Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the Fading Subject
Journal article by Neil Sullivan; African American Review, Vol. 32, 1998
Journal Article Excerpt
Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject. by Neil Sullivan . . . Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people were so cursed as Ham's dark children. (Passing 225) Although many critics have accused Nella Larsen of using race as a pretext for examining other issues,(1) Passing (1929), her second novel, is profoundly concerned with racial identity. In "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring "that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers" (170). For Larsen, too, "race" is inextricable from the collateral issues - including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity. "Passing," of course, alludes to the crossing of the color line that was once so familiar in American narratives of "race," but in Larsen's novel the word also carries its colloquial meaning - death. Thus Passing's title, like the title of Larsen's earlier Quicksand, hints at the subject's disappearance in the narrative, or the possibility of aphanisis, which Jacques Lacan defines in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis as the disappearance of the subject behind the signifier. For Irene Westover Red field and Clare Kendry Bellew, the "twin" protagonists of Passing, the obliterating signifier is nigger, a word that comes to encapsulate their struggle with the conflicts of American racism and assimilation. The narrative representation of these conflicts also suggests at a symbolic level Larsen's repetition and working through of her own anxieties about the rejection she experienced as a result of her racial identity. Her hazy origins and almost traceless "disappearance" differentiate Larsen from the other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, but not from the characters of her own novels. Until the publication of the 1994 biography by Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen's life was shrouded in silence; not even the year of her birth was certain.(2) Davis's project was "to remove the aura of mystery" from Larsen's life (xix), an aura that often resulted in critics' presentation of Larsen as inscrutable Other.(3) But with the details unearthed in her extensive research, Davis reveals that Nella Larsen was deeply scarred by the reality of racism; her seeking of celebrity as a writer was in fact a symptom of the need for recognition and validation, something which she never received as a child and only tenuously as a young adult (Davis 10). As the daughter of the Danish immigrant Marie Hansen and the African American Peter Walker, Larsen was already doubly marginalized in American society, but when her mother remarried a white man (also a Danish immigrant), Larsen found herself so excluded from the family that her mother did not even report her existence to census takers in 1910 (Davis 27).(4) The Larsens orchestrated their dark daughter's absence from their Chicago home by sending her to the Fisk Normal School in Nashville when she was only fifteen, and when the money ran out a year later, Marie Larsen apparently asked the sixteen-year-old Nella (then Nellie) to make her own way in the world. Larsen vanished temporarily, resurfacing three years later at the Lincoln Training Hospital in New York City as a student nurse, where, according to Davis, she began her ascent into the black middle class all alone (66, 70-72).Larsen's childhood rejection was seemingly reiterated in her 1919 marriage to Elmer S. Imes, which ended in a much-publicized divorce in 1933. As Ann Allen Shockley explains, the deterioration of the marriage was accelerated by the overt antipathy felt by Larsen's light-skinned mother-in-law and, significantly, by Imes's indiscreet affair with Ethel Gilbert, a white staff member at Fisk University, where Imes taught physics (438). "He liked white women," several of Imes's friends remarked to Thadious Davis in explanation of his betrayal of Nella Larsen (362). It is hardly incidental in Larsen's construction and subsequent dissolution of identity that the rivals for her husband's affection were both "white" women, and that she could therefore attribute the second major rejection in her emotional life to her inability to be sufficiently white.(5) Although there were many problems in ... |
End of free preview...
To continue reading this publication, you must have a Questia Subscription.
Try Us Today! Click Here
Questia provides the world's largest online library of scholarly books and journal articles, with integrated footnote and bibliography tools, highlighting, note taking and book marking. With a Questia subscription, you'll have access to the full text of more than 67,000 books and 1.5 million articles.
Already a subscriber? Login:
Sponsored Links
Free Newsletter
Get helpful how-to's, writing tips, search strategies, quizzes & more!
Search the Library
