Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Neil Sullivan

The need for recognition is paramount in the lives of Clare and Irene, just as it was in Larsen's own. Recognition is always bound to the Other's inscrutable desire, for "man's desire is the desire of the Other" (Lacan, Four 38). Thus, Irene accuses Clare - "exquisite, golden, fragrant, flaunting" - of a "deliberate courting of attention" (Passing 203), while she herself spends an inordinate amount of time dressing throughout the novel. Recognition requires an appearance of wealth and whiteness in the bourgeois milieu of Passing. Irene "passes" not by adopting a white identity as Clare does, but by adopting white values, including white standards of beauty.(7) Thus, Thadious Davis explains Irene's "attraction to Clare" as an "aesthetic attraction to whiteness," a "logical extension of her black bourgeoisie lifestyle and ideology" (326). While Clare claims Irene as her link to blackness, Irene mediates her desire for whiteness through Clare. With her "ivory face under that bright hair" (Passing 161) and her marriage to a white financier, Clare becomes Irene's vicarious connection to the white world.(8) In dialogue, the subject must determine the desire of the Other, or as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan writes, the subject implicitly asks the Other, "What am I to/of you?" (48), a question that Irene asks not only of Clare, but through Clare. As I will argue, Clare becomes an image of Irene's self; Clare's definition as "nigger" in the eyes of John Bellew will then become Irene's definition of herself. When that meaning literally eclipses Clare's being, Irene, too, will suffer aphanisis, the disappearance of the subject behind the signifier.

Before deciding to pass for white, Clare lived an African American identity, not as Irene does as a member of the black middle class, but first as an impoverished daughter of an alcoholic janitor and then as the orphaned niece of two white great-aunts who treat Clare as if they were ugly step-sisters in the Cinderella tale. Clare describes to Irene an upbringing commensurate with the ideology her Aunt Grace and Aunt Edna borrow directly from the slavery apologists of the Old South:

"I was, it was true, expected to earn my keep by doing all the housework, and most of the washing. But do you realize, 'Rene, that if it hadn't been for them, I shouldn't have had a home in the world? . . . Besides, to their notion, hard labour was good for me. I had Negro blood and they belonged to a generation that had written and read long articles headed: 'Will the Blacks Work?' Too, they weren't quite sure that the good God hadn't intended the sons and daughters of Ham to sweat because he had poked fun at old man Noah once when he had taken a drop too much. I remember the aunts telling me that that old drunkard had cursed Ham and his sons for all time." (15859)

The aunts echo nineteenth-century paternalist pro-slavery arguments by pronouncing the curse of Ham upon Clare, assigning her a subservient position in the family, and intimating a moral degradation that only hard work and "white" guidance can correct. In a rare moment, Clare confides to Irene that the economic and psychological impact of the aunts' beliefs drove her to discard her black identity and become white. She "wanted things," she tells Irene, and clearly she means not only material goods but love and emotional comfort, as well, for she wants "to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham" (159). The aunts' definition of blackness attempts to rob Clare of her humanity, so she must shed that black identity to be human. To do so, she must literally turn white by passing, accepting the demands of assimilation to avoid the ramifications of what Joel Kovel refers to as the "Ham Myth of Expulsion" (79).