Nella Larsen (3 page)

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

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

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

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

Contrary to many of the writers above, my own analysis will strategically recenter race in order to demonstrate precisely how Larsen's novel critiques and embraces the notion of race as an essentialist constuction. From a critical perspective, what seems clear, as Jennifer Brody and Ann duCille suggest, is that Larsen's simultaneous engagement with the interarticulations of race, class, gender, and sexuality ultimately produces a text whose horizon of meaning must inevitably exceed any univocal reading.
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Larsen takes as her subject middle-class black women who, like the author herself, often discover themselves marginalized by their mulatta, or biracial, status. And although most critics now agree that Larsen's novel reflects Irene Redfield's rather than Clare Kendry's story, Clare, like her creator, has remained something of an enigma for the reader. Yet Clare Kendry has little in common with earlier nineteenth-century portraits of the tragic mulatta. And while Clare as mulatta may indeed function as a “narrative device of mediation” (Hazel Carby) or “rhetorical device” (Ann duCille), Larsen refuses her character the sentimental incarnation of the tragic mulatta whose plight necessarily enlists the sympathy of the reader.
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Further, unlike the mulatto characters of earlier abolitionist and black protest fiction, Clare is devoid of race consciousness, expressing neither commitment nor solidarity to race. (Rather, it is Irene who is identified as the “race woman” by virtue of her discourse on “race uplift.”). Although humorously fashioning herself as “deserter,” Clare manifests neither signs of racial self-hatred nor a deep-seated desire to be white. And while it is true that Clare ultimately expresses boredom and disillusionment with her “pale existence,” her story fails to conform to the convention of the tragic mulatta who typically experiences guilt and remorse resulting from racial “desertion” or “abandonment.” As Irene later describes her,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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