by Passing
Buried in Larsen’s text is an obscure but significant reference to the Rhinelander case, a controversial and highly publicized court trial that can be classified as a part of American miscegenation jurisprudence. While Irene’s seemingly offhand reference concerning the Rhinelander case dramatizes the potential legal consequences of Clare’s “transgression,” it also demonstrates the power of legal discourse to define, construct, and even to criminalize the miscegenous body. Further, it is a case that emphasizes the discrepancy between the visible markers and the legal definition of race that leads to a “crisis of representation” in the social construction of the miscegenous body. Linking Bellew’s comments to Irene’s reference to the notorious Rhinelander case highlights the function of the “line” that Bellew “draws” and its demarcation in the courts by means of miscegenation laws designed to protect white property rights as well as the rights of whiteness. Unknowingly, however, Bellew has formed a conjugal alliance that consequently reproduces the miscegenous body within his own family, an action that unwittingly gives the lie to his own claims of racial purity.
Thus, it is the “dangerous mixing” of “white blood” and “black blood” that constitutes a threat not only to white property inheritance, but to the “purity of the white body politic.” The passing body, in particular, is a site of danger since, by betraying no racialized markers, it renders blackness invisible. Not only does Bellew’s racist invective express the fears and anxieties of white masculinity around issues of race, race difference, and miscegenation, but Irene’s reference to the Rhinelander case calls attention to collective white race anxieties and fears as reflected in American jurisprudence. Basically this case represents for white society an expression of the anxiety over race-mixing, both in its potential to change distribution of property (which is precisely what happened in the Rhinelander case),66 as well as in its threat to pollute the putative racial purity of the white family, race, and nation.
The issues of race and nation are also raised, albeit somewhat obliquely, in the affinity between Brian and Clare. Irene apparently (mis)reads the relationship between her husband and her friend as one of betrayal and infidelity, and characteristically, the text refuses to affirm or undermine Irene’s perceptions, leaving it to the reader/critic to reach his or her own conclusions. However, I would propose a reading that would both affirm and challenge Irene’s suspicions. Like Clare, Brian is a figure animated by a desire for a life outside the racist proscriptions of American society. His brooding discontent and innate dissatisfaction stem from his “dislike and disgust for his profession and his country.” And curiously, like John Bellew, Brian is attracted to South America. Irene has “[made] … strenuous efforts to repress … that old, queer, unhappy restlessness … that craving for some place strange and different …” that often leads to Brian’s moodiness. Arguably, what Irene suspects to be a sexual attraction between Clare and Brian reflects an affinity of desire for social and personal freedom from the confines of race in the United States. Brian’s response to American racial arrangements, like Clare’s, constitutes an option (escape) that, like passing, is available only to individuals. What identifies these characters symbolically, then, is that both seek to cross the line, Brian geographically and Clare racially. Brian’s desire to cross geographical borders (“rush off to that remote place of his heart’s desire”) functions, in effect, as the symbolic equivalent of Clare’s desire to cross racial boundaries in pursuit of wealth and status. The symbolic equivalence between expatriation and passing suggests here what Samira Kawash calls “geographies of the color line,” that is to say, the metaphorical relation between race and geography in which, as David Goldberg explains, “spatial distinctions … are racialized [and] racial categories [are] spatialized.” 67 In addition, Larsen’s symbolic equivalence of race and geography fractures the choices that James Weldon Johnson’s narrator collapses in his rationale for passing in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: “I argued to forsake one’s race to better one’s condition was no less worthy an action than to forsake one’s country for the same purpose.” 68 Thus, Larsen’s intertextual response to Johnson figures both Clare and potentially Brian (like the ex-colored man) as “racial expatriates” who transgress the geography of the color line. In fact, Irene’s description of passing—“the breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chance in another environment”—implicates race and place in a definition that could serve equally well for “expatriation.” But, of course, as a racially marked body, Brian “couldn’t exactly pass.” (Unlike Clare, however, whose blackness is invisible, Brian’s complexion is “of an exquisitely fine texture and deep copper color.”)
If Brian and Clare each repudiates boundaries of race and nationality, Irene, on the other hand, seeks to repress Brian’s expatriate impulse and to deny Clare’s passing preference. For Irene, expatriation, like passing, represents “a dangerous business,” that is to say, a threat to her own desires for “safety,” “security,” and “permanence” in her own life. Not only does Irene avow her ties to race, but also her ties to nation: “… she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted.” Here Larsen affirms for her protagonist a complex sense of self-definition predicated not only upon racial identity, but an affirmation of national identity and identification.
Although Larsen revises the conventional treatment of the tragic mulatta, the death of Clare in the “Finale” would seem to replicate the formulaic conclusion of the nineteenth-century passing narrative. Typically, the earlier novel of passing ended with the death of the passer who is caught, unhappily, betwixt and between the black and white worlds. Insofar as Clare has no place in the social order and, therefore, must exit the text, Larsen would seem to conform to conventions of the tragic mulatta. In the more traditional treatment of the passing novel, the existing racial order is restored and the essentialist assumptions underpinning that order are affirmed. Clare’s successful performance of whiteness, however, effectively disrupts the social order and reduces essentialism to a virtual absurdity. Nevertheless, Clare’s performance comes at a high price indeed— her death.
Most critics and readers agree that the reasons for Clare’s death remain inconclusive. Either she falls, jumps, or is pushed from a sixth-story window, thus rendering her death either an accident, suicide, or homicide. And there is, as Claudia Tate warns, “no tangible proof to support one interpretation over another.”69 Nonetheless, the inevitability of Clare’s death is signaled throughout the text by images that foreshadow Clare’s fate: the “offending letter,” which Irene “[tears] into tiny ragged squares” and scatters over the train’s railing, and, later, Irene’s “boiling rage” resulting in a “slight crash” and a “shattered cup,” leaving “dark stains [which] dotted the bright rug.” Indeed, her death is unwittingly anticipated by Brian as he, Clare, and Irene climb up to the sixth-story apartment of the Freelands to attend a Christmas party; Brian jokingly tells Clare, “Mind … you don’t fall by the wayside …” Moments later, Clare’s death is again prefigured by Irene who, opening the “long casement-windows of which the Freelands were so proud,” then “finished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.”
In the conclusion of the novel, Irene hears “a strange man” attributing the event to “death by misadventure,” and while it seems likely that Clare’s death, on the surface of it, could be the consequence of an accident or mishap, it is equally true that both Bellew and Irene must be regarded as co-implicated in her demise. Earlier Irene desperately desires Clare’s death, becoming “faint and sick” while trying vainly to “drive away” the thought that “[i]f Clare should die,” she could rid herself of the “menace” to permanence that Clare represents for her. And arguably, it is Irene’s aphasia, or “[failure] to speak,” about her inadvertent encounter with Bellew that leads ultimately to Clare’
s death. On the verge of telling Clare about the meeting with Bellew, Irene fears that “Clare wouldn’t avert the results of the encounter [exposure of her racial identity],” and represses “the flood of speech on her lips.” In some respects, then, Clare’s death can surely be construed as the indirect consequence of Irene’s “keeping back information.” However, if Irene’s aphasia leads indirectly to Clare’s discovery, it is Bellew’s verbal accusation—“So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!”—that, as we have seen, redraws the color line. In so doing, Bellew verbally “pushes” Clare across that line—over which she stumbles. Bellew’s speech is, in its affect, performative: The moment of its utterance coincides with the moment of Clare’s fatal fall to her death, symbolically through the blackness of night into the whiteness of the snow below.
Yet however one reads Clare’s death, the reader must inevitably return to Irene who, through an act of memory (“Such were Irene Redfield’s memories”), produces a narrative that is fundamentally, albeit fragmentarily, reconstituted through the various scenes of reading that structure her narrative. At the novel’s conclusion, Irene is rendered incapable of reliably reading or remedying her own situation; her story achieves neither resolution nor closure. Rather than invoke her narrative as a modernist stay against chaos, Irene sinks into virtual unconsciousness:
[Irene’s] quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again. Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious… . Then everything was dark. [Italics mine.]
Significantly, Irene’s subsequent memory lapse replicates the textual equivocations and ellipses that are typical of (post)modernist narrative:
What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly… .
What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not— …
She stammered: “Is she—is she—?” …
… She just fell, before anybody could stop her. I—
In an attempt to maintain the modernist ideals of order and harmony in her world, Irene has attempted to discipline and regulate her life, as well as that of her husband and sons, for “Irene didn’t like change, particularly changes that affected her smooth routine of her household.” Just as Irene represses her husband’s desire for Brazil, so she represses, much to Brian’s dismay and protest, the discussion of certain subjects in her household in an attempt to protect her sons from the knowledge of ideas such as “sex” and the “race problem.” Thus Irene attempts to repress not only self-knowledge, but the knowledge of others that she construes to be threatening or dangerous (and significantly that “knowledge” is “racial” and “sexual” knowledge). Yet Irene cannot escape “that fear which crouched, always deep down within her, stealing away that sense of security, the feeling of permanence, from the life which she so admirably arranged for them all, and desired so ardently to remain as it was.” But as Irene’s final physical collapse suggests, it is she herself who embodies internally the disorder and instability that seem to menace the surface order and organization of her world. In a moment of epiphany, Irene recognizes that although “life went on precisely as before … she … had changed.” It is “knowing” that “had changed her”: Invoking the image of the Platonic cave, Irene reflects, “It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.” Irene’s illuminations, however, are submerged in the conclusion by a memory lapse and a final fall into unconsciousness. Irene must “black out” her epiphany, as well as its catalyst and agent, Clare.
Metaphorically, then, it is the opening of the envelope, the door into a repressed or buried consciousness, that exposes Irene to the repressed knowledge of self-difference and that results ironically in tragedy for Clare. For, finally, the death of Clare represents Irene’s successful repression of self-difference. Symbolically, Irene’s “hand on Clare’s arm” links them corporeally in that final equivocal moment. If Clare indeed represents aspects of the self that Irene seeks to deny, then Clare’s death—whether accident, homicide, or suicide—represents the death of Irene’s “otherness.” In other words, the “other” in Irene effectively commits suicide. Put differently, Clare’s physical death functions as the equivalent of Irene’s psychic suicide.
Although the cause of Clare’s death remains indeterminate, what is of greater importance is the fact of her death, and its necessity at the level of modernist narrative. Clare’s transgressive performance of whiteness is “punished,” as it were, by the elaborate essentialist conceptions of her husand and Irene. Narratively, Irene’s nationalist essentialism combines with Bellew’s racialist essentialism to, in effect, reinforce the color line by “killing off ” Clare. As author, Larsen’s dilemma is that she has created a character who, through the successful performance of whiteness, demonstrates the falsity of black nationalist essentialism on the one hand and white racial essentialism on the other. However, Larsen’s successful refutation is not without a cost for both author and character, a cost prefigured in terms of a kind of discourse of the debt that threads through the novel. Importantly, at the outset of the novel, Clare informs her friend, “In fact, all things considered, I think, ’Rene, that [passing is] even worth the price.” Later, quoting her father, Clare expresses a similar sentiment: “As my inestimable dad used to say, ‘Everything must be paid for,’ ” a phrase later eerily repeated by Irene.
The author, in other words, incurs a debt that her character must “pay” with the sacrifice of her life. (Surely it is ironically significant that Clare’s death, which occurs on Christmas, is meant to suggest something of a sacrifice to the dominant notions of essentialized racial identity.) Clare has, in effect, lived out the complex identity that Larsen’s narrative has theorized. At the level of character and narrative, the essentialist divide is finally revealed to be illusory. And Clare’s exposure, in full view of Irene and Bellew, ensures her own disappearance in a world of modernity saturated by an essentialist conception of race. Clearly, at this point Clare is left with no place to occupy in the racially essentialized world of modernity: Irene will not allow her to assume an identity in the black world; Bellew will not allow her to assume an identity in the white world. Yet Clare goes on to claim a postmodernist identity that is predicated on self-difference and an identity that challenges Irene’s modernist self-sameness. Clare performs, and lives out, an identity that is foreign to Irene’s modernist conception of integral identity. In fact, Clare’s complexly reconstructed identity is fundamentally inconsistent and incompatible with the essentializing assumptions of her culture. Larsen has created a character, a mulatta, who affirms a complex, contingent, and multiplicitous postmodernist notion of identity in a modernist world that would nullify her very existence. Her continued existence would menace both Bellew’s and Irene’s world, so she must cease to exist.
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 memor
y. 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.
