong to one an-
other-loses coherence if in order to choose blackness one must
unchoose a whole host of other intimate possibilities. Elsewhere in
“The World and the Jug,” Ellison writes that being black in the US
“imposes the uneasy burden and occasional joy of a complex dou-
ble vision, a fluid, ambivalent response to men and events which
represents, at its finest, a profoundly civilized adjustment to the
cost of being human in this moder world” (178). If, as the bour-
geois blacks under critique in Larsen’s novel would have it, the
price of maintaining black respectability is the loss of this “com-
plex [. . .] fluid, ambivalent” manner of being human, then a con-
tingent racial “betrayal” may be the most culturally authentic alter-
native for us all.

Notes

1. As Hartman notes, the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, handed down only a year
before Harper’s novel was published, institutionalized segregation in the South
based on white “fears of engulfment and contamination” by “scandalously
proximate [black] bodies” (206).

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CANDICE M. JENKINS

2. For more on the mulatta, passing, and whiteness, see Sollors, 246-284; for
more on Larsen’s work and race, see, for example, Blackmer, Berlant, and Ka-
wash, among many others.
3. A number of scholars have addressed this social and cultural integration in
significant detail; see Douglas and Hutchinson. For a related work that under-
takes a very specific reading of Harlem Renaissance texts through the “color-
blind” teachings of mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, see Woodson.
4. I refer, here, to what Haney-Lopez has called “the omnipresent effects of
transparency and of the naturalization of race,” which render the “white” body
invisible (193).
5. For more on the history of racial categories and classifications in the United
States, see Davis.
6. The irony of reading respectability, defined by conformity to patriarchal fam-
ily structures, as a mark of “blackness”-even bourgeois blackness-is that the
patriarchal structures which are the criteria of that respectability actually issue
from white, Western ideology. Hence I find myself in the paradoxical position
of arguing that an aspect of whiteness serves to define blackness. However I
make this claim not to suggest that black identity is generally dependent on
hegemonic structures of dominance for its own coherence, but to call attention
to, and problematize, the ways in which intimate behavior has always been a
part of how black people choose to situate themselves as political subjects.
7. This policing of black female sexuality in the dubious service of racial protec-
tion is the hallmark of what has elsewhere been identified as the “salvific wish.”
While a detailed exposition of the term is beyond the scope of this essay, it
might be briefly explained here as a largely feminine aspiration to rescue the
black community from racist stereotypes of black sexual excess, through the
embrace of traditional notions of domesticity and propriety, an aspect of uplift
ideology specific to women and concerned with characteristics of respectability
related to so-called feminine matters, domesticity and sexual decorum. For a
fuller discussion of this idea in another context, see Jenkins.
8. Butler offers a much more detailed psychoanalytic reading of this simultane-
ous revulsion and attraction in her discussion of Larsen’s text.
9. See McDowell. Butler is the most well known of the critics to follow and
complicate McDowell’s reading.

Works Cited

Berlant, Lauren. “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life.” Compara-
tive American Identities. Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed.
Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991. 110-40.

Blackmer, Corinne E. “The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Lar-
sen’s Passing.” Race-ing Representation. Voice, History, and Sexuality. Ed.
Kostas and Linda Myrsiades. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. 98-
116.

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Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New York:
Routledge, 1997.

-. “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge.” Bodies that
Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. 167-
85.

Chinn, Sarah. Technology and the Logic ofAmerican Racism: A Cultural His-
tory of the Body as Evidence. London and New York: Continuum, 2000.

Davis, F. James. Who is Black: One Nation’s Definition. 1991. University Park:
Pennsylvania State UP, 2001.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Signet, 1969.
Ellison, Ralph. “The World and the Jug.” 1963. The Collected Essays of Ralph

Ellison. Ed. and Intro. John F. Callahan. New York: The Modem Library,
1995. 155-88.

Favor, J. Martin. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance.
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Gaines, Kevin Kelly. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Cul-
ture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996.

Ginsberg, Elaine K. Ed. and Intro. Passing and the Fictions of dentity. Durham
NC: Duke UP, 1996.

Haney-Lopez, Ian F. White by Law: The Legal Construction ofRace. New York:
New York UP, 1996.

Harper, Frances E. W. lola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted. 1893. New York and
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

Harper, Phillip Brian. Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social
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Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
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Hering, Frank. “Sneaking Around: Idealized Domesticity, Identity Politics, and
Games of Friendship in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Arizona Quarterly 57.1
(2001): 35-60.

Hutchinson, George. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. Cambridge
and London: Harvard UP, 1995.

Jenkins, Candice M. “Queering Black Patriarchy: The Salvific Wish and Mascu-
line Possibility in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.” Modern Fiction Studies
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Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line. Identity, Hybridity, and Singular-
ity in African-American Literature. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1997.

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing. 1928, 1929. Ed. and Intro. Deborah
McDowell. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP, 1986.

Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. 1979. New York: Penguin,
1997.

Locke, Alain. The New Negro. 1925. Intro. Arnold Rampersad. New York:
Macmillan, 1992.

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154 CANDICE M. JENKINS

McDowell, Deborah. Introduction. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick NJ:
Rutgers UP, 1986. ix-xxxv.

Piper, Adrian. “Passing for White, Passing for Black.” Passing and the Fictions
of dentity. Ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg. Durham NC: Duke UP, 1996. 234-69.

Reid-Pharr, Robert. Black Gay Man: Essays. New York and London: New York
UP, 2001.

Robinson, Amy. “It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of
Common Interest.” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (1994): 715-36.

Smith, David Lionel. “What is Black Culture?” The House that Race Built. Ed.
Wahneema Lubiano. New York: Pantheon, 1997. 178-94.

Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both. New York: Oxford UP,
1997.

Weigman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham
NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century US Lit-
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• Article Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

MELUS, Vol. 30, No. 3, Personal and Political (Fall, 2005), pp. 3-271
Front Matter
(Mis)interpretations and (In)justice: The 1992 Los Angeles “Riots” and “Black-Korean Conflict” [pp. 3-40]
Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism, 1913-1917 [pp. 41-69]
Identity Configuration and Ideological Manipulation in Nicholas Gage’s A Place for Us [pp. 71-93]
Wittman’s Transitions: Multivocality and the Play of “Tripmaster Monkey” [pp. 95-111]
An Interview with Jimmy Santiago Baca [pp. 113-127]
Decoding Essentialism: Cultural Authenticity and the Black Bourgeoisie in Nella Larsen’s Passing [pp. 129-154]
Voodoo Fascism: Fascist Ideology in Arna Bontemps’s Drums at Dusk [pp. 155-177]
“I Am Nobody”: The Haiku of Richard Wright [pp. 179-200]
A Laying on of Hands: Toni Morrison and the Materiality of “Love” [pp. 201-218]
Audre Lorde: Trauma Theory and Liberal Multiculturalism [pp. 219-245]
Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 247-251]
Review: untitled [pp. 252-255]
Review: untitled [pp. 256-258]
Review: untitled [pp. 259-261]
Review: untitled [pp. 262-264]
Back Matter

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand and Passing”
Author(s): Anthony Dawahare
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 22-41
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The Gold Standard of Racial Identity

in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

Anthony Dawahare

Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? …

Thus much of this will make black white, foul fair,

Wrong right, base noble, old young, coward valiant.

Shakespeare, Timon ofAthens 4.3

He’s got a five-dollar gold piece for a stickpin and he got a

ten-dollar gold piece on his watch chain and his mouf is jes’

cranmmed full of gold teethes. Sho wisht it wuz mine.

-Zora Neale Hurston, “The Gilded Six-Bits” (1014)

In the 1920s, many black writers established African American identity
as one of the most significant issues to be addressed in the post-World

War I period. Figures as diverse as W E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph,

Marcus Garvey, Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, and Jesse Fauset

sought to define a new black identity that had appeared on the scene.

They claimed that this New Negro belonged to a modern generation
of black Americans shaped by the great events of the teens and twenties,

from the Great Migration North, World War I, industrialism, urbanism,
and nationalist liberation movements to the growth of internationalism
following the Bolshevik Revolution. To be sure, black writers and activ

ists were often at odds over just who the New Negro was. Garvey, for

example, championed what he saw as the African character of the New

Negro, while Randolph welcomed the arrival of a left-leaning, work

ing-class New Negro. More often than not, however, definitions of the

Twentieth-Century Literature 52.1 Spring 2006 22

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

New Negro asserted that black Americans belonged to a unique race of
human beings whose ancestry imparted a distinctive and invaluable racial
identity and culture. The New Negro, it was claimed, had thrown off the
yoke of racial prejudice that equated blackness with barbarism and was
proud of his or her race and heritage. Many writers also believed that the
New Negro’s racial revaluation would help to produce a friendly revalu
ation of black Americans by white America. Writers heralded the arrival
of the New Negro as the beginning of a new phase of American history
in which the production of black culture would assist African Americans
in winning respect long overdue in the US and abroad.

At the heart of New Negro discourses of the 1920s hes a crucial con
tradiction, one with important imphcations for discussions of black identity
today.Writers claimed that the New Negro was shaped by modernity yet
retained in some way a racial essence or character that preceded modernity.
The New Negro was as old as Africa but as contemporary as a jazz club
in urban Harlem; his racial soul was as ancient as Hughes’s “dusky rivers”
(Voices 155) yet as modern as the Garvey’s Black Star Line ships ready to
take the black diasporic masses back “home” to Africa. The New Negro
had “the instinctive gift of the folk spirit” (Locke, “Negro Youth” 51),
which did not preclude his evolution into a “new type of Negro … a city
Negro” Johnson 285). In a word, the “new” black identity also retained a
good amount of an “old,” premodern racial self.

Granted, not all Renaissance writers asserted that the New Negro
was both premodern and modern. Exceptions stand out, such the black
socialists who, for a time, rejected racial categories out of hand, and

George Schuyler, who called the New Negro Renaissance the “Ne
gro-Art Hokum” for claiming that black Americans are a distinct race
somehow unaffected by “the same economic and social forces that mold
the actions and thoughts of the white Americans” (1 173).1 But taken as
a whole, New Negro discourses are caught between two poles: a notion
of a premodern racial identity whose origins lie in ancient Africa and a
concept of a modern self not exclusive to black Americans.

A number of current literary studies of the New Negro have all but
laid to rest the racial essentialism predicated on concepts of a universal
black “soul” or “blood” transmuted generationally. These critiques show
how such essentialism reproduces fallacious premises integral to the “sci
entific” racism dating back to the period of slavery as well as to antiracist

writers who problematically borrowed from these pseudoscientific dis

23

Anthony Dawahare

courses to argue against racism.2 Barbara Foley, for example, details the
ways in which writers of the Harlem Renaissance constructed a New
Negro identity indebted to populist and nationalist conceptions of the
“folk” popular at the time. For many New Negro writers, the black “folk”

was tied by “blood” to the “soil” that warranted their equal place in the
American republic. But as Foley demonstrates, notions of a soul or blood
that putatively determines race and place can best be understood not as
scientific but as rhetorical means that New Negro writers used, albeit
problematically, to further civil rights. To be sure, Paul Gilroy’s Against
Race rightly refers to a current “crisis of raciology,” largely the result of
scientific research on human biology and DNA. Nor can one say that
cultural transmission of premodern African or African American identities
necessarily occurs or that it plays a central role in shaping identity in a
highly standardized capitalist economy that has transformed all work and
social relations. Even Countee Cullen, that very modern New Negro poet

who lacked a personal memory or experience ofAfrica and was otherwise
a critic of atavistic thinking, answers the question of what Africa is to him
through recourse to essentialist rhetoric about the black self and its “dark
blood damned within” (142).

Yet if we grant that the New Negro’s racial identity was not the
product of genetics or the holdover of some premodern black essence,
then what were New Negro theorists pointing to when they laid claim
to racial particularity? An answer to this question can be found, oddly
enough, in the other side of the New Negro contradiction: modernity
itself. In other words, the notion of a racial self is itself inseparable from
the specific capitalist institutions and ideologies of modernity.

This is the view suggested by Nella Larsen’s perspicacious novels
Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). On the surface, perhaps, Larsen’s
novels may not seem the perfect place to explore the modernity of New
Negro racial identity, since they are thematically about racially confused
female “mulattas” who struggle with their “biracial” identities in an Amer
ica sharply divided by the color line.3 Nonetheless, both novels clearly
represent racial identity as unavoidably shaped by the modern political
economy of capitalism. Larsen’s characters want to be bourgeois because
they are afraid of being associated with the black working class, which
has been exploited and defined as inferior.Their class identifications ap
pear racial, however, because the institutions and ideologies of modern
capitalism reify race as an indicator of self and social worth. As a result,

24

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

wealth equals whiteness for Larsen’s protagonists, and her novels expose
how this reification of race operates by converting social relations of class
into ontological concepts that appear natural and universal. Ultimately,
her protagonists’ fetishization of wealth and whiteness is motivated by the
desire to become like money itself-the greatest fetish of all. Indeed, pass
ing for white, Larsen suggests, allows the light-skinned mulatta to circulate
like money. But the tragic endings of the novels also suggest that the
overdetermination of racial values by the political economy of capitalism
presents a no-win situation. Even the New Negro’s revaluation of black
ness as a source of pride appears in Larsen’s work as a hopeless attempt
to defy the reification of blackness as a sign of working-class inferiority.
Larsen’s novels suggest that the New Negro promoters of race pride, like
their white-identified detractors, remain trapped by the capitalist semiotics
of race.

The political economy of Quicksand
Larsen first explores racial identity as a function of the capitalist politi
cal economy in Quicksand. Significantly, the novel begins in a work site,

Naxos, the Southern black college where Helga works as a teacher. Larsen
represents this academic institution not as a locus of liberal humanism or
social reform but as a capitalist industrial enterprise. Naxos is a “machine”
that

ruthlessly cut[s] all to a pattern, the white man’s pattern. Teacher
and students were subjected to the paring process, for it tolerated
no innovations, no individualism. Ideas it rejected, and looked
with open hostility on one and all who had the temerity to offer
a suggestion or ever so mildly express a disapproval. Enthusiasm,
spontaneity, if not actually suppressed, were at least openly re
gretted as unladylike or ungentlemanly qualities. (4)

Indeed, Larsen’s depiction of Naxos (the reverse of Saxon) borrows from
“the language of the factory and the ideology of Taylorism” (Carby
170). Under the Taylorism of Naxos, the individual employee’s ideas or
discontent are irrelevant or subject to disciplinary action in the micro
managed workplace. The ultimate purpose of the educational factory, as
the renowned white preacher explains to both teachers and students, is
to manufacture “Naxos products” that will have a specific use value and

25

Anthony Dawahare

exchange value in the division of labor as exploited “hewers of wood and
drawers of water” (3).

As is typical of employees in a capitalist workplace, Helga feels alien
ated from her role as a teacher-that is, from her conumodified self. Feel
ing like a cog, “an insignificant part” (1) among “automatons” (12), she
experiences social relations as reified: the relation between workers and
employers is here conceptualized as a machine operating independently
of human will.4 At work she feels powerless; only when not working does
she feel like herself. She enjoys her time alone in her campus apartment,
“furnished with rare and intensely personal taste” (1), because it is a retreat
from repressive and exploitative work relations legitimized by notions of
discipline and service. Her experience illustrates Marx’s observation that
the worker

only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside
himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when
he is working he does not feel at home. His labour is there
fore not voluntary, but coerced … it is merely a means to satisfy
needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact
that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is
shunned like the plague.

(Marx and Engels 274)

Her rebellion against alienation culminates in her quitting the job she
conceptualizes as a “cage” (27).

But Helga cannot escape her commodification simply by quitting a
job, for society itself is “a big general office” (54). Helga’s problems are

much bigger than she realizes.This vision of society as an office suggests a
social reality that is administered according to the dictates of a capitalism
that assigns black women the role of domestic service worker. Thadious

Davis notes that the federal census for 1900 reported that 90 percent of
black women were employed in personal and domestic services. In the
1910 census for New York-that Northern locus putative of freedom
to which Helga flees-70 percent “of all black female workers .. . were
employed in domestic and personal services, and … of the remainder, the

majority worked as servants and waitresses, with the rest either laundresses,
dressmakers, or seamstresses” (84). Opportunities for black women had
changed little by 1920: 63.1 percent were employed in domestic services
and

30

percent in semiskilled jobs (Greenberg 23-24). In Manhattan,

26

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

nearly 70 percent of black women worked in domestic and personal ser
vices. After leaving Naxos, Helga confronts the same repressive strictures
of a racist and sexist division of labor in Chicago. She despairs when she
realizes that, as an educated and skilled black woman worker, she cannot
find employment without references for domestic service. An unwanted
commodity in a bad economy, Helga “felt the smallness of her commercial
value” (35).

But the question of Helga’s “commercial value” is not limited to the
workplace. Hazel Carby aptly notes, “As a woman, she is at the center of
a complex process of exchange. Money was crucial to Larsen’s narrative,
structuring power relations, controlling social movement, and defining
the boundaries of Helga’s environment” (172). As a mulatta, Helga has a
double symbolic value in this process of exchange, especially for men: her
light skin bestows respectability, and her blackness signifies hypersexuality.

Her value to men oscillates accordingly. As James Vayle becomes increas
ingly assimilated to Naxos and its mission to serve primarily the white
bourgeoisie, his discomfort with her “racially” scandalous origins and
“lack of acquiescence” (7) with the Naxos machine grows, making her
less than an ideal marriage partner. But he doesn’t break off his engage

ment with her, because he finds her “ancient [sexual] appeal” (8) useful.
Similarly, Robert Anderson insults her by incorrectly assuming that a
respectable family background imparted to her “dignity and breeding”
and “good stock” (21), which makes her a valuable asset to Naxos, but
once she proves an unsuitable “marriage” partner for the hypocritical
educational institution, he also treats her as a sexual object, in this case at
Travenor’s party. Not surprisingly, she “savagely slap[s]” (108) Anderson,
which not only punishes him for making her feel “belittled and ridiculed”
but also repays the symbolic slap she felt when devalued at the employ
ment agency in Chicago (33). And, of course, she resists being objectified
as a “decoration,” a “curio,” a “peacock” (73) as a means of “advancing
the social fortunes of the Dahls of Copenhagen” (68) and fulfilling the
sexual needs and narcissism of Axel Olsen. Indeed, Helga experiences

Axel Olsen’s desire to possess her as akin to being reduced to chattel. She
tells him, “I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t

at all care to be owned” (87). His painting of her underscores how he
replicates the racist fantasy about black women as jezebels or, as Helga
puts it, “some disgusting sexual creature” (89). Her refusal of his marriage
proposal parallels her resignation from the college: both actions seek a

27

Anthony Dawahare

way out of the stifling social roles defined for women, particularly black
or mulatta women.

Yet it may be difficult for some readers to see Helga mainly as a com
modified subject trying to dodge her class enemies. After all, she seems
so bourgeois.While staying at Anne Gray’s middle-class house in Harlem,
she thinks to herself:

Some day she planned to marry one of those alluring brown or
yellow men who danced attendance on her. Already financially
successful, any one of them could give to her the things which
she had come now to desire, a home like Anne’s, cars of expen
sive makes such as lined the avenue, clothes and furs from Bend
el’s and Revillon Freres’, servants, and leisure. (45)

Given the racialization of class, the lighter pigmentation of these pro
spective mates is also suggestive of Helga’s upward ambitions. In another
passage we read that on arriving in Copenhagen, “She took to luxury as
the proverbial duck to water” (67) and realizes that ever since childhood
“she had wanted, not money, but the things which money could give,
leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things.” Indeed,

many of her desires are bourgeois and remain so until the final tragic
page of the novel.

But it is precisely the contradiction betwveen her ahenated, cornmodi
fied self and her bourgeois desires that makes this novel so interesting.

While she takes flight from debilitating relationships in Naxos, Chicago,
Harlem, and Copenhagen, Helga does not escape the reified mode of
thinking integral to racism. Her conceptualization of her problems and
their solutions replicates the ways the economies of slavery and capitalism
produced racial ideologies that took physical qualities-genitalia, hair tex
ture, skin coloring, skull size as indicators of a human being’s economic
function and market value. As Emmanuel Wallerstein puts it, “What we

mean by racism is that set of ideological statements combined with that
set of social practices which have had the consequence of maintaining a
high correlation of ethnicity and work-force allocation over time” (78).
The reification of black people (itself an ideological trope [Gates 1579]),
as “naturally” fit to be slaves, domestics, unskilled workers, etc. is the great
est consequence of what I refer to as racial reification. Racial reification
transforms a social relation between the capitalist/slaveholding class and
a section of the working class into a relation between ontological beings

28

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

conceptualized as “whites” and “blacks” (or related concepts, such as Cau
casian and Negro).’ Larsen’s protagonist has internalized this transforma
tion of an economic category-black labor value-into a metaphysical
concept-black value. Simply put, for her, black means poor, enslaved,
and despised and white means wealthy, free, and loved. Larsen’s choice of
Hughes’s poem “Cross” as an epigraph for the novel reveals this reification
of color at the outset. The poem associates dying in a “shack” with being
“black,” and dying in a “fine big house” with being “white.” As a mulatta,

Helga is hung on this “cross”: she is too optically black to pass for white
and therefore cannot escape the black/shack or black/worker equations.

Crucially, at the root of Helga’s ambivalence about her black identity
is a social system predicated on multilevel class inequalities. Her recurring
sense of entrapment is certainly well founded, since the social quicksand
into which she sinks is that of a Jim Crow America whose class, color, and
gender lines extend from South to North. E. Franklin Frazier documents
the ways in which restrictive covenants among white property owners,
landlords, realtors, and the Federal Housing Authority during the 1920s
resulted in the segregation of the waves of Southern black migrants into
select Northern neighborhoods such as Chicago’s South Side and Har
lem (260). Such segregation gave landlords the opportunity to raise rents,
neglect maintenance, and as Cheryl Greenberg puts it, hold “black tenants
essentially captive” (29). On top of legal segregation and discrimination
in the North, racist whites periodically enforced color and class lines
through violent actions from riots to lynchings. “Lines of segregation
actually hardened in the 20s,” Greenberg contends (15).

In Harlem, which Locke dubbed the New Negro “Mecca,” social
conditions were particularly oppressive. Gilbert Osofsky identifies the
1920s as the decade in which Harlem became a slum (135). High rents,
low wages, and overcrowding led to a variety of problems such as poverty,
illness, and premature death. Between 1923 and 1927, Osofsky notes,

Harlem’s death rate, for all causes, was 42 percent in excess of the
entire city.Twice as many Harlem mothers died in childbirth as
did mothers in other districts…. Infant mortality in Harlem …
was 111 per thousand live births; for the city, 64.5. (141)

Post-World War I America was a hard and highly dangerous place for
millions of black Americans.

These conditions and their ideological justifications propel Helga to

29

Anthony Dawahare

flee from the black working class and, just as importantly, from being as
sociated with the black working class. By identifying with the bourgeoisie,
she tries to break the signifying chain that links her to the black working
class, a response typical of the black middle-to-upper classes interested
in maintaining respectability in a white world (Frazier 287, 299). This is

why she dislikes race talk among her Naxos colleagues, Harlem friends,
and Copenhagen relatives and acquaintances. As she thinks in Harlem be
fore embarking for Copenhagen, “Why … should she be yoked to these
despised black folk” (55). And in Copenhagen, seduced by the wealth
and attention she receives, Helga vows never to return to America. She
is charmed by the working-class district in Copenhagen, which was free
from “that untidiness and squalor which she remembered as the accom
paniment of poverty in Chicago, NewYork, and the Southern cities of
America” (75); in her frame of reference, it appears bourgeois. And shortly
after she receives Anne’s letter announcing her marriage to Dr. Anderson,
Helga muses on what would have became of her if she had never left
Harlem and instead married Anderson herself. She would be “Working
everyday of [her] life. Chattering about the race problem” (81).Were she
to return to America, her fate would be that of other

Negroes [who] were allowed to be beggars only, of life, of happi
ness, of security … where if one had Negro blood, one mustn’t
expect money, education, or, sometimes, even work whereby one

might earn one’s bread. (82)

And yet Helga cannot escape the reification of blackness. She is estranged
from her color, which, as Georg Lucacs notes of estranged and com

modified human activity and attributes in general, “must go its own way
independently of [her] just like any consumer article” (87).Thus the black
consumer article” resurfaces in a Copenhagen vaudeville house with the

face of black minstrelsy, stirring shame and a sense of betrayal that her
white family and acquaintances had been “invited to look upon some
thing in her which she had hidden away and wanted to forget” (83)-the
semiotics ofAmerican racism.

Perhaps Helga’s most desperate attempt to free herself from class/racial
crucifixion is her marriage to a Southern reverend, Mr. Pleasant Green,

whose name evokes a kind of utopian fantasy and the bourgeois value of
marrying for money. The marriage is a way of finally consummating her
sexual desires without feeling,belittled or somehow beneath her husband.

30

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

Described as unrefined and unattractive (he is “fattish yellow” [115], “rat
tish yellow” [118], and has dirty fingernails [121]), Green does not initially

make her feel inferior in terms of her class background and race. In other
words, Helga ensconces herself in his Southern working-class community
as a way to escape the reifying gaze of both racist whites and bourgeois
blacks, who made her feel black and poor. Her attempt to identify with
Green and his flock is, in essence, motivated by the same racist attitudes
as her identification with the bourgeoisie: her desire not to be perceived
by people as the inferior black working-class other.

Helga’s marriage to Green does not overcome her internalized rac
ism. Sex with this black working-class man only temporarily gives her an
“anaesthetic satisfaction for her senses” (118). Before long, she wants to
bourgeoisify her home and female neighbors. Her fear of being identified
with the black working class reasserts itself in her attempt to conceal the
poverty, class status, and racialization of black women, especially when she
counsels the women not to wear the racially and class-coded sunbon
nets or aprons on Sundays because, one can assume, they would look like
domestics-too conventionally black (119). She does not transcend the
racial ideology that Hughes describes as deeply rooted in the minds of
the black middle class:

the word white comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the
virtues. It holds for the children [of the black bourgeoisie] beau
ty, morality, and money. The whisper of “I want to be white”
runs silently through their minds. (Voices 306)

Not surprisingly, her contempt for the black working class grows
when she fails to uplift her neighbors and she herself becomes increas
ingly proletarianized. She must perform more and more domestic work
in exchange for her sexual satisfaction-another economic transac
tion-especially when she has children. Helga comes to view the labor
“cost” (116) (to use her own metaphor) of having a sex life as an unequal
exchange, since she must pay dearly with her body–the double labor of
producing children and maintaining a well-kept home. Having reached
her final crisis, Helga thinks to herself, “She had ruined her life…. She
had, to put it as brutally as anyone could, been a fool…. And she had
paid for it. Enough. More than enough” (133).This sense of paying too

much-a repetition of her observation on the novel’s first page that she
“gave willingly and unsparingly of herself with no apparent return”

31

Anthony Dawahare

grounds the realization that she has not succeeded in escaping her “fate”
as a black woman. She too is exploited.

As the economic boundaries between herself and her black neighbors
erode, she redoubles the ideological boundary by blaming them for their
subjugation. “She hated their raucous laughter, their stupid acceptance
of things, and their unfailing trust in ‘de Lawd”‘ (134). She especially
criticizes their belief in a compensatory afterlife, in the “sweet promises
of mansions in the sky by and by … Pie in the sky.” Instead of extend
ing her recognition of injustice against herself to the other black women
of her class, she plans her escape and lapses into an “easy and pleasant”
reverie about “freedom and cities, about clothes and books, about the
sweet smell of Houbigant and cigarettes in softly lighted rooms filled with
inconsequential chatter and laughter and sophisticated tuneless music”
(135)-a dream she will attain “by and by.” Larsen here makes explicit
the nature of Helga’s interpellation: freedom is defined as possessing com

modities and attending inconsequential social gatherings.This bourgeois
fantasy-where “softly lighted rooms” obscure the horrors of exploitation,
sexism, and racism, where class contradictions vanish in puffs of cigarette
smoke, and where “sophisticated tuneless [white] music” replaces the

weary blues-is Helga’s response to history. Significantly, her bourgeois
fantasies precisely echo the religious fantasies of the black working-class
characters: seeking places free from the ravages of racism and capitalism,
both imagine “mansions in the sky by and by.” In Helga’s dream, freedom
for the commodified worker is to be the white commodity purchaser

with unlimited cash. It is the dream to possess “Things. Things. Things”
instead of being counted as a thing, the hope of being an eternal con
sumer rather than the exploited producer.

Passing through the money economy
In Passing Larsen addresses Luk’acs’s seminal question about the capacity
of “the commodity structure to penetrate society in all its aspects and to
remould it in its own image” (85) by depicting characters whose identities
approximate the money form of the commodity. Here money is not just
a means of and imaginary escape from commodification but also shapes
the most fetishistic form of black identity-the passer for white.

To be sure, the influence of the money economy on racial identifica
tion also operates in Quicksand, where Larsen first establishes the mon

32

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

etization of color, depicting African Americans in a spectrum of colors,
with lighter skin embodying higher value. “Marveling at the gradations
within this oppressed race of hers,” Helga notes,

There was a sooty black, shiny black, taupe, mahogany,
bronze, copper, gold, orange, yellow, peach, ivory, pinky white,
pastry white…. Africa, Europe, perhaps a pinch of Asia, in a fan
tastic motley of ugliness and beauty, semibarbaric, sophisticated,
exotic, were here. (59-60)

While the gradations do not correspond exactly to a hierarchy of racial
value, the description of skin colors moves from “sooty black” to “pastry
white,” corresponding to the movement from Africa to Europe, from
“ugliness” to “beauty,” and from the “semibarbaric” to the “sophisticated,
exotic.” Moreover, the color spectrum here encodes the economic ori
gins of racial value. The “sooty” blackness suggests industrial production,
associating a besotted working class with ugliness and semibarbarism. In
contrast, “pastry white” evokes a “higher” class associated with Europe,
beauty, and sophistication.We have here, in other words, the reification of
color in relation to the social relations of capitalism. This passage helps to

clarify why Helga associates blackness with dirt, labor, and barbarism.
An association of gold with whiteness and thus with value is central

to the depiction of major characters in both novels. Quicksand’s Helga
has “skin like yellow satin” and is “radiant” (2), and this gilded mulatta has
bourgeois desires and tastes, from oriental silks to expensive cars and furs,
all of a piece in her imagination. Similarly, the financially independent

Anne Grey, though not a mulatta, has the “face of a golden Madonna”
(45) and a bourgeois “aesthetic sense” (44). Her “brownly beautiful” (45)

but “golden” face suggests that gold has the power to “make black white,”
as Timon ofAthens says in the epigraph to this essay (and as Marx quotes
in Capital 229).

The association of whiteness with money in its golden incarnation
is especially plain in the depiction of the mulatta protagonist of Passing,

Clare Kendry. Irene, for example, reflects on Clare’s appearance at a Negro
Welfare League dance:

Clare, exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting, in a stately gown of
shining black taffeta, whose long, full skirt lay in graceful folds
about her slim golden feet; her glistening hair drawn smoothly

33

Anthony Dawahare

back into a twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like
dark jewels. (203)

“Golden,” “shining,” “glistening,” Clare is depicted more as a fetish-re
plete with jewels for eyes-than a human being. Her name, a variant of
clear, is etymologically associated with “brightly shining” and “brilliant,”
two qualities of gold; and from Irene’s. perspective, even her laugh is akin
to “the ringing of a delicate bell fashioned of a precious metal” (151).
Perhaps her literary prototype is The Great Gatsby’s Daisy, the “golden
girl” with a “voice full of money” (127).6

As a fetish, Clare’s value seems both clear and, as Irene notes, “mys
terious and concealing” (161). She appears intrinsically valuable, but she
conceals her family origins in the working class. Her white father was a
janitor; as a child she worked as an errand girl for a dressmaker, and later,
after her father’s death in a saloon fight, as a domestic for her white rela
tives. Clare also learns from her white adoptive aunts that her role in the
division of labor is to be a worker, one of the “daughters of Ham” con
demned “to sweat” doing “hard labor” (159). As a light-skinned mulatta,
she can opt out of the black working class by passing for white.

Like money itself, Clare’s whiteness/golden appearance bears no trace
of the social relations between black and white workers in the division of
labor at the basis of the creation of wealth in America. In other words, the
dazzling figure of Clare conceals not only her class background but also
the exploitation of labor in general and black labor in particular. “There
is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document
of barbarism,” notes Walter Benjamin (256). It is no wonder that, as her
racist husband notes, Clare “wouldn’t have a nigger maid around her for
love or money” (172), presumably because she would be a remiinder of
the barbarism of the racist labor division.

Like money, which needs to “possess the same uniform quality …
[and to be] divisible at will” (Marx 184), Clare’s identity is based on ab
straction. Her white body is remarkable not because of its particularity but
because it functions socially as an abstract symbol of value. She is able to
pass because white people symbolically”possess the same uniform quality”
and whiteness itself (as an ideological trope) is “divisible at will” without
reducing its value. Similarly, regardless of the variety of social, political, and
cultural factors definitive of human identity, black people are abstracted
as a race. But if both whiteness and blackness are abstracted, it is only

34

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

the abstraction of whiteness that functions as the signifier of money.The
black/worker equation forecloses the signification of blackness with the
product of labor under capitalism, namely, capital. Only whiteness signifies
wealth, since the bourgeoisie have historically and mainly been white in
America and have had the power to disseminate the derogatory fictions
of color that function to pit black and white workers against each other.
The whiteness/wealth equation elides, of course, the exploitation of the
white working class and white poverty, but it is precisely this elision that
allows Helga and Clare to assume that whiteness is like money.

Put another way, Clare resists the commodification of blackness by
undergoing the metamorphosis of the commodity into its money form.
“In the money-form,” Marx notes, “all commodities look alike” (204).
Clare conceals her relative form of value, her depreciated black body, and
assumes the equivalent form of value, that is, the money form.This allows
her to attain the highest form of commodity fetishism: she becomes the
symbol that appears to have intrinsic, not relative, value. She becomes the
universal equivalent of value associated with whiteness that functions as
the measure of all things-money.

Passing is a way to circulate like money, to become acceptable ev
erywhere. It allows Clare to transgress the color line to acquire more
of those “Things. Things. Things” that Helga hoped would displace the
social significance of her blackness. And as a money fetish, Clare is said to
pass from hand to hand and make everyone feel the richer-at least for
a while. At the Negro Welfare League dance, we get “glimpses of Clare

in the whirling crowd, sometimes dancing with a white man, more of
ten with a Negro” (204). At Irene’s tea party, Clare is the prized money
commodity that Felise Freeland wants to take home. Echoing the general
perception of Clare as a desirable commodity, Felise tells Irene, “I want
her for a party. Isn’t she stunning today?” (220).

Clare’s power to activate the white/bourgeois fantasies of her friends
and acquaintances is so compelling as even to disarm the otherwise criti
cal Brian, Irene’s husband, who apparently falls in love with Clare. AWorld

War I veteran bitter over the US government’s broken promises of free
dom and democracy in the “hellish place” of America (232), Brian finds
in Clare a way to live beyond the color line without moving to Brazil.

Through her he lives a fantasy where being black is not restrictive, and
the black man is the desired object of the white female. Brian’s attraction
to Clare follows the logic outlined by Frantz Fanon on “the man of color

35

Anthony Dawahare

and the white woman”: “By loving me she proves that I am worthy of
white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man” (63).

Irene, of course, is the character most affected by what Judith Butler
calls Clare’s transgressive “risk-taking,’ which “alternately entrances Irene
and fuels her moral condemnation of Clare with renewed ferocity” (169).
Indeed, the radiance of Clare’s money character-its social desirability
and ability to circulate freely-is so powerful that it consistently obscures
her real character: her extreme self-centeredness (Passing 210). “It’s funny
about ‘passing,”‘ Irene notes. “We disapprove of it and at the same time
condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it” (185-86).
So when Irene makes up her mind to break off her relationship with her
old friend who is “just a shade too good looking”(198), she loses her
determination on seeing her, as if mesmerized:

Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden
inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling. Reaching out, she
grasped Clare’s two hands in her own and cried with something
like awe in her voice: “Dear God! But aren’t you lovely, Clare!”

(194)

Deborah McDowell identifies this and other passages as expressive of
Irene’s vaguely conscious homosexual attraction to Clare. Her queer af

fections are “inexplicable” since they are unexplainable in terms of the
heterosexual and bourgeois values Irene otherwise fights to protect (xxvi
xxvii).While Irene’s attraction to Clare can be viewed as homosexual, it is
also indicative of the ways in which the embodiments of economic value
are objects of libidinal investment by both male and female subjects in
bourgeois society. Money is sexy in both Quicksand and Passing, and its
possessor is the object of general desire. Irene also grasps Clare, one may
add, because Clare stimulates her own boundless acquisitiveness.Yet Clare,
as the idealized object, activates Irene’s desire to despoil her as well: what
the envious Irene wants but cannot have, she shall destroy.

Irene’s relationship with Clare also underscores the ways in which
passing is a “hazardous business” (157), and not only because it is a form
of counterfeit circulation that may reveal the “dirty Nigger” (238) under
neath the gold leaf.7 More importantly, Clare’s passing for white within
the Redfield home reinforces the devaluation of Irene’s already com

modified blackness. Whiteness as the universal equivalent makes Irene
recognize her relative form of value in relation to Clare. Irene grows

36

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

increasingly dissatisfied with her black middle-class life, for example, when

her friend comes back into her life. She begins to see that her own desire
for “security of place and substance” (190) comes at a cost to her ability
to feel and live life more deeply (195). Even before the suspicion of her

husband’s affair with Clare dawns on her, Irene intuits the logic of the
racist marketplace of human value, where a black woman is worth less
than a white woman. Thus, while expressing her dissatisfaction that her

husband has invited Clare to the tea party and noting that he is uncon

cerned about her view of the matter, Irene thinks, “his gaze was on her,

but in it there was some quality that made her feel that at that moment
she was no more to him than a pane of glass through which he stared. At

what? She didn’t know, couldn’t [yet] guess” (216). Irene’s image conjures

up “the shop-windows [that] threw out a blinding radiance” (146) that

she peers into on her visit to Chicago; she experiences herself as the shop
window through which her husband peers at the “hot” commodity of
Clare, whose golden color throws out a radiance that blinds Brian as well
as others. And once she understands the source of her feelings, she is un

certain whether or not “she had ever truly known love” (235). She comes
to realize that “she didn’t count. She was, to him, only the mother of his
sons.That was all.Alone she was nothing.Worse.An obstacle” (221).8

After this realization, Irene wants to restore the security of her

middle-class home and marriage by taking Clare out of circulation. She

hopes that Clare’s fear of discovery or divorce from her wealthy white
husband will constrain her. (Significantly, Clare’s husband, John Bellew,
made his fortune digging gold in South America and maintains it as an
international banking agent.) She toys with the idea of informing on

Clare as a way of getting rid of her, but decides to keep Bellew ignorant
of his wife’s racial identity; knowledge of Clare’s “counterfeit” identity
would result in divorce, thus freeing her to circulate as she wished.

As she grows increasingly desperate, however, Irene fantasizes about

taking Clare off the market by killing her.”If Clare should die!” Irene re

flects, “Then-Oh, it was vile! To think, yes, to wish that! … the thought
stayed with her” (228). This murderous wish is fulfilled at a party, the

symbolic marketplace of the novel, where Clare (once again) is depicted
as a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold” (239). As Jacquelyn

McLendon notes (108), Irene rehearses her murder of Clare by opening
the window, throwing out the butt of her cigarette, and “watching the

tiny sparks drop slowly down to the white ground below” (Larsen 238).

37

Anthony Dawahare

Added to the novel’s constellation of images for Clare-gold, yellow,
fire-are these sparks. Significantly, both the sparks and Clare “drop,”just
as Irene, Clare’s competitor for Brian, had previously dropped in value.

After fainting from realizing the horror of her action, then, Irene is “dimly
conscious” of what we assume are Brian’s “strong arms lifting her up”
(242).Thus the novel ends when Irene takes Clare out of circulation as a

way of raising her own (black) value for Brian.
Irene’s disposing of the white fetish in no way means that her prob

lems are over, any more than Helga’s move to a Southern black commu
nity solves her dilemma. In Larsen’s work the commodification of black
women and the reification of race under capitalism seem inescapable: the
sought-after transcendence of racism through bourgeois identification is
itself based on capitalist premises. Needless to say, her mulattas’ motives are
rooted in the existence of an exploited black working class. One cannot,
Larsen suggests, be bourgeois like those always-rich white people who die
in “big fine house[s]” without a working class to produce all those fine
houses. From this perspective, Helga, Clare, and Irene evade the inherent
social relations of capitalism by wanting the impossible: to be black yet in
no way associated with the exploited black working class, and when this
fails, to escape racism by becoming bourgeois/white.

Larsen’s critical portrayal of racial categorization and politics as in

separable from the money economy is unparalleled in the New Negro
Renaissance. Unlike so many of her contemporaries who were inmmersed
in the racialist and ethnic nationalist discourses of the post-World War I
period, she was able to see both race pride and old-fashioned racism as
idolatrous, since both worship what is social and historical-race itself-as
if it were a metaphysical reality. Her likening of race thinking to fetishism,
and fetishism to the Gold Standard, situates her closer to the proletarian

writers of the 1930s, for whom race was an “old myth” generated by
capitalism (Hughes, “Too Much” 102-03).Thus, the most radical implica
tion of Quicksand and Passing is that the money economy itself must be
abolished before its reifying ideologies and practices can come to an end.

While some readers misrecognize and dismiss such an implication as ex
cessively pessimistic, I see in Larsen a social critic whose work challenges
the hollow optimism of bourgeois reformism and its race talkers.

38

The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing

Notes
1. See also Owen and Randolph. For an extended analysis of competing politi
cal definitions of the New Negro,

see Dawahare, Foley, and Maxwell.

2. In The Souls of Black Folk, for example, Du Bois hypostatizes black identity
with claims to a “Negro blood” and “soul” generative of “innate love of har

mony and beauty” and “a message for the world” (39). His 1897 essay “The

Conservation of Races,” now included in the Blight and Gooding-Williams
edition of The Souls of Black Folk (1997), explicitly endorses nineteenth-cen

tury pseudoscientific
race theories. For a discussion of Du Bois’s essentialism,

see Sundquist.

3.1 use mulatta only by default, since its origins and meaning stem from racist,

biologically determinist conceptions of human identity imported by the Span
ish conquistadors and subsequently adopted by American slaveholders. Biracial

does little to correct this, since it frequently
assumes that race is somehow

biological.

4.1 am drawing on Georg Luk?cs’s theory of reification.

5. Jules-Marcel Monnerot,
a
Martiniquan surrealist writer, comments indirectly

on a similar reifying process that converts economic relations and values into

moral values as a way to dominate blacks under French rule:

Shake the principle notions of bourgeois morality and you hear the

jangle of money
… all the words expressing these notions ALSO

have?or have had?a mercantile and financial sense … DUTY means

DEBT, a perfectly Christian notion of a debt man has never finished

repaying. This duty, which primarily profits the holder of obligations, is

itself called OBLIGATION. Its fulfillment, the ethical manual tells us,
confers a VALUE on the subject…. Put obligation, value and good in

the plural and you immediately see what is going on. (61)

6.1 thank James Smethurst for calling my attention to the parallel between

Daisy’s and Clare’s moneyed voices.

7. Of course, the unchallenged assumption is that the authentic self of the

mulatta is black, and passing for white is dissimulation. Thus Irene doesn’t tell

John Bellew that his wife is black out of “race loyalty” (255). She could logi

cally have come to the opposite conclusion: the mulatta should tell John out of

white race loyalty.

8. Passing is
a precursor to that other short masterpiece of the Harlem Re

naissance, Zora Neale Hurston’s “The Gilded Six-Bits,” which depicts the

39

Anthony Dawahare

corrosive effects of money (as a fetishization of bourgeois whiteness) on re

lationships?from Joe Banks’s ritual of “chunkin”‘ silver dollars at his wife to

Otis D. Slemmons’s own “chunkin”‘ of gilded coins at Missie May.

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• Issue Table of Contents

Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Spring, 2006), pp. 1-110
Front Matter
Essays
Truth, Reconciliation, and the Restoration of the State: Coetzee’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” [pp. 1-21]
The Gold Standard of Racial Identity in Nella Larsen’s “Quicksand and Passing” [pp. 22-41]
Jokes, Fiction, and Lorrie Moore [pp. 42-60]
“Bitched”: Feminization, Identity, and the Hemingwayesque in “The Sun Also Rises” [pp. 61-91]
Reviews
Review: The Négritude Renaissance [pp. 92-95]
Review: Recovering Empire’s Critics [pp. 96-105]
Review: Translating the Dreamers of China [pp. 106-110]
Back Matter