Building Your Library, Nella Larsen's Passing
The Author: Nella Larsen
Recommended Reading: Passing
Nella Larsen’s novel Passing takes us to the epicenter of the Jazz Age: Harlem, and also to a central site of conflict over what the Black legacy will be. Larsen’s novel is set in the influential drawing room of Black-bourgeois socialite and community builder Irene Redfield, whose life has just been complicated by the arrival of childhood friend and rival Clare Kendry.
Clare, a mixed-race woman, has, since childhood, lived along the margins of the Black bourgeois community Irene navigates with perfect fluency, and it makes sense that as Irene has been forging her identity among the Black elite and the white tourists of Harlem (more on this in my next post) Clare has been passing for white and has married a prominent white businessman.
Clare, who moves in and out of white New York and Irene’s Harlem, charming everyone in her path, is causing increasing instability in Irene’s life (or was Irene always unstable? Mentally as well as in the racial legibility she has moored her identity to even as her body is capable of and does pass throughout the narrative). Meanwhile, Clare’s indecision about which half of a binarized world to belong to when her body clearly reflects neither is careening toward a crisis point.
Passing is a complex novela about the construction of race, identity, and a yearning for social belonging set against the glittering backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a novela I’ve read six times, taught twice, and plan, eventually, to write about in the context of New York metropolitanism. Passing is a key example of both the literary output of the Harlem Renaissance and belongs to canons of Black Literature, Literature by Women, Literary Modernism, Literature of the Jazz Age, and Urban Literary Studies.
Many descriptions of the novel emphasize the damaging effect of “hiding identity,” but if you take my reading recommendation and want to read as I would, I encourage you to try to think more complexly about the question of stable identity. When I read Passing what stands out to me is not so much that Irene and Clare have stable identities that they hide, but rather that their identities as mixed-race women highlight the instability of thinking in terms of “Black and white.” Their challenge comes from, essentially, having no place in either category and this is especially apparent in Larsen’s portrayal (through the eyes of Irene) of Clare. While Irene has a clear and stable position in the Black bourgeois community of Chicago, Clare is passed back and forth between Black and white relatives, and, therefore, lacks the clear sense of community and identity that Irene has, though as the novel progresses Irene’s own sense of belonging becomes increasingly muddied and incoherent. Part of what I love about this novel is that it rejects the easy conception of identity and offers, instead, a deconstruction of many identity categories.
Like many novels set in cities (and especially the Jazz Age novels of New York) Passing recreates the Harlem Renaissance and if you read it you’ll find many a clear historical figure with a slightly changed name, lending the novella’s setting even more of the feel of an insider’s view of the Harlem Renaissance. As you read think about the representation of the city, of who New York belongs to, who moves freely in the city, and who is relegated to certain spaces or neighborhoods? While many romantic notions revolve around the cosmopolitan and diverse nature of cities, Passing is also, importantly, from the perspective of a Black woman living in the Harlem Renaissance milieu, so while Larsen captures the excitement of the age, her novel also remains powerfully aware of the ways the city doesn’t belong to the people who created much of U.S. artistic culture. So, take a step back into “When Harlem was in Vogue” (Langston Hughes) and stay tuned for my reflections on why reading Hughes’s essay alongside Passing will enrich your reading of the novel.
The version of the novel I have linked to is published by Chemeketa Press which is a press based out of Chemeketa Community College. I selected this version of the book because the press’s mission of making affordable versions of books for students seems like a laudable venture. There are other great versions, for example, the Norton edition (and Norton Press is collectively owned by their employees which also makes it a great press to support) which includes supplemental materials. I encourage you to consider supporting your local bookstore by purchasing from them, but should you want to support Maison Metropolitanist as a digital learning space buying through the affiliate link at Book Shop (linked above) is one way you can do so. For now, proceeds from the Maison Metropolitanist shop will go directly into the cost of running this project.