Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Neil Sullivan

Irene begins to feel ambivalence about her African heritage, and that ambivalence is associated with Clare as Irene begins to wish "for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro" (225). Irene is "on the verge of total mental disintegration" (Tate 143), and initially she projects her disintegration onto her double and idealized image, Clare, a projection that issues in what Jonathan Little refers to as the "imagery of fragmentation" associated with Clare (179). Although Clare represents Irene's ideal physical image, she maintains only a precarious hold on her own white identity, as evidenced by her refusal to have black servants (who might "discover" her identity) or to give birth to another child because the "hellish strain" of anxiety about the child's coloring would be too much for her (Passing 168). When she says, "'Really, 'Rene, I'm not safe'" (210), she means not only that she is dangerous because of the risks she takes but also that she is always already in danger of destruction. Fragmented things become metonymies for Clare, and since Clare is a version of Irene, they represent Irene herself, even when she is consciously performing the fragmentation. As Lacan demonstrates in "The Mirror Stage," corporal integrity is fundamental to subjectivity, so we could conclude that corporal disintegration is a prelude to aphanisis, the subject's disappearance. The symbolic mutilation that Irene performs on Clare foreshadows aphanisis for both women.

The first fragmentation involves Irene's destruction of letters from Clare at two different points in the narrative. From Irene's perspective, Clare's letters are always a little obtrusive; like Clare herself, her letters are "furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting," "out of place and alien," and "mysterious" (143). Significantly, both letters revive for Irene the memory of John Bellew's racist invective, along with the presence of Clare. The first of these is the note Clare sends Irene to thank her for attending the tea in Chicago. But the letter only reminds Irene of the humiliation of listening silently to Bellew's racist diatribe, so she destroys it:

With an unusual methodicalness she tore the offending letter into tiny ragged squares that fluttered down and made a small heap in her black crepe de Chine lap. The destruction completed, she gathered them up, rose, and moved to the train's end. Standing there, she dropped them over railing and watched them scatter, on tracks, on cinders, on forlorn grass, in rills of dirty water. (178)

In destroying the letter, an overture of friendship, Irene symbolically attempts to rid herself of Clare as "Nig." She tears it into "tiny ragged squares," then scatters the pieces in a gesture of riddance, a forced disappearance of Clare's asserted presence, which brings with it John Bellew's hatred of "niggers." Irene then thinks that, if Clare shows up in person, she "had only to turn away her eyes, to refuse her recognition" (178). Unconsciously, she is mimicking the behavior of the white racist, willing Clare's disappearance through a refusal to recognize. The second letter, which Irene receives in New York two years later, revives again the memory of shame, "bringing with them a clear, sharp remembrance, in which even now, after two years, humiliation, resentment, and rage were mingled" (145). Later, she "tear[s] the letter across" and flings "it into the scrap-basket" (191), acting out both her anger at Clare and the disintegration she feels with the memory of Bellew's hatred.