Content of the Problem
Larsen goes into a novel that dealt with her own lifestyle. The Climax that Larsen was indeed struggling with her own racial identity half African American/Caribbean and European descent.
Instrumenting a Main Character wrestling with her racial identity “passing for white” and wrestling with a turbulence marriage. All aspects of Larsen’s life. Irene the Main Character and Larsen pending question was “Cannot accept that disruption to her settled life”
The moment of the novel’s climax, when Irene chooses the stability of married life over Clare’s safety, is put in motion by her decision to pass for white when she first meets Bellew, rather than to face the unpleasantness that would result if she had spoken up against his racist comments. Bellew’s belief that she is white sets up the inevitable conflict that arrives when he sees her with Felise. As Larsen points out early in the novel, people like Bellew do not see the Blackness of people who look like Irene and Clare unless they see them with other unmistakably Black people. Seeing Irene with Felise breaks the illusion of her whiteness for Bellew, which in turn causes him to realize that Clare is also Black. Irene understands in that moment, first unconsciously and then clearly, that if Bellew ends his marriage to Clare, Irene’s marriage to Brian will be at risk. Irene cannot accept that disruption to her settled life.
Significance of the Study
Nella Larsen is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance, yet she was a Chicago native whose personality was decisively shaped by her youth on the near South Side. The Chicago of her early childhood was a sprawling chaos sprung from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871 and already surpassing in population every American city but New York. “Think of all hell turned loose,” wrote the newcomer John Dewey to his sister in 1894, “& yet not hell any longer, but simply material for a new creation.” Born in 1891 at 2124 S. Armour Street (Federal Street today) to a white Danish immigrant named Marie Hansen and a man of color named Peter Walker from the then-Danish Virgin Islands, Larsen (initially Nellie Walker) grew up in one of the Western Hemisphere’s most notorious vice districts, the so-called Levee. Prowling the area bordering Nella’s to the north, the young journalist Theodore Dreiser wrote in his first feature newspaper story, “Entering the district at midnight and wandering along the broken wooden pavement, ill-lighted by lamps and avoided by the police, the nerves tremble at the threatening appearance of the whole neighborhood.” He could see only filth, misery, and vice in the area–drunken men and despondent women, children with “wan, peevish faces.”
Peter Walker abandoned his wife and daughter soon after Nella’s birth, and Marie could not legally remarry for seven years, but she took up soon after Walker’s disappearance with a white Danish immigrant named Peter Larsen, and they considered themselves married. Marie gave birth to a second, white daughter when Nella was a year old; both daughters were given the Larsen surname and grew up in a Danish-American home. Residential segregation was already an issue but there was no true “ghetto,” because African Americans were still so few. As of 1890, only one point three per cent of the Chicago population was black. By 1910 the number had risen to just two per cent, but a distinct “black belt” had taken form. As a “mixed” working-class family in rapidly segregating Chicago, the Larsens were forced to live in the red-light district, and Larsen’s relationship to the black community was tenuous. Being born to a white woman was enough in itself to cast suspicion upon her legitimacy. Knowing little about her natural father throughout her life made the situation even worse. White women with mixed-race children were routinely assumed to be prostitutes. For young Nella Larsen, the racial culture of the United States imperiled her primary attachments and vexed every aspect of her family’s life. To be identified with her mother, to be carried on her mother’s hip in the butcher shop, to toddle down the sidewalk at her sister’s side, meant braving catcalls and dirty looks.
For a period of their early youth before starting school, Nella and Anna accompanied their mother to Denmark to live with relatives, apparently for three years, while Peter Larsen moved to the “white” West Side. They returned to Chicago in 1898 after Marie’s mother died and the family promptly moved back
to the vice district at State Street and Twenty-Second Street. Seven months later Marie and Peter Larsen were finally able to legally marry, the seven-year waiting period having elapsed since Peter Walker’s disappearance.
Larsen managed to rise into the black bourgeoisie after a stint at Tuskegee Institute and marry a cosmopolitan man of good family, America’s first black PhD in physics. She then turned to library work, becoming the first black graduate of a professional library school, and found herself, as the Harlem Renaissance took form, on the springboard to a literary career. Her first publications introduced black children to Danish children’s games and rhymes in The Brownies’ Book, a black children’s magazine associated with The Crisis, a journal of the NAACP in New York
Passing earned Larsen a book award from the Harmon Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel in Europe and North Africa while working on another novel. She was the first black woman so honored.
Literature Review
Passing is the second novel by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen. This novel follows the relationship between two childhood friends, one who is proud of her racial heritage and one who has passed into the white world to marry for wealth. Irene Redfield runs into Clare Kendry Bellew on the roof of the Drayton Hotel in Chicago. At first Irene does not recognize the blond beauty, but as they begin to speak Irene realizes exactly who this beautiful woman is. Irene wants nothing to do with Clare, but finds herself pulled in by her charms. Two years later, Irene realizes she is not the only one who is susceptible to Clare’s charms. Passing is a unique novel about race, love and human nature.
Irene Redfield is in Chicago to visit her father while her children are away at summer camp. Overwhelmed by the intense heat, Irene hails a cab and allows the driver to take her to Drayton Hotel where she hopes to enjoy a cool wind along with her iced tea. While sitting at her table, Irene becomes aware of a beautiful blond woman at another table who has taken an unusual interest in her. At first Irene worries that the woman has recognized that Irene is black, but Irene decides this is not possible. Finally the blond woman comes to Irene’s table and calls Irene by name, causing Irene to recognize that this blond woman is her childhood friend, Clare Kendry.
The two old friends sit and talk for hours, both ignoring the fact that Clare is clearly passing in the white world. Clare invites Irene to tea the following Tuesday and Irene agrees so that she will not hurt Clare’s feelings. However, Irene vows not to go. When Tuesday comes around, Clare calls so many times that Irene feels she must go have tea with her. When Irene arrives at Clare’s hotel, she finds her entertaining another childhood friend who also married a white man. The women chat for a time and then Clare’s husband arrives. Almost instantly Irene realizes the man is highly prejudiced against black people. Clare is outraged by his behavior, but she does not say anything in order to protect Clare.
Two years pass and then Irene gets another letter from Clare. After discussing it with her husband, Irene decides not to answer the letter. However, a few months later Clare appears on her doorstep. Clare convinces Irene to invite her to a dance she has helped to organize. After the dance, Clare becomes a regular guest at the Redfield home. In December, shortly before Christmas, Irene becomes aware that her husband has become inappropriately close to Clare. Irene hides the fact that she knows, however, feeling as though she should be able to deal with the pain. However, Irene begins trying to come up with ideas of how to rid herself of Clare. Irene thinks briefly that she might tell Clare’s husband that Clare is really black, but she decides this would not be a good idea because it would be like betraying her entire race.
One after while shopping, Irene runs into Clare’s husband while shopping with a black friend. Irene ignores him and walks away, but finds herself unable to tell either her husband or Clare what occurred. That night, Irene decides she can handle her husband having an affair as long as he continues to come home to her. However, when Clare’s husband arrives at a party that the Redfields are attending with Clare, Irene panics. Irene cannot allow Clare’s husband to divorce her because then Clare would be free to be with Irene’s husband. Without thinking, Irene pushes Clare out of a window.
In 1927 Chicago, two light-skinned Black women, childhood friends whose lives took different paths, meet again in a theoretically white space, and a strange friendship is renewed despite the danger that the connection might bring. For Irene Redfield, a proper Black doctor’s wife and a doyenne of Harlem society, passing is a petty indulgence, something she dabbles in on occasion, for “the sake of convenience.” Her racial dexterity gains her “restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that.” But to beautiful, orphaned Clare Kendry, passing is a means of survival. Clare had a home with her white relatives who disdained her race; she wanted something more, and she grabbed it, making a permanent break.
It’s an odd reunion of two very different women. One reckless, flirtatious and bold; the other contained, proper and guarded. Clare lives as white in a gilded cage, a fashionable beauty with a touch of what the book calls “the tar-brush,” married to a racist boor who would definitely not approve of her past identity or her connections. And yet despite the precarity of her situation, Clare has agency. Her choices are borne of desperation and ambition, but in thumbing her nose at what’s expected, she escapes the arbitrariness and slipperiness of racial categories. She also refuses to live by the rules of passing, refusing to fully leave the world she came from behind. When she runs into an old friend, the well-married Irene, it reignites a longing.
Nella Larsen’s “Passing” is named so in reference to the concept that one may “pass” as a race that is not their own. From the first part of the novel, we understand that several of the women introduced are either passing all the time (such as with Clare), or have the ability to (such as with Irene in the Drayton). While all of these women are black in ancestry, their skin is pale enough to pass as white, and therefore they can disguise themselves as a part of privileged society at a time when African-Americans were still segregated.
Despite Passing’s third-person narrator, Larsen divulges Irene Redfield’s intimate thoughts more so than any of the novella’s other characters. Thus, readers become privy to her opinions and judgments of both herself and Clare Kendry. Though Irene continuously rejects Clare’s overtures of friendship out of disapproval of her life choices, it becomes apparent that Irene accepts the privileges of passing herself, whether or not it is voluntary. Existing in whites-only spaces when convenient, Irene’s navigation of white supremacy betrays her nuanced relationship with passing and colorism. Despite Irene’s proud engagement with African-American cultural organizations, marriage to a dark-skinned man “who could not pass,” and life in Harlem, she uses her light skin to transcend the limits of blackness due to white supremacy.
This tantalizing on-and-off relationship with passing manifests itself in Irene’s love/hate relationship with Clare Kendry. To Irene, Clare is not simply a traitor to the race by concealing her complete heritage and living as a white woman. Clare, rather, represents the extent of social mobility attainable for mixed-race women. As she begins to witness the security of her life dissipate, Irene harbors a subtle envy for Clare’s privilege. Upon first learning of Clare’s secret-ridden marriage, Irene believes it is Clare whose path is least secure. However, upon Clare’s reentry into the black community, Irene realizes that Clare’s whiteness gives her the upper hand in both white and black spaces. This inspires both Irene’s envy and admiration for her. Larsen describes a first impression of Clare: “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” (10). Irene finds Clare’s beauty in her whiteness, consistently meditating on her pale skin throughout the novella. When Irene’s husband and Clare begin to spend time together, she becomes insecure about the state of her marriage—fearing Brian’s preference for Clare. This demonstrates Irene’s acceptance of colorism, as she succumbs to the possibility that a mixed-race woman with features more European than hers could easily surpass the attraction Brian feels toward his own wife.
Furthermore, Irene laments the Jim Crow racism about which Brian educates his sons. Changing the subject, she is reluctant to acknowledge the formidable consequences of her sons being black in America. Meanwhile, Clare’s light-skinned daughter is away at boarding school in Europe—needing not to worry about such threats to her well-being. This stark juxtaposition between Irene and Clare’s privileges exists only because of their opposite decisions to live as a black woman and a white woman, respectively. Witnessing Clare’s ability to seemingly reap the benefits of both communities by indulging in Harlem’s cultural and social scene in secret only amplifies the pitfalls of Irene’s life living only as a black woman. Her dilemma of disapproving of Clare’s white life while envying her whiteness demonstrates Irene’s contradictory navigation of white supremacy. Notwithstanding her cultural pride, Irene has had more than a taste of Clare’s privilege, and observing Clare unabashedly have her cake and eat it too unearths Irene’s own yearning for the more privileged half of her identity.
Larsen escalates the paradox further still with Clare Kendry, the envied, who is herself a conflicted character with nuanced motivations. Symbolizing the emptiness of mixed-race people who choose to abandon half of their identities, Clare’s longing for black culture but inability to sacrifice her whiteness is a dilemma also explored in Passing. Clare’s desperate, one-sided letters to Irene begging for companionship evince the long-term unsustainability of abandoning a significant aspect of her heritage. While Irene engages some of her white heritage while passing occasionally, when we first meet Clare, she had been without black society for the majority of her life and existed exclusively as a white woman. Groveling before Irene, she clandestinely integrates herself into Harlem society. Through Clare’s rejuvenation upon attending black community events with Irene and Brian, Larsen argues that mixed-race identity thrives in the embrace of the whole self.
The conflict Clare and Irene face is their dual heritage’s incompatibility with the American narrative and legacy. Blackness and whiteness in the Jim Crow era existed as enemy races—the one perceived to be unequivocally supreme exercised its forceful dominance by alienating the other. Therefore, Larsen writes these characters as embodiments and victims of that fabricated dichotomy. Clare must hide her black heritage from her white, racist husband in order to engage with white culture and must antagonize her white heritage to engage with black culture.
This internal tug-of-war has bred a genre of literature, the ‘Tragic Mulatta,’ in which authors depict the mere impossibility of successfully toeing the line between these two heritages within one body. Larsen’s representation of mixed-race identity crises evoked my sympathy for Clare Kendry, in particular. Growing up mixed-race, it was and continues to be difficult to identify with any one of my two backgrounds. To be both often results in being neither. Passing features this American all-or-nothing narrative that persists in our culture today. Take Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s infamous quote, “I wasn’t black until I came to America.” The culture of segregation on the basis of race is an indefatigable reality across the United States. Although ethnic solidarity can be empowering, it is a practice that often subverts mixed-race identity—especially when a person can exist as both the ‘us’ and ‘them’ in any number of us-against-them narratives (i.e. being both black and white). Clare, therefore, is not an opportunist who wants the best of both worlds but rather a woman deciding to come into her full identity—creating a new category of being that defies the race politics of the 1920s that continue to suppress mixed-race people in the 21st century.
Nella Larsen achieves the aforementioned characterization by putting these characters in dialogue with one another. Readers learn about Irene through her relationship with Clare and learn about Clare through her relationship with Irene. Their character dynamic itself symbolizes the internal conflict that, due to racial inequality and race wars across the globe, continues to plague mixed-race people who have the privilege of passing. Irene struggles to find complete satisfaction in her decision to live as a black woman, and cannot help but take advantage of her ability to pass when needed. Clare, too, struggles with her own decision to live as a white woman, slinking toward Harlem whenever she needs a black culture fix. These two experiences, equally similar and different, represent the battle within the mixed-race mind as it grapples with the ethics of passing, the validity of ambition, and the inescapability of self-denial. Half of the self desires the privilege it can attain through abandoning its black heritage, while the other mourns the potential loss of vital cultural solidarity. Mediating this conflict is the principle that, in America, in order to be one, one cannot be both. A house divided cannot stand. Blackness and whiteness’ very definitions being utter opposites epitomizes the intense internal conflict which being mixed-race unavoidably creates. Irene and Clare are each other’s ‘could-be’s’, each modeling the path not chosen by the other in all its greener-grass glory.
In contributing to the ‘Tragic Mulatta’ trope in literature with the tragic fate of not only Clare Kendry but of Irene, as she, too, is shattered in her own way by Clare’s death, Nella Larsen sends a message to her fellow mixed-race women: erasing half of one’s history is to erase part of one’s humanity. The painful process of pruning the mixed-race body of either half of its roots is a dangerous tradition through which satisfaction can never be attained. Passing, for any race, is inherently an act of self-denial which sends both Irene and Clare yearning for complete acceptance in an integrated space that has yet to exist in American society. The categorization of mixed-race people as existing together in a liminal space between two segregated groups is a harmful method of ostracization and only perpetuates racial hierarchy. Irene and Clare’s attempts to transcend such a system result only in tragedies—a premature death and a newly unraveled identity.
Larsen concludes her intricate characterization with these unhappy endings to argue the lack of space for mixed-race expression and mere existence in America. According to Larsen in the 1920s, engaging with both whiteness and blackness, whose separation rests within inequality, was dangerous, furtive, and potentially fatal. Barriers such as laws against interracial marriage and integration during this time period were extensions of society’s intolerance for and avoidance of people who threatened the absoluteness of racial borders, black oppression, and white supremacy. In the 21st century, these societal and resultant internal conflicts persist at the systemic level. Take the widely-used U.S. census race survey for instance, wherein Americans of two or more distinct ethnic backgrounds find degradingly vague acknowledgement of their identity in the pithy “Two or More Races” checkbox. At the interpersonal level, interracial marriage stigmas and labels such as ‘exotic’ remain prevalent and yet encourage mixed-race identities’ pernicious capitulation to racist schema—pressurizing the whole self into a box meant for half at most. Our century-long toleration of this response to integration continually coerces mixed-race people into Larsen’s cautionary paradox and projects the fragmenting message that, to be seen in America, they ought to check not all that apply when it comes to self-presentation. As though climbing a ladder with some rungs bone-dry and some oiled for the slipping, Larsen’s Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry showcase the uncertainty of the very delicate blessing and curse that is passing.