Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Neil Sullivan

Looking at the woman before her, Irene Redfield had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling. Reaching out, she grasped Clare's two hands in her own and cried with something like awe in her voice: "Dear God! But aren't you lovely, Clare!" (194).

If the mirror were not implicitly present in the scene and if there were no elision of identities, the "kiss," the "inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling," and Irene's expression of awe might all be read exclusively as signs of an erotic attraction between two women. However, Irene is looking in the mirror when Clare enters, and the mirror's presence makes ambiguous the phrase looking at the woman before her. Is that woman Clare or Irene herself? Moreover, Irene's reaction to Clare's entrance reiterates the Lacanian infant's "jubilant assumption" of her mirror image ("Mirror Stage" 2), for like the mirror-stage infant, Irene reaches out to the image and exclaims with joy. Her "awed" exclamation" 'Dear God! But aren't you lovely, Clare!'" indicates that she sees in Clare an image superior to the one she nervously fussed over before Clare's entrance and therefore more fitting to represent the "mental permanence of the I" (Lacan, "Mirror Stage" 2). As if to stress the identification between the two, Clare even seats herself in Irene's "favourite chair" (194). While Irene's reaction includes erotic overtones, it also contains narcissistic ones. The scene confirms the oscillation between Irene's "desire for Clare and identification with her" that Helena Michie notes (151). Irene sees in Clare an "image of her futile searching" for permanence (Passing 200), and as the novel continues, she has difficulty separating "individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry" (227).(14)

As Irene realizes that she cannot "master" Clare, the identification between the two women becomes more problematic.(15) The beautiful, idealized white image is denied Irene when she begins to suspect that Clare is trying to seduce her husband Brian and that the two plan to betray and abandon her. When this suspicion crystallizes, also before the mirror, Irene experiences a temporary eclipse of being: "The face in the mirror vanished from her sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind" (217; emphasis added). When the face finally reappears in the mirror, it is "her dark-white face" (no longer purely white), one which she meets not with joy but with "a kind of ridiculing contempt" (218). Later in the novel, when Irene and Clare meet before the mirror for the last time, Irene experiences fear and guilt over her sin of omission; she knows but fails to tell Clare that Bellew; having seen Irene out with the brown-skinned Felise Freeland, probably suspects Clare's racial identity. "Irene passed a hand over her eyes to shut out the accusing face in the glass before her. With one corner of her mind she wondered how long she had looked like that, drawn and haggard and-yes, frightened" (233). As Irene becomes more and more incapable of controlling either Clare or herself, she experiences a diminution of the "loveliness" in the mirror. The image is no longer one of mastery, but one of impotence and fear.