Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies

African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Zhou Yupei

Responding to a distinguished group of studies on George Schuyler that read him as assimilationist, Gallego in chapter three associates Schuyler's novel Black No More (1931) with the genres of satire and dystopia. For Gallego, the satirical and dystopian elements available in the novel provide a negative vision of reality, and facilitate Schuyler's parallel representations of white racism and African American hypocrisy. Gallego further analyzes Schuyler's parody of the sub-genre of the passing novel and interrogates the phenomenon of passing itself. Substantiating this analysis is not only an inquiry into Schuyler's satirical essays but a detailed explanation of the protagonist's ambiguous position as trickster and as deviant, and of the central idea of miscegenation that allows multiple interpretations. Ultimately, Gallego characterizes Schuyler's novel as a simple story that contains "an enormous discursive potential," and that simultaneously uses "passing" as an ironic strategy and also concludes the passing motif originating with the Du Boisian perspectives of double consciousness.

Chapter four sets the feminist discourse in Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) in opposition to male literary tradition. Also methodically parodic and skillfully disguised, Larsen's revolt, unlike Johnson's or Schuyler's, however, is expressed through her protagonists' search for a sense of the self and through Larsen's embodiment of an alternative identity for African American women, an identity of "double double consciousness." Tracing the representation of African American female sexuality to the era of slavery, Gallego associates Larsen's novels with the tradition of the romance or the sentimental novel, and interprets her application of these traditions as a parodic revision and re-elaboration. He explores how Larsen's characterization rejects simple representations of women as either genteel or vulgar, as typified in romance and sentimental novel traditions. The dilemma of virgin and whore that Larsen's protagonists face symbolizes "the muddy terrain of the sexual profile of African American women," and implies at the same time a racialized masking strategy that conceals a female sensibility. Each protagonist manages to transgress both racial boundaries and sexual restraints by affirming her own individual identity and sexuality. Furthermore, Larsen challenges the idealized discourse of marriage and maternity, another feature of the sentimental novel. Similar in function to the protagonists' deviation from the norms of African American femininity, their final controversial destruction also covers Larsen's innovative, yet not necessarily problem-free, feminist and anti-racist vision.

Gallego also sees Jessie Fauset's mulatta protagonist in Plum Bun (1928) as a metaphor of double consciousness, of African American women, and of the problematic definition of both their identity and their sexuality. Fauset's dramatization of the "mulatta" protagonist's desire to pass as white, however, exposes the white world as materially and morally corrupted, and idealizes Harlem as morally and culturally solid. For Gallego, Fauset's characterization in such contrasting social backgrounds aims to reveal the materialist and racist roots and motivations of the action of passing and the destructive consequences of such action. As interpreted by Gallego, the action itself also constitutes a disguising strategy that conceals Fauset's critique of racist ideology. Other means of disguising include the genres of the fairy tale, the romance, and the nursery rhymes. By strategically employing these means, Fauset parodies fairy tale motifs in African American life and devises a strategy of survival rooted in "double double consciousness." In spite of their endowments of beauty and their longing for riches and happiness, both protagonists, contrary to their idealized fairy-tale models and the conventional images of African American women, possess assertive personalities, materialistic attitudes that confound their emotions, and a desire for happiness rendered difficult by racial and gender categorizations. The discrepancy between the African American women's ruthless reality, on the one hand, and conventional childhood's pleasures and hopes, on the other hand, is also rewritten, as Gallego explains, in the Mother Goose nursery rhyme that shapes the structure of the novel. The "plum bun" obtained by the speaker in the rhyme and metaphorically achieved by Angela, one of the protagonists, appropriately supplants marriage and the fallen woman with a work of art at the conclusion of the novel.