Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Neil Sullivan

Aphanisis threatens Clare in the novel when her "light" name (Clare means 'light') is supplanted by her dark name: "Nig," the uncanny appellation provided jokingly by her husband John Bellew, the racist ignorant of her African heritage.(9) He explains the nickname to her tea party guests, Gertrude and Irene, who also disguise their African American identities for Bellew's benefit:" 'When we were first married, she was as white as - as - well as white as a lily. But I declare she's gettin' darker and darker. I tell her if she don't look out, she'll wake up one of these days and find she's turned into a nigger'" (171). Bellew's naming makes present the identity that Clare strives to hide (but it eventually makes Clare herself absent).(10) He explains to the three disguised Negroes precisely what "niggers" are:

"I don't dislike them, I hate them . . . . They give me the creeps. The black scrimy devils . . . . And I read in the papers about them. Always robbing and killing people. And," he added darkly, "worse." (172)

Despite all its trappings of urbanity, this tea party becomes a microcosm of American racism: A white male who exudes the "impression of latent physical power" (170) discourses upon the meaning of nigger while three African Americans wearing self-protective masks must silently listen, powerless to challenge his version of the truth.(11)

Uncontested beliefs soon become accepted as "truth." With her temporary white identity' and enforced silence, Irene is in danger of internalizing Bellew's "truths" as a form of unconscious ideological assimilation. His views on "black scrimy devils" provoke in Irene an hysteria figured as uncontrollable laughter, which she at first attributes to the irony of the situation; however, the hysteria goes beyond an amused response to an absurd situation. It marks a loss of control, the beginning of a mental deterioration that plagues Irene throughout the novel. African origins here are tied to a false but nonetheless powerful definition, one that is shared by the white world depicted in the novel. When Bellew pronounces the casual" 'Hello, Nig' "(170), he dredges up the memories of Clare's childhood humiliations and creates for Irene an anxiety about possible humiliations, humiliations intimated by his public proclamation of exclusion:" 'No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be' "(171).(12) This sentence - Bellew's reiteration of Noah's curse-causes the nearly implacable Clare an unhappiness she betrays in an expression "so dark and deep and unfathomable" as though in "the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart" (172).

Although the scene at the tea party, along with the rest of the novel, is narrated in the third person, the narrative consciousness is Irene's. The use of the word creature appears innocent in this context, but later the word creature resurfaces in the narrative in an overtly negative sense, revealing how Irene has already aligned herself with the white racist signification embodied by John Bellew. At the breakfast table in her own New York home, Irene recounts to her husband Brian her secret humiliation at Clare's party and her refusal ever to suffer such humiliation again:" '. . . I'm really not such an idiot that I don't realize that if a man calls me a nigger, it's his fault the first time, but mine it he has the opportunity to do it again'" (184). Within a few paragraphs of this confession, the maid enters to serve breakfast; again, the perspective is Irene's: "Zulena, a small mahogany-coloured creature, brought in the grapefruit" (184). In spite of Irene's admission of the humiliation of being called a "nigger," the narrative consciousness that reflects her own performs a gesture of dehumanization in describing the maid as a "mahogany-coloured creature" - for coloured connotes "creature" at the depths of Irene's unconscious.