Out the Window: Dissolving Binaries in Nella Larsen's Passing

Out the Window: Dissolving Binaries in Nella Larsen's Passing

Beth Marzoni

With the final scene of her novel, Passing, Nella Larsen achieves a strange unity in her text. As we climb the six stories to Felise's party, Larsen begins to subtly return to the early pages of the novel. Perched by an open window because she is too hot, Irene Redfield watches “the tiny spark [of her cigarette] drop slowly down to the white ground below,” and we are reminded of a previous, elevated moment in the text (110). Within the first pates of the novel, we encountered a similar experience when, overheated on the summer streets of Chicago, Irene ascends to the roof of the Drayton Hotel and encounters Clare Kendry. Clare is also at Felise's party, “radiant in a shining red gown” that also causes associative effects for the reader, recalling us to Irene's first memory of Clare, “a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing piece of bright red cloth together” to make a new dress for her Sunday school picnic (9).

Larsen utilizes these two mirrored occasions in the text to create a sort of frame around her novel, eerily linking beginning and end. This association is not a static return, however, as, though they are reminiscent of each other, these account for the absolute reversal of tones in the text. Being on the roof of the Drayton, height meant security for Irene and safety from the sweaty, pressing crowd of the street below: “With a quick perception of the need for immediate safety, she lifted a wavering hand in the direction of a cab parked directly in front of her... It was, she thought, like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one she had left below” (13). Elevation at the party, on the other hand, is dangerous, and Irene's host warns her as she smokes by the window, “you ought not... to stand there like that” (110). Clare's red dress evolves, too. No longer the “pathetic little red frock” of her childhood, the garment has become a beautiful, shimmering, sexy vision heightening the sense of Clare's power (10). In both these cases, the same images have altered to represent polar opposites: safety becomes danger; pathos becomes envy. Things have changed and, more than simply returning, the reader revisits these moments because they are complementary, because they create on of the many binary systems upon which this novel is both structured and deconstructed.

Such opposition sits at the root of Larsen's Passing. While black and white interact to create the most prominent tension in the novel, this racial binary is not the only juxtaposition at work. In a way, it serves as a beginning, a place from which to launch the other oppositions explored in the text: heterosexual and homosexual; upper class and lower class; Irene and Clare; the conscious and the unconscious. As Larsen's title explains, however, this text is not simply about the creation of dichotomous identities and structures but also concerns passing between them, linking those moments and objects in complete opposition, and understanding how the novel evolves from beginning to end.

Larsen uses the black/white binary as the foundation of her novel, and passing between racial identities forms the crux of her plot. With Clare Kendry's entry into the novel, Irene's life comes, not only, an acute sense of racial identity, but also the flexibility of such barriers—expressly for those for whom race is purely a social construct with no physical indicators. Clare is one such individual, a black woman who has spent twelve years passing as white. Clare's passing has been more than that, however, as she has abandoned all ties to her black past and community to enter the white world. Not even Clare's racist husband, John Bellew, suspects his wife's race, though he ironically names her “Nig.” Bellew's character highlights the power of racism and, thus, resistance when Irene , who asserts that she has never considered passing, is forced to do so because of Bellew's (and Clare's) violent enforcement of the black/white binary.

However, the arrival of Clare in this text ushers in passing on more than simply a racial level, as Clare seems to trigger all of the sexual awareness in the novel. Though both Clare and Irene are married women, their marriages (especially Irene's) seem to contain no passion. Irene and her husband, Brian, sleep in different bedrooms, and Irene ruminates in a distanced way about their relationship: “He was her husband and the father of her sons. But, was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more? In that hour she thought not” (107). Yet, Clare seems automatically to assume the “more” that Brian lack's for Irene. Clare's body defines her in this text, and in the first moments of their meeting it is Clare's body that attracts Irene's attention as she ponders her eyes, smile, and hands; Irene even considers Clare's “tempting mouth” (28). In fact, Clare does not seem to simply bring out Irene's sexuality but to highlight, in numerous passages, homosexuality in this woman heretofore labeled heterosexual. A close look at Brian supports this understanding of Irene's sexuality, as her opinion of her husband's appearance seems to be tempered with defense of questionable heterosexuality: “Brian was... extremely good looking. Not, of course, pretty or effeminate; the slight irregularity of his nose saved him from the prettiness, and the rather marked heaviness of his chin saved him from the effeminacy. But, he was in a pleasant masculine way, rather handsome” (53-4).

While Irene certainly feels the struggle with heterosexual versus homosexual tension, continuously excited by Clare's gaze but unsettled by her touch, Clare seems unperturbed by her own androgyny and possible bisexuality. Her husband, John, is at one point described as “womanish” (38). She compares her friendship with Irene with a romantic relationship: “Every day I went to that nasty little post-office place. I'm sure they were all beginning to think that I had been carrying on an illicit love-affair” (65). Thus, just as she begins to force a breakdown of the ordered binary system at work racially in Irene's life, Clare acts as a sexual passer, too, disregarding dichotomies.

Clare also easily disregards binaries between classes. Irene notes that, when Clare came to visit, she would often “descend to the kitchen and with—to Irene—an exasperating childlike lack of perception, spend her visit in talk and merriment with Zulena and Sadie,” Irene's black servants (79). This ability to transcend economic boundaries is the one that Irene lacks and “secretly resents,” pointing out that she “wouldn't have... been so friendly with white servants” (79). Clare depicts class changeability by moving easily from her white upper class lifestyle to Irene's bourgeois Harlem society, to the below-stairs realm of the servants that Irene cannot (or will not allow herself to) achieve.

In the explorations of each of these binary structures, we find the basis for an argument that Irene and Clare themselves act as a binary system in Passing. Clare has abandoned her black identity to pass for white with her racist, white, husband, while Irene has worked with her black husband to become a pillar of the black community in Harlem. Clare is defined by her attractiveness and people's capacity to love her, qualities that, for her, seem independent of a person's sex, while Irene sleeps separately from her husband, shrinks under Clare's lips on her shoulder, and concludes that she “couldn't be sure she had ever truly known love” (107). Clare moves easily in and out of social classes that make Irene uncomfortable. Clare is, in fact, the ultimate passer, willing to give up entire identities to take on new ones at whim with no consideration to those around her. She admits, “I'm not safe,” and explains that “to get things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away” (81). All this she confesses to Irene, a woman who asserts that she wants “security” most in life, “only to be tranquil, unmolested” (107).

Yet, for all of Clare and Irene's apparent polarities, Larsen relates them. By means of careful imagery that suggests leaks in the juxtaposition of even this structure, here, too, we find blurring of the boundaries between binaries. Throughout the entire novel, Larsen builds the color red as a signifier for Clare: her red dress, her red lips, and her frequent association with fire, all point to symbolism. However, this imagery that is to tied up in notions of Clare also, at intervals, refers to Irene. After recounting her memory of Clare's red Sunday school frock she pieced together as a child, Irene turns to her memories of the meeting in Chicago and “brilliant red patches” flame in her cheeks (11). After encountering Bellew on the streets of New York, Felise begins to allude that Irene may have a racial secret but is distracted: “Can it be possible that honest Irene has—Oh, do look at that coat! There. The red one. Isn't it a dream?” (100). Red is also an important part of Irene's identity; her last name, Redfield, suggests that Irene actually encompasses everything that is red in this novel, including Clare.

This notion of a simultaneous opposition and relation between Irene and Clare is supported by their initial reunion on the roof of the Drayton Hotel. Repeatedly throughout the text Irene and Clare meet each other in mirrors, and the scene at the Drayton, though void of an actual mirror, is strikingly similar. Clare's gaze is enough first to make Irene uncomfortable, but slowly she begins to check herself, to make sure she is presentable, straightening her hat, checking her makeup, ensuring her dress is all right, as if she stood in front of a mirror. The physical absence of such a medium gives this scene its power, however, as under Clare's gaze, Irene becomes momentarily convinced that the woman knows she is black; suddenly the possibility exists that one or both of these figures are simply reflections. The fact that Clare recognizes Irene seems to give that character an upper hand, suggests that possibly Clare is nothing more than an aspect of Irene, a wish or desire characteristically repressed. This consideration causes Felise's distraction by the red coat to take on a significant and uncanny meaning, creating an association between Irene's secret and the color red, hinting that Irene's secret is Clare.

This would suggest, in fact, that the binary between Irene and Clare is also the juxtaposition between the conscious and unconscious. “Passing” in this binary comes to mean recognition of repression, the appearance of Clare in Irene's life echoing an emergence of the unconscious into the realms of consciousness in the novel. Once she has identified Clare at the Drayton, Irene expresses a wish to “find out about this hazardous business of 'passing'” (24). As critic Monique Rooney observes, “Irene must repress her own transgressive desire to pass, a transgression that tropes on bodily misrecognition... It is, after all, Clare's ostensible lack of awareness, particularly of the power her body holds, that most torments Irene” (7). It is not simply the social implications of Clare's body that Irene envies, however, but also the physical and sexual. Rooney points out that “it was [Clare's] smile that maddened Irene” (Larsen, 111), an attribute that Irene automatically relates to sex on the room of the Drayton, noting that Clare's smile was “a shade too provocative for a waiter” (15). This openness and comfort with sex, however, is completely missing in Irene's life. In a conversation with her husband, Brian refers to sex as “a grand joke, the greatest in the world,” shining an insightful light on the couple's own relationship (60). In the same conversation, Irene expresses a wish to shield her son from the knowledge of sex, and is unable to utter the word herself: “'I'm terribly afraid he's picked up some queer ideas about things—some things—from the older boys, you know'” (59).

In light of this, it becomes difficult to disregard the possibility that Clare symbolizes the unconscious wishes of Irene, and that her appearance in the novel is the manifestation needed to challenge Irene's repression. Before Clare enters the text, Irene is living in opposition to no one. In fact, the dichotomies that drive this novel do not exist until Clare holds up her figurative mirror, creating binary opposition in the text and passing that notion off onto Irene. The reader is even unaware of Irene's race until Clare's gaze causes her to panic and wonder if her blackness has been revealed.

The eruption and unraveling of the unconscious and the repressed through the course of Passing culminates in Clare's death. However, this final passage becomes problematic, as the idea of a dichotomous link between Irene and Clare begs the question of what exactly Irene destroys when she pushes Clare out the window in the end of the novel. While it can certainly be argued that Clare's death signals a failure or punishment of passing in the novel, Irene's destruction of her own rebelliousness, I disagree. Just as there is a shift in the meaning behind the imagery that links the beginning of the novel to the end, Irene's character passes through this text dynamically; we do not simply return to Irene as she was before Clare's gaze on the room of the Drayton. Instead, I would argue that Irene's evolution through the text, culminating in Clare's death, is actually the passing through and destruction of binary systems.

At the beginning of the novel, we encounter Irene safely insulated, but in the end she is a murderer, no longer contained as her passing has become ultimate. First she comes to inhabit a racial space between black and white when Bellew identifies her as a “mulatto” while she shops with her dark skinned friend Felise. In this moment, Irene's identity can only slip into the ambiguous gray space between binaries, fluidly encompassing either and both categories at all times. Irene achieves comparable middle ground concerning her mental state, as during and after Clare's death, Irene exists somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious. Just before Bellew appears at the party, Irene sits by the window, finishing her cigarette. She then flicks the butt out the window and watches “the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below,” a passage eerily like that describing Clare's death (110). Larsen describes Clare, just before she disappears through the window, as “a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold” (111). Larsen's imagery undeniably links Clare to Irene's cigarette, subtly associating Irene's actions. Further, Irene states that “she had thought of nothing in that sudden moment of action,” highlighting both the consciousness of the action and its repression (112). This space between dichotomies is preserved after the act, as Irene “never allowed herself to remember. Never clearly,” whether or not she murdered Clare (111). Finally, Irene, so set on tranquility just pages before, has become a dangerous force like Clare. She has, however, adopted this treachery, that she identifies in Clare as destabilizing, chaotic energy, to maintain stability in her own life, and to maintain Brian. Thus, existing yet again between two of Clare's polarities (Clare who was only ever black or white, or who was prepared to abandon entire identities in order to take on their opposite) Irene has become a hybrid unable to be defined by binary structure.

Not only Irene has undergone this transformation, however, as in the course of the novel, passing becomes fluid, not simply in terms of Irene's final overwhelming of binary tensions but also as a definition unto itself. Passing is, of course, pretending to be someone or something you aren't, but it is also the passing of Clare's binary system on to Irene; it is passing back and forth, the switching and slipping between definitions and identities. The ending of this novel, however, collapses all of the levels of passing in the text. There is only one ultimate passing—death, the death of Clare, the death of binary systems, and the death of passing itself.

Works Cited

Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Rooney, Monique. “'Recoil' or 'Seize'?: Passing, Ekphrasis, and 'Exact Expression' in Nella Larsen's Passing.” Enculturation, Vol. 3, No. 2. Available: Accessed May 28, 2002.

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