Classic Review: PASSING

Is it my imagination or has Passing by Nella Larsen just come back into vogue? Published in 1929 it has certainly been around for a while, so why is it I've only just seen it on 'must-read' list in the the past two or three years? Apparently Passing has always been operating just below the bubbling line, it has never made too much of a splash. Even after it was published and the reviewed by W.E.B. Du Bois where he called it was of the finest books published that year saying, "the psychology of the thing; the reaction of it on friend and enemy. It is a difficult task, but she attacks the problem fearlessly and with consummate art." It still made barely a ripple. So why now? Could it be that our society is becoming less homogenous and more multicultural, and more and more people are finally acknowledging that race it just a made up construct, one that shouldn't define us? Perhaps with the popularity of books like Vanishing Half (2020) readers are starting to look around to see what other examples they can find of people of one race passing for a member of another race.

The concept of "passing" is not new in society or in literature. In the introduction to the version I read, Kaitlyn Greenidge wrote that passing was not always such a tortured act as literature would have you believe. In fact, the idea of  the horrors of passing and being found out, leading to ruination and death probably came into a new meaning, 

...when passing challenged the biological essentialism at the core of the newly developed race theory of the late nineteenth century. For whites actively working to segregate public and private life throughout the United States, "passing" was an active threat. The moral basis of white support for segregation and racial terrorism was the "fact" that humans belonged to separate races, with inherent, immutable traits that directly aligned with moral aptitude and capabilities. So what was society to make of an individual who could slip between? (ix)

In Passing two old friends chance to meet in Chicago one hot afternoon. Irene and Clare are both spending a few moments out of the sun when Clare spots Irene. Clare left home years ago and slipped into the white world, even marrying a man who is openly a racist. Irene, who also has light skin, only passes for white when it is convenient, like at this moment when she wants to do something that she could not have as a Black person, like sitting at this particular restaurant sipping an ice tea. The two friends reconnect but Irene is very uncomfortable with Clare's choice to not only pass as a white person but to return to Harlem for frequent visits. At one point, Irene is even tempted to tell Clare's husband about the ruse, after she suspects Clare of having an affair with her husband. "She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race." 

It is in this dilemma that the plot rests. Irene as a woman feels threatened by Clare. She wants to do something about it but she can't because it would be disloyal to her race.

The book is short, a novella really, yet there is little action. Most of the conflict occurs in Irene's mind. At one point, as my husband and I were listening to the audiobook, I turned it off and commented how boring it is when everything happens inside one character's mind. My husband thought it made a good point that we, as white people, can't relate to that tussel of ideas/conformity many people of color have to cope with every day. Good point, I conceded and turned on the audio again. At that very point, with less than 15 minutes left of the story, the climax occurred. I wasn't prepared for it but found the timing of my comment quite ironic. The ending is ambiguous but unsettling. Perhaps the author wanted her readers to question the ending by examining the idea of race vs friend vs self and then let us to draw our own conclusions.

Nella Larsen only published two novels and a few short stories yet today she is recognized as one of the finest writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance. Interestingly she was a mixed race person, having a white mother and an Afro-Caribbean father, who may also have been mixed. The book Passing comes from a place of knowing personally what it was like to not be accepted by either world. After her parent's relationship broke up, Nella's mother married a white man and had a child with him. "[Nella] could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up.^[3]"(Wikipedia)

One gets a sense of that netherworld in Passing.

My rating 3 stars.

-Anne