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. . Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one's own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people were so cursed as Ham's dark children. (Passing 225)
Although many critics have accused Nella Larsen of using race as a pretext for examining other issues,l Passing (1929), her second novel, is profoundly concerned with racial identity. In "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring "that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers" (170). For Larsen, too, "race" is inextricable from the collateral issuesincluding class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity. "Passing," of course, alludes to the crossing of the color line that was once so familiar in American narratives of "race," but in Larsen's novel the word also carries its colloquial meaning-death. Thus Passing's title, like the title of Larsen's earlier Quicksand, hints at the subject's disappearance in the narrative, or the possibility of aphanisis, which Jacques Lacan defines in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis as the disappearance of the subject behind the signifier. For Irene Westover Redfield and Clare Kendry Bellew, the "twin" protagonists of Passing, the obliterating signifier is nigger, a word that comes to encapsulate their struggle with the conflicts of American racism and assimilation. The narrative representation of these conflicts also suggests at a symbolic level Larsen's repetition and working through of her own anxieties about the rejection she experienced as a result of her racial identity.
Her hazy origins and almost traceless "disappearance" differentiate Larsen from the other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, but not from the characters of her own novels. Until the publication of the 1994 biography by Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen's life was shrouded in silence; not even the year of her birth was certain.2 Davis's project was "to remove the aura of...