Nella Larsen (6 page)

Clare's successful passing from one “essence” (“blackness”) to another diametrically opposed “essence” (“whiteness”) demonstrates, finally, that these so-called essences are not biological but socially constructed. Larsen's artistic achievement lies in the narrative performance of her refutation of essentialism. She does not challenge the presuppositions of essentialism either morally, philosophically, or scientifically; rather through the performativity of her narrative, she presents a reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position. As author, Larsen imagines a position that her narrative demonstrates to entail an absurdity. In other words, the presumption of essentialism would make it impossible for one to switch “essences.” It is precisely the successful performance of passing that would render such a presumption absurd.

Just as Irene, in the final scene, sinks into unconsciousness and later, a memory gap, Clare falls into a kind of metaphysical gap. Clare's fall into a metaphysical hole has its counterpart in both the textual “holes” as well as the “holes” in Irene's memory. Such a conclusion can only confirm that there exists no place in the realm of essentialist being for Clare's continued existence; she possesses no ontological claim in the world of essentialized modernity.

Notes

1. See James de Jongh's
Vicious Modernism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

2. Werner Sollors,
Neither Black Nor White Yet Both
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 247–48.

3. Rita Felski,
The Gender of Modernity
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 13.

4. Arthur Davis, for instance, speculates that “the present-day reader may wonder at this morbid concern . . . with the passing theme” (
From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900–1960
[Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974], 6). This sentiment is shared by Amritjit Singh, Hoyt Fuller, and other earlier critics of the genre.

5. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1929); also cited in Hoyt Fuller's Introduction, Nella Larsen,
Passing
(New York: Collier Books, 1971), 13.

6. According to Gayle Wald, the “postpassing” narratives “[articulate] collective values of pride in the ‘Negro' identity and [challenge] the social and economic pressures that promote passing as an ‘alternative' to racial segregation.” Gayle Wald, Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S.
Literature and Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 119.

7. See Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen's
Passing:
A Problem of Interpretation,”
Black American Literary Forum
(Winter 1980), 146.

8. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis (1928); also cited in Hiroko Sato, “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen,” in
Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays,
Arna Bontemps, ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1972).

9. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis ( July 1929), 234; also cited in Fuller.

10. Robert Bone,
The Negro Novel in America
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958; revised 1965), 102.

11. Fuller, 18.

12. Sato, 88, 89.

13. Nathan Irvin Huggins,
Harlem Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 157, 159.

14. David Levering Lewis,
When Harlem Was in Vogue
(New York: Knopf, 1981; Oxford University Press, 1989), 231.

15. George Hutchinson, “Subject to Disappearance: Interracial Identity in Nella Larsen's
Quicksand,
” in Genevieve Fabre and Michel Feith,
Temples for Tomorrow: Looking Back at the Harlem
Renaissance
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

16. Cheryl A. Wall,
Women of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 132.

17. See Charles R. Larson,
Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella
Larsen
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 86, and Thadious M. Davis,
Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance:A Woman's Life Unveiled
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994). Arthur Davis describes Larsen's first novel as “a moving story,” although “not as good a novel as Quicksand,” 97. Critic Bernard Bell regards Quicksand as “structurally . . . the better of [Larsen's] two novels” (
The Afro-AmericanNovel and Its Tradition
[Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987], 110). And although questioning the grounds of earlier evaluations of
Passing,
Mary Mabel Youman does not “quarrel with the overall [critical] judgment” that ranks Larsen's second novel “inferior” to her first.

18. Gayle Wald aptly deploys this term.

19. This is the second version of William Wells Brown's
Clotel, or,
the President's Daughter
(1853), which is currently regarded as the first novel published by an African American.

20. See David Kirkpatrick's account, “On Long-Lost Pages, a Female Slave's Voice” (
The New York Times,
Nov. 11, 2001), which provides the account of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s remarkable “discovery” of this volume.

21. Werner Sollors speculates that “[t]he first American instances in which the word ‘passing' was used to signify ‘crossing the color line' would seem to have appeared in notices concerning runaway slaves, and the term ‘passing'—first for ‘free,' and then for (its larger part-synonym) ‘white'—may have entered American fiction through the citing of such bills,” 255.

22. Caleb Johnson, “Crossing the Color Line,”
Outlook and Independent
158 (Aug. 26, 1931): 526; also cited in Sollors, 245.

23. Walter White, “Why I Remain a Negro,”
The Saturday Reviewof Literature,
Oct. 22, 1947; quoted in Amritjit Singh,
The
Novels of the Harlem Renaissance: Twelve Black Writers, 1923–
1933
(University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press), 92.

24. Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and
Modern Democracy
(New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1944), 683, 688.

25. Sterling Brown,
The Negro in American Fiction
(1937; reprint, New York: Atheneum, 1969), 142.

26. See José Esteban Muñoz,
Disidentification: Queers of Color and the
Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).

27. Barbara Christian,
Black Women Novelists: The Development of a
Tradition, 1892–1976
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 44, 45.

28. Bone, 98.

29. Singh, 93.

30. Donald Goellnicht, “Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,
”
African-AmericanReview
30.1 (1996), 19.

31. Examples of works by such southern writers include Thomas Dixon's
The Clansmen
(1905) and
The Leopard's Spots
(1902), and Thomas Nelson Page's
Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction
(1898).

32. David Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of
the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991); also cited in Ruth Frankenberg,
Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and
Cultural Criticism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 10.

33. Sollors, 260.

34. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in
Critical Race Theory:
The Key Writings That Formed the Movement,
Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1996), 278.

35. Ibid.

36. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,”
Raritan
8.2 (1988), 57.

37. Joel Williamson,
New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the
United States
(New York: Free Press, 1980), 98.

38. Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of fingerprinting techniques, began his project in an attempt to discover an indicator of “Race and Temperament” in the character and patterns of fingerprints. Josiah C. Nott, in his Two Lectures on the Natural His
toryof the Caucasian and Negro Races
(1844), moved from the scriptural evocation of the curse of Ham to a biological argument for racial difference that was based on a theory of polygenesis. Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who developed his racial ideas in 1863, is widely acknowledged as one of the major formulators of “scientistic racism.” See Sollors, 157, 109, 131.

39. Drawing out the implications of British philosopher J. L. Austin's work on performative utterances, contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler postulate the performativity of identities constructed through practices of citationality and iterability. “Performativity,” Judith Butler argues, “consists in a reiteration of norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken as the fabrication of the performer's ‘will' or ‘choice.' ” For Butler, then, “The reduction of performativity to performance would be a mistake.” ( Judith Butler,
Bodies That Matter
[New York: Routledge, 1993], 234).

40. See Mary Helen Washington, “Lost Women: Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance,”
Ms.
(Dec. 1980). Arguably, of course, the same indictment could be brought against what might be regarded as “compulsory blackness,” in which, by virtue of the one-drop rule, one's “roots and genealogy” are also denied.

41. For Wall, these roles are defined as “the perfect lady” and “the exotic Other.” Wall argues, correctly, that Irene is “the perfect lady” and Clare “the exotic Other”—both roles rejected by Larsen's earlier protagonist, Helga Crane, in
Quicksand.
See Wall, 121.

42. Deborah McDowell, Introduction, Nella Larsen,
Quicksand
and Passing
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986), xxx.

43. See Washington.

44. Tate, 143.

45. Wall, 138.

46. Mary V. Dearborn, Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Eth
nicityin American Culture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 59.

47. McDowell, xxvi, xxx. In
Bodies That Matter,
theorist Judith Butler both extends and revises McDowell's reading of
Passing
by arguing that race and sexuality are “inextricably linked, such that the text offers a way to read the racialization of [sex and] sexual conflict, 272.

48. Larson, 82.

49. See Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradi
tionin Black Women's Fiction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), and Jennifer DeVere Brody, “Clare Kendry's ‘True' Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen's
Pass
ing,” Callaloo 15.4 (1992).

50. Critic Hazel Carby suggests that the mulatta “is a narrative device of mediation; it allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relation between the races.” See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence
of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171. Similarly, Ann duCille describes the mulatta as “both a rhetorical device and a political strategy,” 7.

51. McDowell, xxvi; Tate, 144.

52. Saks, 44.

53. See Deborah McDowell's argument, cited above, that Irene's attraction to Clare is based on latent or repressed lesbian desire.

54. Saks argues that because “the deviance of social form from legal form makes social form an unreliable sign of legal form (and vice versa), this deviance causes a crisis of representation,” 63.

55. Referencing the black postmodernist subject, W. Lawrence Hogue compares the decentered subject of postmodernism to the modernist subject: “Unlike the alienated, modern subject who seeks temporal unification of the past and the future with the present, the postmodern subject is free from all metaphysical narratives, free to simply desire and want. He or she no longer seeks social change; he or she exists only to satisfy his or her own desires.” See W. Lawrence Hogue, Race, Modernity,
Postmodernity: A Look at the Literatures of People of Color Since the
1960s
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 152.

56. In his S/Z, Roland Barthes distinguishes between le scriptible (the writerly) and
le lisible
(the readerly) text, the latter allowing the reader to collaborate in the production of meaning. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, Richard Miller, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Also see Wolfgang Iser's reader-response model of reading in which the “act of reading” generates new meanings, and even new identities, on the part of the reader: Wolfgang Iser,
The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communicationin Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and
The Act of Reading:
A Theory of Aesthetic Reception
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Both models of reading would seem especially useful for understanding the consequences of Irene's “act of reading” Clare.

57. My reading here signifies on Deborah McDowell's reading of Larsen's
Passing.

58. Wall, 130. Curiously, Wall focuses on
Irene's
function as
Clare's
double, rather than vice versa. While acknowledging the mutuality of this relation of doubles, my own analysis emphasizes
Clare's role as Irene's double.

59. Davis,
Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance,
315.

60. duCille, 105. DuCille both challenges and expands Wall's and McDowell's readings of Irene.

61. Samira Kawash,
Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and
Singularity in African American Narrative
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 18.

62. Significantly, both William Wells Brown's
Clotel
and Frank Webb's
The Garies and Their Friends
refer to the “mezzotinto” of the iris as a physical marker betraying African ancestry in the passing subject.

63. Frankenberg, 6.

64. In response to Chesnutt's article (“What Is a White Man?,” New York
Independent,
May 30, 1889), Cable wrote the following: “You know that all my earlier stories about quadroons really ask this question, ‘What is a white man, What is a white woman?' ” George Washington Cable, letter to Charles Chesnutt, June 12, 1889. Charles Waddell Chesnutt Collection, Fisk University, Nashville; also cited in Stephen P. Knadler, “Un-tragic Mulatto: Charles Chesnutt and the Discourse of Whiteness,”
American Literary History,
8.3 (Fall 1966), 426–48.

65. In its draft stage, Larsen's
Passing
was entitled “Nig”— perhaps, as Thadious Davis speculates, as a “play” upon Carl Van Vechten's
Nigger Heaven
(1926). What is equally intriguing for me is that its initial title ironically echoed the then “undiscovered” novel by Harriet Wilson, entitled
Our Nig
(1859).