Nella Larsen

by Passing

  4. “gone native”: a reversal of the original meaning of this phrase, in which someone civilized, presumably white, “regresses” to a “native,” or savage, state. In Larsen’s reversal, gone native is a synonym for passing, a play on the idea of blending into the “native” white surroundings. For more on this reversed sense of the phrase, see Marianna Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive: Savage Intellect, ModernLives (University of Chicago Press, 1990).

  5. the Rhinelander case: This was a highly publicized court case that involved the marriage of Leonard Kip Rhinelander, a member of a wealthy and aristocratic New York clan, and Alice B. Jones, a mulatto chamber-maid in his household. Married on October 14, 1924, Leonard filed for an annulment after the first month, on the grounds that Jones had fraudulently entered the marriage by falsifying her racial identity. After her lawyers first claimed that she was white, Alice Rhinelander filed a countersuit in which she charged that her husband knew her true racial status (she was a quadroon, a person of one-quarter black ancestry) before their marriage and that he had ardently pursued her nonetheless. As the trial proceeded, Leonard confessed with some embarrassment that indeed he did know that she was a mulatto before marriage but that his father had strongly objected to Alice’s black ancestry. During the course of the trial, the white newspapers sensationalized the proceedings (the black newspapers less so), and Leonard’s love letters were read in open court, while Alice was forced to partially disrobe so that the jury could examine her skin color. On December 5, 1925, the jury rendered its verdict (in spite of the racist closing argument of the prosecution), exonerating Alice from charges of fraud. Leonard’s attempts to appeal the verdict would prove costly and futile. In 1927 (the temporal setting of Passing), Alice filed a suit for separation on the grounds of abandonment as well as “cruel and inhuman treatment” as a consequence of the trial publicity. When a divorce decree was granted, in 1930, Alice received a cash settlement of $31,500 (her husband had spent more than $50,000 in legal fees), along with a quarterly annuity of $3,600, payable for the rest of her life. Six years later, at age thirty-four, Leonard died of pneumonia. For further details of the case and its significance for Larsen, see Mark J. Madigan’s “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class’: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing” (Modern Fiction Studies 36:4 [Winter 1990]).

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. “C.P. time”: colored people’s time; used jocularly in the African-American vernacular to mean late, lagging, or behind the appointed time; opposite of punctual or “on time.”

  2. “nigger-power”: walking; the term suggests a forerunner of “black power” but without the ideological or political connotations. It refers to the achievement of a task by virtue of brute strength and endurance, rather than by ancillary (or machine) power. A legendary example might be John Henry, the “steel-drivin’ man.”

  3. Centuries after … : Two different endings to the novel were published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929. The first and second printings concluded with the following paragraph:

  Centuries after, she heard the strange man saying, “Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe. Let’s go up and have another look at that window.”

  The third printing, however, omits this passage, concluding with “Then everything was dark.” Later editions, including those published by The Arno Press (1969), Negro Universities Press (1969), Ayer Publishing Company (1985), and Rutgers University Press (1986), close with the abridged version. In contrast, the 1971 Collier Books edition (Macmillan) and the 1997 Penguin Books edition conclude with the extended ending. The Modern Library edition also contains the original extended ending. Interestingly, editor Deborah McDowell states in her introduction to the Rutgers edition that “[t]his closing paragraph does not seem to alter the spirit of the original in any way.” I am inclined to believe that the ending does makes a difference, in that the amended conclusion enhances its status as a “writerly” text—in the sense that French critic Roland Barthes defines as “writerly” an open-ended text that requires the reader to collaborate in producing its meaning.

  Selected Bibliography

  Berzon, Judith R. Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

  Brody, Jennifer DeVere. “Clare Kendry’s ‘True’ Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Callaloo 15.4 (1992).

  Bullock, Penelope. “The Mulatto in American Fiction.” Phylon 6 (First Quarter 1945).

  Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

  ———. “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge.” In Female Subjects in Black and White, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

  Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- AmericanWoman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

  Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon Press, 1985.

  ———. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.

  Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen: Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.

  ———. “Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic.” In The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations, edited by Amiritjit Singh, William Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin. New York: Garland, 1989.

  ———. Introduction to Passing. New York: Penguin, 1997.

  Dearborn, Mary V. Pocahontas’s Daughters: Gender aned Ethnicity in AmericanCulture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

  duCille, Ann. The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

  Ginsberg, Elaine, ed. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

  Horton, Merrill. “Blackness, Betrayal, and Childhood: Race and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Passing.” College Language Association Journal 28:1 (Sept. 1994).

  Hutchinson, George. “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.

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

  Larsen, Nella. “The Author’s Explanation.” Forum, April 1930.

  ———. “Correspondence.” Opportunity, Sept. 1926.

  ———. “Danish Fun.” The Brownie’s Book, July 1920.

  ——— [Allen Semi]. “Freedom.” Young’s Magazine, April 1926.

  ———. Passing. New York: Knopf, 1929.

  ———. Quicksand. New York: Knopf, 1928.

  ———. “Sanctuary.” Forum, Jan. 1926.

  ———. “Three Scandinavian Games.” The Brownie’s Book, June 1920.

  ——— [Allen Semi]. “The Wrong Man.” Young’s Magazine, Jan. 1926.

  Larson, Charles R. Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993.

  Madigan, Mark J. “Miscegenation and ‘The Dicta of Race and Class’: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Modern Fiction Studies 36.4 (Winter 1990).

  ———. “ ‘Then everything was dark’? The Two Endings of Nella Larsen’s Passing.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 84:4 (Dec. 1990).

  McDowell, Deborah, ed. Introduction to Passing and Quicksand. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

  McLendon, Jacquelyn Y. The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

&n
bsp; ———. “Self-Representation as Art in the Novels of Nella Larsen.” In Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction: An Essay Collection, edited by Janice Morgan, Colette Hall, and Carol Snyder. New York: Garland Publishing, 1991.

  Ramsey, Priscilla. “Freeze the Day: A Feminist Reading of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing.” Afro-American in New York Life and History 9:1 ( Jan. 1985).

  Sato, Hiroko. “Under the Harlem Shadow: A Study of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen.” In Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays, edited by Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1972.

  Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  Tate, Claudia. “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation.” Black American Literary Forum, Winter 1980.

  Wacks, James L. “Reading Race, Rhetoric and the Female Body: The Rhinelander Case and 1920s American Culture.” Senior thesis, Harvard University, 1995.

  Wald, Gayle. Crossing the Color Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

  Wall, Cheryl A. “Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels.” Black American Literature Forum 20:1–2 (1980).

  ———. Women of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

  Washington, Mary Helen. “Lost Women: Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance.” Ms., Dec. 1980.

  Youman, Mary Mabel. “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony.” College Language Association Journal 18 (Dec. 1974).

  THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

  Maya Angelou

  Daniel J. Boorstin

  A. S. Byatt

  Caleb Carr

  Christopher Cerf

  Ron Chernow

  Shelby Foote

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Vartan Gregorian

  Richard Howard

  Charles Johnson

  Jon Krakauer

  Edmund Morris

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Elaine Pagels

  John Richardson

  Salman Rushdie

  Oliver Sacks

  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

  Carolyn See

  William Styron

  Gore Vidal

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  1. Passing is set in the 1920s, before the Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” facilities for nonwhites unconstitutional. What privileges are Irene Redfield denied as a black person? What do men and women gain by passing?

  2. In Part One, Irene has tea with Gertrude and Clare, her two childhood friends. Compare the attitudes each woman has toward passing. To what degree does each pass for white?

  3. Passing presents two women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who make very different choices yet whose lives intertwine in startling ways. Compare the characters of each. What are each woman’s strengths? Her weaknesses? What are each woman’s attitudes toward race? How do these attitudes influence the novel’s plot?

  4. Consider Irene’s fear that Brian and Clare may be having an affair. Does her anxiety seem reasonable to you? Why, or why not?

  5. Compare different characters’ attitudes toward sexuality. For instance, in what ways are Irene’s and Clare’s thoughts on sex similar? How are they different? How might these attitudes be related to each character’s thoughts on race?

  6. Discuss the novel’s ending. Do you think Irene pushed Clare? What evidence does the novel offer either for or against this interpretation?

  7. Certain critics have suggested that an erotic attachment exists between Irene and Clare. Do you agree with this reading? What evidence can you find in the novel to support this idea?

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  NELLA LARSEN

  Nella Larsen, one of the most promising if enigmatic writers of the Harlem Renaissance, was born in Chicago of interracial parentage on April 13, 1891. Her father, who came from the Virgin Islands, died when she was two; her mother was of Danish origin. She grew up in a white world, primarily among people of German and Scandinavian stock. Her first experience with an all-black world occurred in 1909, when she matriculated at the high school division of Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. After studying at the University of Copenhagen for two years, Larsen moved to New York City in 1912 to study nursing at Lincoln Hospital. She later would train as a librarian, earning her certificate from the New York Public Library in 1923. In 1919 she married Elmer Samuel Imes, a prominent black research physicist, who introduced her to Harlem’s literary and social elite. A job at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library brought her into contact with writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.

  Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand, was published by Knopf in 1928. The largely autobiographical story of a mulatto woman who searches in vain for sexual and racial identity, Quicksand was awarded a Bronze Medal by the Harmon Foundation in recognition of Distinguished Achievement Among Negroes in Literature. “This is an articulate, sympathetic first novel, which tells its story and projects its heroine in a lucid, unexaggerated manner,” said The New York Times Book Review. W.E.B. Du Bois deemed Quicksand “a fine, thoughtful and courageous work … the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of [Charles] Chestnutt.”

  Passing, Larsen’s tragic and remarkably candid story of a light-skinned black woman who chooses to “pass” as white for economic security and social status, was published by Knopf in 1929. Critic Robert Bone considered the novel “the best treatment of the subject in Negro fiction.” The Saturday Review wrote: “Miss Larsen has produced a work so fine, sensitive, and distinguished that it rises above race categories and becomes that rare object, a good novel.” And The New York Times Book Review, although critical of the novel’s “suspiciously ‘made’ ending,” praised Larsen’s skillful tracing of “the involved processes of a mind divided against itself, that fights between the dictates of reason and desire. [Larsen] follows the windings of Irene Redfield’s thought without chasing the fleeting shades of cerebral processes
into blind alleys.”

  In 1930 Larsen became the first African American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing, but her personal life and career as a novelist suffered several reversals during the early years of the Depression. Erroneously accused of plagiarizing the short story “Sanctuary,” which appeared in Forum magazine under her name, she was unable to have a third novel accepted for publication. Following a highly publicized divorce in 1933, Larsen gradually withdrew from literary circles and abandoned writing altogether. She spent the last twenty years of her life working as a nurse in Manhattan hospitals. Nella Larsen died in New York City on March 30, 1964.

  “Nella Larsen had no peer among Harlem Renaissance writers in the kinds of questions she posed in her novels,” judged Thadious M. Davis, Larsen’s biographer. Mary Helen Washington, writing in Ms. magazine, claimed, “The women in her novels, like Larsen, are driven to emotional and psychological extremes in their attempts to handle ambivalence, marginality, racism, and sexism. She has shown us that behind the carefully manicured exterior, behind the appearance of security is a woman who hears the beating of her wings against a walled prison.” Alice Walker concurred: “Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable.”

  2002 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2000 by Ntozake Shange

  Critical Foreword and notes copyright © 2002 by Mae Henderson