Nella Larsen (2 page)

Contemporary critics have not only noted the popularity of the passing plot, especially during the Harlem Renaissance, but have further emphasized the social and political function of the passing narrative. Commenting on the irony of passing as a “major theme of the 1920s when race pride was supposedly at a peak,” feminist critic Barbara Christian argues that this form, in fact, “heightened the white audience's awareness of the restrictions imposed upon talented blacks who then found it necessary to become white in order to fulfill themselves.” Christian also observes that in the African American version of the passing novel, “the passer is often a woman who believes that through marriage to a wealthy white man, she might gain economic security and more freedom of mobility.”
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Christian's particular focus on the role of the “
mulatta,
” and the significance of gender, sex, and marriage in a domestic plot en-framed by a larger social narrative of patriarchy, as we shall see, would constitute key elements of feminist analysis by contemporary critics of Nella Larsen's
Passing.

Locating the “passing” novel within his cultural and political narrative of nationalism and assimilation, critic Robert Bone defines the “attack upon passing” by the “Rear Guard” of the Harlem Renaissance as an “affirmation of race loyalty,” and thus a “manifestation of . . . nationalism.” Bone argues that “if the act of passing is an expression of assimilation carried to its logical conclusion, then surely a novel which condemns passing must have nationalist implications.” For Bone, then, the passing novel represents, “in psychological terms, a symbolic rejection of the author's unconscious desire to be white”—a fictional projection whose repudiation “fortifies . . . racial loyalty against the threat from within.”
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On the other hand, Amritjit Singh maintains that the appearance of so many passing novels during the twenties is “evidence of [the] predominantly middle-class orientation” of the Harlem Renaissance novelists. In support of this class narrative, Singh cites Claude McKay's claim in
Banjo
(1929) that “passing white” was a “common [topic] of colored intelligentsia” but had little meaning or relevance for lower-class blacks. Explaining the attraction of the modernist passing novel for Harlem Renaissance writers, Singh observes the double move of this genre: “[A]t one level there is an attempt to delineate a dimension of culture and values which the middle class shared with the white American. At the same time, these novels inform white readers that middle-class blacks have no intention or desire to relinquish the joy and abandon of black life for the dullness of the white bourgeoisie.”
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What Singh identifies here is a contradictory narrative impulse that negotiates between an ideology of universalism at the level of national culture and an ethos of particularism at the level of lived racial experience.

Not only do Bone and Singh affirm the logic of racial difference implicit in passing, but both emphasize the passing novel's narrative trajectory as one of return, or “homecoming,” deriving from a sense of the subject's racial allegiance and/or affinity. What is less clear in their analyses, but more evident in the novels, is that it is precisely the social construction of identity, often due to advantages of class and culture, that allows the passing subject to cross into the “white” world, while a more essentialist notion of identity, based on atavistic “yearnings” or racial fealty, inevitably returns this character to the racial fold. Thus, while the logic of passing would seem, on the one hand, to subvert the logic of racial difference, it seems, on the other, paradoxically, to affirm a racial or cultural essence that has the effect of naturalizing difference. Not unlike other narratives of passing, Larsen's novel, as we shall see, expresses this tension between social constructionism and the competing narrative of essentialism that has engaged postmodern discourse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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