‘Passing’ — the original 1929 novel — is disturbingly brilliant

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signet Classics

Signet Classics

Editor’s note: This essay references a book whose title contains a racial smudge. The one thing most people know about Nella Larsen ‘s Passing is that it explores a curious kind of deception — being born into one marginalized racial category and slipping into another, for prerogative, security system, or world power. But the significance of Passing is n’t found in the coat facts but in the magnificence of its performance : the smasher of the write, the close character study, and the acute psychological suspense.

For writer-director Rebecca Hall, ‘Passing’ was a deeply personal project

For writer-director Rebecca Hall, ‘Passing’ was a deeply personal project

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Like a decades-early harbinger to a Patricia Highsmith fresh, a sense of sensual glamor, frustration and foreboding pervades Larsen ‘s celebrated novelette. In 1927 Chicago, two light-skinned Black women, childhood friends whose lives took unlike paths, meet again in a theoretically egg white space, and a strange friendship is renewed despite the danger that the connection might bring. For Irene Redfield, a proper Black repair ‘s wife and a doyenne of Harlem society, passing is a junior-grade indulgence, something she dabbles in on occasion, for “ the sake of convenience. ” Her racial dexterity gains her “ restaurants, field tickets, and things like that. ” But to beautiful, orphaned Clare Kendry, pass is a means of survival. Clare had a family with her flannel 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 unlike women. One foolhardy, coquettish and bluff ; the other contained, proper and guarded. Clare lives as white in a aureate cage, a stylish beauty with a touch of what the book calls “ the tar-brush, ” married to a racist peasant who would decidedly not approve of her past identity or her connections. And so far despite the precarity of her situation, Clare has agency. Her choices are bear of despair and ambition, but in thumbing her nuzzle at what ‘s expected, she escapes the flightiness and slickness of racial categories. She besides refuses to live by the rules of passage, refusing to fully leave the world she came from behind. When she runs into an old friend, the well-married Irene, it reignites a hanker.

In contrast, Irene lives carefully within walls of her own structure. She is always watching what she does and what she says, even afraid her conserve will tell her kids about the “ racial problem. ” She ‘s trying to shield them from ugliness, but thinking she can protect two Black boys in Harlem in 1927 from learning about racism is a signal that she ‘s removed from reality. The contrast, parallels, and interplay between these two women is part of what makes Passing so beautifully constructed. Every choice is finely calibrated. Their interactions are civil, but Larsen has a way of making the simplest observation feel like a preliminary to repugnance :

The words came to Irene as she sat there on the Drayton ceiling, facing Clare Kendry. “ A having manner. ” Well, Irene acknowledged, judging from her appearance and manner, Clare seemed surely to have succeeded in having a few of the things that she wanted.

“ Seemed ” is doing a set of exercise in that paragraph. Clare seems to have gotten what she wanted but there ‘s more going on below the airfoil. Clare ‘s unchained sexual magnetism and Irene ‘s simmering intimate jealousy adds however another dimension. Time and again, alongside the social aspects which remain chillingly relevant, it ‘s Larsen ‘s art that leaps out : specifically her consummate treat of plot, character and climate. She seamlessly blends music genre elements into a literary novelette about race. The lyric and iconography of suspense and horror are there from the get down. Some of the mood-making is subtle ; Irene ‘s mentality gets increasingly strain as her liaison with Clare deepens and she begins to feel that the glamorous intruder is threatening the life she ‘s built .

At other times, Larsen is boldface, putting the vernacular of the Gothic into Irene ‘s head, invoking “ apprehension, ” “ foreboding, ” and even “ horror. ” then there ‘s the adumbrative in Clare ‘s hysterical language, how she frames herself as a terror in conversation with Irene : “ Ca n’t you realize that I ‘m not like you a act ? Why, to get the things I want ill adequate, I ‘d do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away. actually, ‘Rene, I ‘m not safe. ” Or the cold feeling that runs through Irene on the street, fair after she meets Clare ‘s conserve :

A flimsy shudder ran over her. “ It ‘s nothing, ” she told herself. “ Just person walking over my grave, as the children say. ”

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Published in 1929, during the Harlem Renaissance — a movement its author was deeply entrenched in — Passing caused more of a ripple than a sensation at its release, with critical acclaim far outstripping its sales. ( In debate aggravation, and recalling Carl Van Vechten ‘s controversial novel about Harlem Nigger Heaven of three years earlier, Passing ‘s original intended title was just Nig. ) The influential sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois reviewed it favorably in the NAACP ‘s Crisis magazine. Calling Passing one of the finest novels of the class, Du Bois wrote that Larsen explained “ the psychology of the thing ; the reaction of it on supporter and enemy. It is a unmanageable task, but she attacks the problem fearlessly and with complete art. ” about one hundred years late, those contributions remain. In 19th and early twentieth century literature, the “ tragic mulatto ” was a stock figure, a person of desegregate backdrop whose african inheritance and hanker for a white being causes great isolation and suffer. Despite having alike contours, Larsen ‘s novel was a pivotal step beyond those characterizations. deftly juggling the psychological closeup and the bigger video, Larsen dips into, contradicts, and complicates that break image while besides bringing to biography Du Bois ‘ concept of double awareness. Larsen shows how intimate choices are bound up in social forces while endowing her characters with indelible specificity. As her last published novel, that is quite a bequest. A slowly ball carrier and firm reader, Carole V. Bell is a cultural critic and communication learner focusing on media, politics and identity. You can find her on Twitter @ BellCV .