Every Sense of the Word: Sexual Undertones and Layers in Nella Larsen's 'Passing'
I wrote this for a Modern Novels class. In the original, titles are italicized and italics are used for emphasis. I'll add them at some point, but I'm too tired right now XD
English 462
May 19, 2010
Every Sense of the Word: Sexual Undertones and Layers in Nella Larsen’s 'Passing'
There is an obvious answer to the question “What is Nella Larsen’s novel Passing about?” and that answer is “Race.” The books is primarily concerned with two African American women whose skin is light enough that they may “pass” as white, thus there is no question that “Race” is a major theme. But as with modernist texts in general, that is only one of many layers, one of many themes. A remarkable aspect to Passing is how a complex novel with several complex issues is put together in under one hundred pages and crowned with a one-word title as layered with meaning as the novella itself.
In her article about the novel, Nell Sullivan boiled down the themes of the book, saying “For Larsen, too, ‘race’ is inextricable from the collateral issues - including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry - that bear upon the formation of identity” (Sullivan). But while saying that Race is a current underneath all of the issues covered in Passing, Sullivan also seems to point to Identity and its formation as the overarching topic. Saying that Identity is the theme of Passing allows for exploration of other sub-themes. Critics and scholars do not have to focus on Race since it is Identity which is the real umbrella issue which race falls under, along with all the other fragments of Identity including Sexual Orientation.
The book begins and ends on a rooftop, a place removed from the everyday and obvious. In opening and closing her novel in these places, Larsen is giving her readers a clue, telling them to look beyond the obvious theme of Race, as important as it is. Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, estranged friends, accidently encounter each other for the first time in years while dining in a rooftop restaurant. Both are black women allowing others to believe they are white. The book ends when Clare’s racist white husband confronts her at a rooftop party upon finally realizing that his wife was black. Clare falls (or faints or is pushed, this too is ambiguous) from a window, to her death. In both of these settings the women are hiding in plain sight, but also in removed worlds away from the comings and goings of the average person. They have “passed” from the ground floor world up into another one. They dwell in a disguise within a disguise. The restaurant may be considered a “white” place, as it is understood that people with darker skin would not be welcome inside. Conversely, the rooftop party is populated by African Americans. It is also a place which hovers above the streets and thoroughfares, but where the restaurant is “pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote” (Larsen, 8), the rooftop party is held in a “long, untidy living-room” (Larsen, 78). It is a generally more homey location, populated by friends and conversation. The restaurant is a place of total pretense, whereas the party is where Irene’s friends know her to be black and where Clare’s years of pretending finally cease as her husband tells her he knows her secret. A comparison of the two locations reveals how for Irene racial identity is dependent on where she is at the time. There are places where she “passes,” but there are also places where she embraces her identity as an African American and where everyone knows her as one. However, Irene’s sexual identity hidden in both places. This too is indication of an even deeper level of “passing,” one which underscores the novel beneath the surface topic of Race.
The novel chronicles Irene’s growing paranoia about the nature of the relationship between her husband Brian and her friend Clare. Throughout the book Irene tells herself to cut off ties to Clare, making things as they were before they found each other again. She decides to ignore a letter from Clare, but immediately bends to Clare when she arrives and personally asks why there had not been an answer. She decides she does not wish to see any more of Clare, but is persuaded to visit Clare in her home. Her actions and her words to herself do not connect with each other. Her natural inclinations seem to be towards Clare, not away from her.
Though Irene attempts to maintain an inner dialogue against Clare despite her actions to the contrary, when she describes Clare even her mind betrays her. In his article about the sexuality in the book, David L. Blackmore points out “Irene’s descriptions of Clare are exotic, sensual, couched in the discourse of desire” (Blackmore). One example of this is when Irene describes Clare, dressed for a dance. She is “exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting….her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels” (Larsen 53).
Blackmore writes about how Irene attempts to explain her attraction away by clothing it in racial terms, “masking her physical desire behind a shield of racial solidarity” (Blackmore). But her actions betray her again and again. At one point in the novel, Clare surprises Irene by entering her room quietly and planting a kiss on Irene’s head. If Irene was serious about pushing Clare away and continuing separate lives (as she seemed to be just moments before when resolving to tell Clare “that it was no use, her coming”), now would definitely be a time to make the declaration, in body and mind. Should she not feel annoyance at Clare’s surprise intimacy and verbally tell her so? But neither happens. Instead Irene “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, Claire!’” (Larsen, 45-46). When Clare touches Irene, Irene touches back, feels love for Clare, and compliments her verbally. This may not point to obvious sexual desire; however it certainly does not support Irene’s insistence that not only is she not attracted to Clare, but she actually greatly dislikes her and wishes she would go away.
Blackmore does not only focus on the subtle sexuality of Irene and Clare. In a somewhat unusual interpretation of the novel, he also makes a case about Irene’s husband Brian being different from what he appears. When critics write about Irene’s sexuality they usually make a note of how sexless her marriage to Brian is. They do not share a room and inwardly Irene states that to Brian she was “only the mother of his sons. That was all” (Larsen 66). Irene even questions whether she had ever really loved Brian, and doubts that she had. But the asexual nature of their relationship does not only reflect on Irene, it is indicative of Brian and his orientation as well. Irene uses the word “queer” in relation to her husband, especially where his desires to leave for Brazil are concerned. Blackmore places a lot of significance in Brian’s wish to immigrate to Brazil, saying “it can be read as a desire for sexual freedom in a country where homosexuality has been a visible cultural force throughout modern history” (Blackmore). Blackmore asserts that Brian would have been aware of Brazil’s acceptance of multiple sexual orientations and suggests that in choosing Brazil as the location of his dreams, Larsen may be making a subtle indication about his affinity towards homosexuals. Here is another kind of “passing”: Irene’s worries about her husband’s sexual orientation pass as worries about his longing to move to Brazil.
If Irene is both afraid that her husband harbors sexual desire for other men and also that she herself holds an uncontrollable love for other women, it gives new meaning to her fear that Clare and Brian are having an affair. Blackmore explains “In this way she displaces her own attraction to Clare by projecting it onto Brian. At the same time, by making Brian a willing partner in the intrigue, she undercuts her fears about his sexual preference” (Blackmore). Irene subconsciously tells herself that she doesn’t love Clare; Brian does. Brian doesn’t love other men, Brian loves Clare. This is both comforting and tormenting. It is a comfort because it dispels the threat homosexuality would have on her marriage and social status, but it is miserable because if it is true it means the two people she loves most in the world would rather be with each other than with her. Either way, Irene loses. If Irene and Brian are both gay, she loses Brian without a certainty of gaining Clare. If Clare and Brian are having an affair, at least there is a possibility of keeping Brian, as long as Clare goes away. But then she loses Clare. In the final moments of the book, Irene makes her choice. The cause of Clare’s plummet from the window is not certain. We don’t know whether she faints, whether she throws herself out, whether she falls or anything for sure. But there is a definite possibility that she was pushed - by Irene. Look at how Irene describes the event:
Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene’s placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.
Irene wasn’t sorry. (Larsen, 80)
In an earlier scene in the book (also taking place at a social gathering), Irene is watching with increased agitation as she perceives Clare flirting with a married man. She quickly assures the reader that it bothers her because she fears her husband will succumb to the same flirtations, but it is Clare she focuses on when she narrates “Clare had a trick of sliding down ivory lids over astonishing black eyes and then lifting them suddenly and turning on a caressing smile” (Larsen, 66). She isn’t using language of deception, she is noticing Clare’s “astonishing” eyes and “caressing” smile. If she were really worried about Clare using feminine wiles to wreck homes, should she not have described Clare in less flattering terms? Immediately following this observation, “Rage boiled up in her” and “There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread” (Larsen, 66). Read next to the scene in which Clare falls, the parallels become very clear. Irene may have pushed Clare in a moment of rage and passion and it may have been very close to an accident (as was the dropping of the cup), but Irene is the cause.
If Irene did cause Clare’s death, it is a visible rejection of her attraction to Clare. Irene chooses to continue in her belief that Clare has seduced Brian, that Brian is attracted enough to be seduced, and that removing Clare from the equation will help solve everything. But, as Jonathan Little points out in his article about Larsen’s use of irony, it doesn’t solve anything. “Clare’s murder becomes part of a circular continuum, another in a long series of Irene’s increasingly pathological symptoms that will continue due to the inadequacy of this murderous act of displaced repression” (Little).
There are those who would look at the evidence for sexual attraction between Irene and Clare and dismiss it as platonic. It is true that the novel does not come right out and make obvious statements about sexuality the way it does about race. But then, that is part of the beauty of the modernist movement: nothing is what it seems. There is more than enough subtext within Irene’s inner dialogue and in Larsen’s writing to make a very good case for Irene’s desires for Clare and for Irene’s fears (real or not) that Brian desired other men. Modernist texts demand close reading and attention to how the author writes, not just what they say. In this book of all books everything should be questioned. It is a book about “passing,” after all. Why can’t a book which seems to be about black women who pass for white actually be a book about sexuality passing as a book about race?
Works Cited
Blackmore, David L. "`That unreasonable restless feeling': The homosexual subtexts of Nella Larsen's Passing." African American Review 26.3 (1992): 475. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Little, Jonathan. "Nella Larsen's Passing: Irony and the critics." African American Review 26.1 (1992): 173. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.
Sullivan, Nell. "Nella Larsen's Passing and the Fading Subject." African American Review 32.3 (1998): 373. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.
English 462
May 19, 2010
Every Sense of the Word: Sexual Undertones and Layers in Nella Larsen’s 'Passing'
There is an obvious answer to the question “What is Nella Larsen’s novel Passing about?” and that answer is “Race.” The books is primarily concerned with two African American women whose skin is light enough that they may “pass” as white, thus there is no question that “Race” is a major theme. But as with modernist texts in general, that is only one of many layers, one of many themes. A remarkable aspect to Passing is how a complex novel with several complex issues is put together in under one hundred pages and crowned with a one-word title as layered with meaning as the novella itself.
In her article about the novel, Nell Sullivan boiled down the themes of the book, saying “For Larsen, too, ‘race’ is inextricable from the collateral issues - including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry - that bear upon the formation of identity” (Sullivan). But while saying that Race is a current underneath all of the issues covered in Passing, Sullivan also seems to point to Identity and its formation as the overarching topic. Saying that Identity is the theme of Passing allows for exploration of other sub-themes. Critics and scholars do not have to focus on Race since it is Identity which is the real umbrella issue which race falls under, along with all the other fragments of Identity including Sexual Orientation.
The book begins and ends on a rooftop, a place removed from the everyday and obvious. In opening and closing her novel in these places, Larsen is giving her readers a clue, telling them to look beyond the obvious theme of Race, as important as it is. Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, estranged friends, accidently encounter each other for the first time in years while dining in a rooftop restaurant. Both are black women allowing others to believe they are white. The book ends when Clare’s racist white husband confronts her at a rooftop party upon finally realizing that his wife was black. Clare falls (or faints or is pushed, this too is ambiguous) from a window, to her death. In both of these settings the women are hiding in plain sight, but also in removed worlds away from the comings and goings of the average person. They have “passed” from the ground floor world up into another one. They dwell in a disguise within a disguise. The restaurant may be considered a “white” place, as it is understood that people with darker skin would not be welcome inside. Conversely, the rooftop party is populated by African Americans. It is also a place which hovers above the streets and thoroughfares, but where the restaurant is “pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote” (Larsen, 8), the rooftop party is held in a “long, untidy living-room” (Larsen, 78). It is a generally more homey location, populated by friends and conversation. The restaurant is a place of total pretense, whereas the party is where Irene’s friends know her to be black and where Clare’s years of pretending finally cease as her husband tells her he knows her secret. A comparison of the two locations reveals how for Irene racial identity is dependent on where she is at the time. There are places where she “passes,” but there are also places where she embraces her identity as an African American and where everyone knows her as one. However, Irene’s sexual identity hidden in both places. This too is indication of an even deeper level of “passing,” one which underscores the novel beneath the surface topic of Race.
The novel chronicles Irene’s growing paranoia about the nature of the relationship between her husband Brian and her friend Clare. Throughout the book Irene tells herself to cut off ties to Clare, making things as they were before they found each other again. She decides to ignore a letter from Clare, but immediately bends to Clare when she arrives and personally asks why there had not been an answer. She decides she does not wish to see any more of Clare, but is persuaded to visit Clare in her home. Her actions and her words to herself do not connect with each other. Her natural inclinations seem to be towards Clare, not away from her.
Though Irene attempts to maintain an inner dialogue against Clare despite her actions to the contrary, when she describes Clare even her mind betrays her. In his article about the sexuality in the book, David L. Blackmore points out “Irene’s descriptions of Clare are exotic, sensual, couched in the discourse of desire” (Blackmore). One example of this is when Irene describes Clare, dressed for a dance. She is “exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting….her glistening hair drawn smoothly back into a small twist at the nape of her neck; her eyes sparkling like dark jewels” (Larsen 53).
Blackmore writes about how Irene attempts to explain her attraction away by clothing it in racial terms, “masking her physical desire behind a shield of racial solidarity” (Blackmore). But her actions betray her again and again. At one point in the novel, Clare surprises Irene by entering her room quietly and planting a kiss on Irene’s head. If Irene was serious about pushing Clare away and continuing separate lives (as she seemed to be just moments before when resolving to tell Clare “that it was no use, her coming”), now would definitely be a time to make the declaration, in body and mind. Should she not feel annoyance at Clare’s surprise intimacy and verbally tell her so? But neither happens. Instead Irene “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, Claire!’” (Larsen, 45-46). When Clare touches Irene, Irene touches back, feels love for Clare, and compliments her verbally. This may not point to obvious sexual desire; however it certainly does not support Irene’s insistence that not only is she not attracted to Clare, but she actually greatly dislikes her and wishes she would go away.
Blackmore does not only focus on the subtle sexuality of Irene and Clare. In a somewhat unusual interpretation of the novel, he also makes a case about Irene’s husband Brian being different from what he appears. When critics write about Irene’s sexuality they usually make a note of how sexless her marriage to Brian is. They do not share a room and inwardly Irene states that to Brian she was “only the mother of his sons. That was all” (Larsen 66). Irene even questions whether she had ever really loved Brian, and doubts that she had. But the asexual nature of their relationship does not only reflect on Irene, it is indicative of Brian and his orientation as well. Irene uses the word “queer” in relation to her husband, especially where his desires to leave for Brazil are concerned. Blackmore places a lot of significance in Brian’s wish to immigrate to Brazil, saying “it can be read as a desire for sexual freedom in a country where homosexuality has been a visible cultural force throughout modern history” (Blackmore). Blackmore asserts that Brian would have been aware of Brazil’s acceptance of multiple sexual orientations and suggests that in choosing Brazil as the location of his dreams, Larsen may be making a subtle indication about his affinity towards homosexuals. Here is another kind of “passing”: Irene’s worries about her husband’s sexual orientation pass as worries about his longing to move to Brazil.
If Irene is both afraid that her husband harbors sexual desire for other men and also that she herself holds an uncontrollable love for other women, it gives new meaning to her fear that Clare and Brian are having an affair. Blackmore explains “In this way she displaces her own attraction to Clare by projecting it onto Brian. At the same time, by making Brian a willing partner in the intrigue, she undercuts her fears about his sexual preference” (Blackmore). Irene subconsciously tells herself that she doesn’t love Clare; Brian does. Brian doesn’t love other men, Brian loves Clare. This is both comforting and tormenting. It is a comfort because it dispels the threat homosexuality would have on her marriage and social status, but it is miserable because if it is true it means the two people she loves most in the world would rather be with each other than with her. Either way, Irene loses. If Irene and Brian are both gay, she loses Brian without a certainty of gaining Clare. If Clare and Brian are having an affair, at least there is a possibility of keeping Brian, as long as Clare goes away. But then she loses Clare. In the final moments of the book, Irene makes her choice. The cause of Clare’s plummet from the window is not certain. We don’t know whether she faints, whether she throws herself out, whether she falls or anything for sure. But there is a definite possibility that she was pushed - by Irene. Look at how Irene describes the event:
Gone! The soft white face, the bright hair, the disturbing scarlet mouth, the dreaming eyes, the caressing smile, the whole torturing loveliness that had been Clare Kendry. That beauty that had torn at Irene’s placid life. Gone! The mocking daring, the gallantry of her pose, the ringing bells of her laughter.
Irene wasn’t sorry. (Larsen, 80)
In an earlier scene in the book (also taking place at a social gathering), Irene is watching with increased agitation as she perceives Clare flirting with a married man. She quickly assures the reader that it bothers her because she fears her husband will succumb to the same flirtations, but it is Clare she focuses on when she narrates “Clare had a trick of sliding down ivory lids over astonishing black eyes and then lifting them suddenly and turning on a caressing smile” (Larsen, 66). She isn’t using language of deception, she is noticing Clare’s “astonishing” eyes and “caressing” smile. If she were really worried about Clare using feminine wiles to wreck homes, should she not have described Clare in less flattering terms? Immediately following this observation, “Rage boiled up in her” and “There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread” (Larsen, 66). Read next to the scene in which Clare falls, the parallels become very clear. Irene may have pushed Clare in a moment of rage and passion and it may have been very close to an accident (as was the dropping of the cup), but Irene is the cause.
If Irene did cause Clare’s death, it is a visible rejection of her attraction to Clare. Irene chooses to continue in her belief that Clare has seduced Brian, that Brian is attracted enough to be seduced, and that removing Clare from the equation will help solve everything. But, as Jonathan Little points out in his article about Larsen’s use of irony, it doesn’t solve anything. “Clare’s murder becomes part of a circular continuum, another in a long series of Irene’s increasingly pathological symptoms that will continue due to the inadequacy of this murderous act of displaced repression” (Little).
There are those who would look at the evidence for sexual attraction between Irene and Clare and dismiss it as platonic. It is true that the novel does not come right out and make obvious statements about sexuality the way it does about race. But then, that is part of the beauty of the modernist movement: nothing is what it seems. There is more than enough subtext within Irene’s inner dialogue and in Larsen’s writing to make a very good case for Irene’s desires for Clare and for Irene’s fears (real or not) that Brian desired other men. Modernist texts demand close reading and attention to how the author writes, not just what they say. In this book of all books everything should be questioned. It is a book about “passing,” after all. Why can’t a book which seems to be about black women who pass for white actually be a book about sexuality passing as a book about race?
Works Cited
Blackmore, David L. "`That unreasonable restless feeling': The homosexual subtexts of Nella Larsen's Passing." African American Review 26.3 (1992): 475. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.
Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Norton, 2007. Print.
Little, Jonathan. "Nella Larsen's Passing: Irony and the critics." African American Review 26.1 (1992): 173. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.
Sullivan, Nell. "Nella Larsen's Passing and the Fading Subject." African American Review 32.3 (1998): 373. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 10 May 2010.