ISSN 1229-3814 The Journal of Modern British & American

󰡔현대영미어문학󰡕 제38권 2호 Language & Literature Vol 38. No 2, May 2020

(2020년 5월) 27-53 http://dx.doi.org/10.21084/jmball.2020.05.38.2.27

‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in

Nella Larsen’s Passing

Min-Jung Kim*
(Ewha Womans University)

Kim, Min-Jung. 2020. “‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella
Larsen’s Passing.” The Journal of British & American Language & Literature 38.2:27-53.
While maintaining the pivotal issue of race in Nella Larsen’s Passing in view, this paper
seeks to shift the interpretive focus slightly by contending that far from claiming her black
race, Irene Westover’s understanding of the overwhelming significance of race in the U.S. is
manifested in her disavowal of her black identity. In the presence of Clare’s passing body,
Irene becomes raced, reducible to “a Negro,” both as she is literally cast as a link to the
black community, and importantly, when Irene finds herself exposed of her blackness. Thus,
this essay concentrates in particular on textual moments that Irene regards a renewed
relationship with her childhood acquaintance as highly charged distressing occasions in which
she is forced to inhabit a black racial identity. Incorporating Calvin Warren’s Ontological
Terror, this essay also argues that Irene’s fear of being black—condition of ejection, a
non-being, a black being, and nothingness—persistently informs her increasingly desperate
reflections of herself and Clare, and her determination to sever her link to Clare. The
horrifying reality of the literal destruction and expulsion of Clare’s passing body at the
story’s end seems to be the enactment of Irene’s racial terror. (Ewha Womans University)

Key Words: Nella Larsen, Passing, race, black, African-American

주 제 어: 넬라 라슨, 패싱, 인종, 검정, 미국 흑인

Criticism on the two black female protagonists Clare Kendry and Irene

* professor
28 Min-Jung Kim

Westover in Nella Larsen’s compact yet bewildering novella Passing

(1929) is abundant, as scholars have sought to unravel the text’s intriguing
complexities. The character of Clare Kendry, a beautiful light-skinned black
wife of a white businessman Jack Bellew who has passed over into white
society after abandoning her racial origins and meagre family background,
has been the interest of many. Among those who account for the
subversiveness of Clare’s passing, Martha Cutter contends that “Clare is
such a powerful presence because she denies the divisions of race, class,
and even sexuality” (1996, 89), and Gabrielle McIntire that the novella
“draws us into a maze of epistemological unrest” (2012, 779), for Clare
“resists interpretation textually, semiotically, sexually, and racially” (783).
Lori Harrison-Kahan calls attention to passing in “the formation of
subjectivity,” for Larsen’s women resist the fixity of becoming a racial
object of the gaze as in Fanon’s example of a black man, but “construct
their ambiguity through performances of identity” (2002, 111).1 With much
of the story anchored in the relationship between Clare Kendry and her
childhood acquaintance as a result of their casual reencounter after twelve
years, some have concentrated specifically on Irene Westover, the
light-skinned wife of a black doctor with two sons who prizes “the sense
of security, the feeling of permanence” (Larsen 2003, 57) above all else in

1 Additionally, some early interpretations such as by Judith Butler, Deborah McDowell,

Claudia Tate, and David L. Blackmore have carried the discussion beyond the issue of race
or have pivoted on its imbrications with issues of sexuality in the text. In her widely-cited
reading that points to the homoerotic subplot in Passing, Deborah McDowell states that
underneath the safe surface of Irene’s story about racial passing “is the more dangerous story
—though not named explicitly—of Irene’s awakening sexual desire for Clare” (1986, xxvi).
David L. Blackmore argues that “an unnamed flight into the forbidden realm of same-sex
desire has ‘passed’ unnoticed by most readers,” but that the novella will reveal that Larsen
“hints at the idea of homosexual desire both between Irene and Clare and in the case of
Brian,” Irene’s husband (1922, 475). Claudia Tate also states that the text’s main tension
evolves from “Irene’s jealousy of Clare and not from racial issues which are at best
peripheral to the story” (1980, 143).
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 29

life. Johanna M. Wagner asserts that for Irene, Clare is “danger, a threat
to her racial ontology” (2011, 151) for her understanding of Clare is that
“comprehending Clare’s attitude, and finally Clare herself, would mean
breaching her own security, a sanctuary of a racially unified ontological
whole: knowing who she is” (149). Rafael Walker also maintains that
Clare’s “oscillatory biraciality”—not just passing “for small conveniences
but leading two lives, a white one and a black one”—poses the greatest
danger to Irene’s “orderly sense of the world,” since for Irene, “[its] threat
to the stability of racial identity is virtually indistinguishable from the
threat of complete chaos” (2016, 180).
While I am in line with these scholars on the critical point that Irene
conceives race as “the keystone of social life” (181), I would differ in the
specifics of their claims, that “racial identification is the very thing that
[Irene] most sedulously safeguards” (192). In this paper, I will thus take
the centrality of race in the novella in a slightly different direction. While
keeping the problematic of race as governing the text and at the core of
Irene and Clare’s volatile relationship in perspective, I will assert that
Clare’s passing body threatens Irene’s sense of herself not because Clare
disrupts Irene’s sense of her own affiliation to her black race, which she
lacks. Rather, Irene views her relation and reconnection with Clare as her
becoming reduced to her blackness, a non-being and non-existence, a
condition and identification that she fiercely seeks to reject and disclaim.
That is, Clare unsettles and confounds Irene’s understanding of herself by
introducing and reinforcing race as fundamental to her identity. Since Clare
unleashes Irene’s fear of her own blackness, the tragic conclusion for such
condition seems to be the literal expulsion and destruction of Irene’s
passing and passable body at the plot’s end.
30 Min-Jung Kim

II

Passing opens by means of a letter, with an extensive description of

Irene’s feelings of visible discomfort at receiving one that does not fit in
with “her other ordinary and clearly directed letters”: “The long envelope
of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place
and alien” (Larsen 2003, 9).2 Presented through Irene’s consciousness,
Irene continues to note that with its envelope “foreign paper of
extraordinary size,” there was “something mysterious and slightly furtive”
and “flaunting” about it, “a thin sly thing” (9). Clearly, the descriptives
used here, for immorality, illicitness, and impropriety, are conventionally
affixed to people and not objects. It is not for Irene’s lack of knowledge
of who the sender is (“no return address”) that makes for the letter’s alien
quality, since Irene “immediately know[s] who its sender was” (9), since
this is the second letter she receives—“some two years ago she had one
very like it in outward appearance” (9). As several scholars working on
epistolarity in literature have expounded at length, the letter can function
on two figurative levels. In its metaphoric function, the letter may serve as
“a substitute for the letter writer (a metaphor of the letter writer is
generated by the epistolary situation, which conjures up interiorized images
and comparisons),” and in its metonymic, “(the letter itself, by virtue of
physical contact, stands for the letter writer)” (Bower 1997, 19). Irene’s
preoccupation with the letter in this opening scene may be emblematic of
just one of her paranoid apprehensions. To Irene, “a thin sly thing” in its

2 Several critics have commented on the significance of the novel’s opening and the letter.

Pamela L. Caughie for instance argues that while the letter “serves synecdochically to figure
Clare’s status in the text,” it also has a metonymic function in that it “initiate[s] a chain of
connections that drives the plot forward, and thus it suggests not only aspects of Clare’s
identity,” but “the text’s status as well, particularly the text’s own furtiveness, protectiveness,
reticence, and self-difference” (1992, 780).
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 31

foreignness and illegibility becomes a metaphor for Clare’s character and

of Clare, evoking further images of the sender, “such an attitude towards
danger as she was sure the letter’s contents would reveal” (Larsen 2003,
9). Shortly after again, Irene notes, “this . . . was of a piece with all that
she knew of Clare Kendry. Stepping always on the edge of danger” (9).
Additionally, for Irene, as a figure for the letter writer, the sheer
material presence of the letter “as a physical entity emanating from,
passing between” (Altman 1982, 19) the writer and the addressee disturbs
her profoundly because she cannot control its operation, its creation and
movement. The physicality of letter in her home and among her “ordinary”
letters angers Irene because a letter is essentially about a relation, in that
it assumes and imposes connection, whether congenial or antagonistic,
between the writer and the addressee. As Janet Gurkin Altman observes,
the most distinctive aspect of epistolary discourse is the “I-You”
relationship; it is “colored by not one but two persons and by the specific
relationship existing between them” where the “I becomes defined relative
to the you whom [s/he] addresses” (1982, 118). For Irene, it is her
connection and association with Clare that troubles her, as “she disliked
the idea of opening and reading it” (Larsen 2003, 9 italics added).
As if in a determined attempt to disentangle herself from Clare, Irene
does not read the letter right away, but upon its receipt turns to childhood
memories of Clare that underscore the two women’s differences. Irene
“seemed to see a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing
pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall,
powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room,
bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the
less frightening because they were, for the most part, ineffectual.
Sometimes he did manage to reach her” (9). Irene’s reflections—that she
“seemed to see”—appear to evidence her desire to remember and reposition
32 Min-Jung Kim

Clare in her scant origins with an abusive janitor father and in poverty.
While Gabrielle McIntire also observes of Irene’s reflections here that she
is imagining rather than actually remembering a scene, McIntire provides a
somewhat different interpretation by marking it as rather involuntary and
unthinking: Irene “seemed to see” defines much of her views, for readers
“come to know [Irene] preeminently by her blindnesses rather than her
insights,” as “Irene’s vision will be both physically and metaphorically
under siege for much of the text” (2012, 781). H. Jordan Landry also
provides commentary on this scene, noting that Irene “seemed to see”
foregrounds “the constriction of Irene’s gaze,” but specifically her “inability
to see Clare outside of the conventional mode” (Larsen 2003, 12):
Literally, “Irene’s seeing Clare isn’t actual because she is accessing
memory,” but figuratively, Irene “can’t see Clare because her vision is
complicit in Clare’s father’s seeing,” for Irene’s seeing has also been
obscured by “racist and sexist notions about women of mixed ethnicity’s
propensity to betray others through sex” (Landry 2006, 36), “ideology
promulgated through the mulatto literary figure” (35). I would posit instead
that Irene’s abrupt return to her childhood memory betrays not necessarily
her complicity in dominant ideologies about mixed women, nor is it
unintentional, but bespeaks above all her conscious desire to cast the
young Clare in a particular way that cements their differences—Clare as
“selfish, and cold, and hard,” “catlike,” “rashly impulsive,” “soft malice”
with “a ferocity and impetuousness that disregarded or forgot any danger”
(Larsen 2003, 11). Moreover, far from intended to elicit sympathy, the
particular detail that Irene provides about Clare’s violent father emphasizes
Clare’s unfeeling and hardened nature, for what directly trails the lines
cited earlier are “[b]ut only the fact that the child had edged herself and
her poor sewing over to the farthermost corner of the sofa suggested that
she was in any way perturbed by this menace to herself and her work”
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 33

(9). A proof of Clare’s selfishness which Irene provides, that “even in

those days, nothing sacrificial in Clare Kendry’s idea of life, no allegiance
beyond her own immediate desire,” is Clare’s stealing of a portion of a
dollar from a dressmaker to buy herself a new dress for her Sunday
school picnic. This particular example does not seem to warrant Irene’s
assessment of her as “selfish, and cold, and hard” (10). Throughout Irene’s
representation, what is emphasized are the two women’s class differences:
Clare taking the money to “buy the material for that pathetic little red
frock” and her father Bob Kendry’s death in “a silly saloon-fight” (10).
With Clare’s unopened letter still in her hand, when Irene finally returns
to the letter after having conjured up memory of her childhood friend,
Irene’s response of “a little feeling of apprehension” is, as in her previous
assessment of the young Clare, both groundless yet understandable from its
contents. Offered in fragments through Irene’s reading of what she says
are “sheets upon thin sheets of it,” the letter expresses “an extravagantly
phrased wish to see [Irene] again” (11):

“. . . For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you

again, as I have never longed for anything before; and I have wanted many
things in my life. . . . You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am
all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I
was glad to be free of. . . . It’s like an ache, a pain that never ceases. . . .”
Sheets upon thin sheets of it. And ending finally with, ‘and it’s your fault,
‘Rene dear. At least partly. For I wouldn’t now, perhaps, have this terrible,
this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that time in Chicago. . . .” (11)

The letter discloses that what Clare wants is not necessarily a

connection to Irene per se, but living with a white racist husband and
having had to cut off her link to the black community, a reconnection
with other black people in Harlem—“For I am lonely, so lonely.” H.
Jordan Landry states here that in the case of Clare, “through seeing Irene,
34 Min-Jung Kim

she comes to consciousness about her wounded state within the white
world, her ‘pain’ and ‘pale[ness]’,” and that “this recognition of paucity
comes from the loss of her own African-American female body in passing
white” (2006, 38). Landry further notes that for Clare, the “terrible, wild
desire” can be fulfilled through “a material reunion” with Irene, and as
such, Clare “figures the physicality of Irene as a cure to her own
threatened body image” (38) and as “recoverable in the body of Irene”
(39). Whether one could describe Clare’s response to Irene as “erotic
transference” or that “self-love can come from love of Irene” (39) is
debatable, since for Clare, Irene embodies the black race and her
connection to the African-American community. Clare’s letter reads like a
love letter, especially as it is, without any reference to race, it is about
unrequited attachment. At the same time, on close inspection, what Clare
desires is “that other [life] that I once thought I was glad to be free of”
which has been triggered “at least partly” by the two women’s chance
meeting. That is, what/who Clare desires is not Irene but a connection to
Harlem. But this is precisely why the letter upsets Irene: her recognition
that for Clare, Irene is the black race. Irene’s angered reflections that “nor
would she assist Clare to realize her foolish desire to return for a moment
to that life which long ago, and of her own choice, she had left behind”
(Larsen 2003, 11) reveals that what upsets her is not only Clare’s foolish
desire but because of her own blackness, her involvement in it. Irene’s
ruminations again later that she has “no intention of being the link
between [Clare] and her poorer dark brethren” (55) suggest that a renewed
relation with Clare distresses Irene, because at odds with her carefully
orchestrated daily life of bourgeois womanhood, she becomes inseparable
from her racial identity.
As if to attest that for Irene, she does not wish to have race occupy
the center of her everyday consciousness or be reminded of it, notably,
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 35

there is no mention of race in Clare’s letter which is provided to the

readers through Irene’s selected presentation—punctuated and edited by
ellipses. Moreover, it is only after several pages in chapter two that race
actually enters the narrative. Even in the pages that are allotted to Irene’s
observations on Clare’s childhood, racial cues remain absent, and if at all,
in fact, are used as class signifiers. Clare is a “pale small girl,” Clare
“stares down at the pasty white face of her parent,” and “Irene’s cheeks
are warm and olive” (10). Chapter one ends with Irene’s reading of
Clare’s letter, which takes the next chapter to their chance meeting in
Chicago. Irene begins to recall that moment two years back at the
all-white rooftop café in Chicago’s Drayton hotel, associating it with
“humiliation, resentment, and rage” (11), feelings that readers learn Irene
experiences at the possibility of racial detection. Shopping on a sultry
August day in Chicago, Irene desperately feels the urge to find refuge
from “burning sidewalks, stinging the seared or dripping skins of wilting
pedestrians” (13). Seized by “the need for immediate safety,” she gets on
a cab that can take her “on a roof somewhere” (13 italics added).
Auspiciously, the cab driver, mistaking her to be white, takes her to the
white-only space of Drayton’s rooftop. Where she has arrived to escape
the “sizzling” world below, Irene is “passing” as white, a feeling that she
muses is “like being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world”
(13). Irene’s self-identification with whiteness is marked foremost by her
active act of spectatorship: “she survey[s] the room about her or look[s]
out over some lower buildings,” and “gaz[es] down for some time at the
specks of cars and people creeping about in streets, and think[s] how silly
they looked” (14). In the context of racial history in the U.S., “gaze”
reflects a racial hierarchy. As Langston Hughes observes of the whites
who frequented to Harlem during his time, they were “strangers [who]
were given the best ringside table to site and stare at Negro customers—
36 Min-Jung Kim

like amusing animals in a zoo” (1940, 225).

Once on the Drayton rooftop, where Irene believes that she can mask
her racial identity, she liberally adopts the position of a spectator and
eventually finds herself staring at “an attractive-looking woman,” whom she
will shortly learn to be Clare. As Harrison-Kahan astutely notes, racial
passing is “not only about the performance of whiteness,” but “also offers
the opportunity for spectatorship” (2002, 111). Just as spectatorship affords
one control of one’s situation, relationship, and context, Irene’s desire for
autonomy, and her tendency for compromise and self-satisfaction can also
be seen in her thoughts about the tea that she orders in this scene, which
“was all that she had desired and expected” (Larsen 2003, 13). The tea
that Irene enjoys while she “suvey[s],” “look[s] out,” and “gaze[s] down”
seems to exemplify her basic way of being in the world. As Samira
Kawash comments here, “this is a self completely adequate to itself,
neither needing nor wanting the supplement of an other: transparent,
autonomous identity” (1997, 157).
Clare’s reentry in her life thus disrupts or shakes up Irene’s racial
(non)self-definition. Literally, it is Clare who terminates Irene’s desire for
control by the unmasking of and revelation of Irene’s racial identity. Not
aware that the woman she finds herself gazing at is her childhood
acquaintance, Irene “watche[s]” the woman, and then “conscious that she
had been staring quickly look[s] away” (Larsen 2003, 15). Irene realizes
that she herself too is being watched. Notably, her realization comes not
from her own sight; but as if a testament to her own anxiety and
uneasiness at being improperly in a white-only establishment, it is by
“some sixth sense” that she becomes “acutely aware that someone was
watching her” as “her unseeing eyes [are] far away on the lake” (15).
“Very slowly” when Irene looks back at the woman, the woman is not in
the least embarrassed, for she “continued to stare” (15). In Irene’s account
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 37

of the episode, there is a certain boldness and persistence in Clare’s

reciprocal gaze: with “her demeanor … one who with utmost singleness of
mind and purpose was determined to impress firmly and accurately each
detail of Irene’s features upon her memory for all time, nor showed
slightest trace of disconcertment at having been detected in her steady
scrutiny” (15). Irene thereby suddenly realizes that she is not in command
of the situation, for under the woman’s “continued inspection,” “instead, it
was Irene who was put out” (15). When Irene finds herself the object of
the woman’s gaze, though visibly shaken, she initially suspects that she
may have breached some social code by her physical comportment, never
wondering that the woman whom she here believes to be white could be
a previous acquaintance. Initially placing herself only in terms of class and
gender, Irene can only think of her hat, her makeup, her dress—“What,
she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? . . .
Perfectly all right. What was it?” (17) As Irene quickly goes through
possible reasons for the woman’s stare, there gradually rises in her “a
small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar” (16)—“She laughed
softly, but her eyes flashed” (16). As if to highlight the extent to which
the condition of being black is on Irene’s consciousness but as repressed
anxiety, Irene can only suspect race as the reason for the woman’s stare.
“Odious and hatefully familiar” may refer to the humiliation of being
caught and exposed for disguising, i.e., passing, but they also indicate that
Irene finds her blackness, or a situation in which she must confront and
accept her racial identity, as such. The abstract “inner disturbance” is how
Irene understands her own blackness. Literally, race for the light skinned
Irene is something not easily tangible (“inner”), but a part of herself that
Irene suppresses. Irene may appear to be accepting of her black race—
faithfully staging her bourgeois social and personal life around racial uplift
—but she perceives race as a source of fear and threat to her sense of
38 Min-Jung Kim

self. Finally, in this moment with this woman, Clare discovers herself
reduced to nothing but her blackness, wherein no other part of her person
matters: “Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here
before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (16 italics
added)
Clare’s return gaze—her reciprocity, which is a form of relation—turns
Irene acutely self-conscious and uncomfortable about a pivotal part of her
being, her race. Irene’s violent responses “Absurd! Impossible!” may
simply be her denial that a white person can detect her racial identity, but
her exclamations can also be read to oddly work as her rejection and
negation of her own blackness. Irene continues, “Never, when she was
alone, had they [white people] even remotely seemed to suspect that she
was a Negro. No, the woman sitting there staring at her couldn’t possibly
know” (16). Since Clare is able to recognize Irene first, it is Clare who
suggestively makes Irene confront her blackness, yet an identity Irene
seems to ostensibly reject and disavow: “Suppose the woman did know or
suspect her race. She couldn’t prove it” (16). Irene’s feelings here mirror
the mixture of “humiliation, resentment, and rage” of the scene earlier of
her reading of Clare’s letter: “Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger,
scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a
Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected
from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton
would probably do it, that disturbed her” (16). Gabrielle McIntire
eloquently observes of this moment that “failing to recognize her friend or
her race, what Irene sadly recognizes and knows first is the fear of
racism’s interpolations and prohibitions, deferring the recognition of what
is intimate and personal because of the overwhelming superstructures that
demand a shaming around race” (2012, 782).
Irene’s agitated emotions here reveal that being black is not just an
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 39

identity, but a condition and an identification that in fact leads to

identitylessness, thus a “fear” of a non-identity and non-being through the
process of social ejection. Irene’s fear of expulsion that blackness entails
echoes the important argument that Calvin Warren builds in Ontological
Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Warren asserts that African
existence and black are not synonymous, for “African existence is
transformed into black being through violence, transport, and rituals of
humiliation and terror” (2018, 39).3 “With the death of African existence,
the Negro, or black being, is indeed nothing or no-thing that translates
into any recognizable ontology” (41), Warren maintains. He thus proceeds
to declare that since black being lacks any legitimate ground outside the
oppressive logics of use value, it thus emerges through what he terms as
“the execration of Being,” for “it can lay recourse neither to Being nor to
a primordial relation (since its primordial relation has been annihilated or
murdered as a condition of its existence)” (41). Warren defines “the
execration of Being” as follows: “the death or obliteration of African
existence,” “this obliteration provides the necessary condition for the
invention of the Negro, or black being—black as metaphysical nothing or
groundless existence” (41): and “antiblackness: an accretion of practices,
knowledge systems, and institutions designed to impose nothing onto
blackness and the unending domination/eradication of black presence as
nothing incarnated” (9). In Passing, what Irene experiences as she must
confront her black race in her fright of racial detection is that in the eyes
of white society, her race diminishes her to pure function. She is nothing
but “a Negro,” a racial classification and category and not an individual

3 Warren argues that “black being is a structural position or instrumentality,” whereas

African existence is “an identity” (2018, 39). According to Warren, “Blacks have function,
but not Being—the function of black(ness) is to give form to a terrifying formless (nothing)”
(5), and that through “objectification, domination, and extermination of blacks” (6), “the
world needs the Negro, even as the world despises it” (7).
40 Min-Jung Kim

being. As Warren writes emphatically, “The Negro is pure function; this

function is to be black, but a being that is not” (35); “the Negro is black
because the Negro must assume the function of nothing” (6).
For Irene, Clare’s reentry in her life is a confrontation and acceptance
of her racial identity which would mean a loss of a secure identity and
lifestyle. As recurring throughout the novella, for Irene, the lack of
security and safety that the potential loss of family, marriage, and class
would incur is to be diminished to “a terrifying formless (nothing)” (5) of
her race. In the scene at the Drayton, as the woman approaches Irene,
“suddenly her small fright increase[s],” and she experiences a moment of
terrifying uncertainty and disorientation, loss of herself—“What was going
to happen now?” (Larsen 2003, 16) Interestingly, when Clare approaches
Irene with her address to her as ‘Rene’, it acts as a reminder of the truth
of her racial past—and not the white identity she temporarily adopts at
Drayton. Lori Harrison-Kahan observes that Clare’s nickname for her friend
“removes the ‘I’ from Irene’s name and replaces it with an apostrophe to
draw attention to its absence” (2002, 110). The nickname “thus mimes the
disappearance of Irene’s subjectivity which has become inseparable from
Clare’s own” (110). While the appellation ‘Rene’ is not a name used
exclusively by Clare, and thus the absence of the I, a condition not
necessarily brought upon through the relationship between the two women,
Irene identifies her childhood nickname in racial terms, as she too reflects
momentarily, “What white girls had she known well enough to have been
familiarly addressed as ‘Rene by them?” (Larsen 2003, 17), along with her
own admission that “And though nobody calls me ‘Rene any more, it’s
good to hear the name again” (17). Rather than the “merging of the two
protagonists” as Harrison-Kahan puts it, I would say that Irene’s nickname
seems to suggest that Irene and Clare cannot coexist. Irene cannot
reconcile Clare’s reappearance in her life because she foists upon Irene a
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 41

racial identity that she does not want to claim for herself. In this scene at
Drayton, the woman Clare is singularly privy to Irene’s racial identity, and
so by extension, exposes Irene in her act of passing. Being unmasked,
being “a Negro,” thus equals “ejection” from the condition of Being, for
the world below—banishment from a white-only milieu—is a literal and
figurative death, a return to the world “that she had left below” (13). A
powerful image of the world that is not the rooftop is lifelessness if not
death: before “edging her way out of the crowded street” to seek
“immediate safety” “on a roof somewhere,” Irene finds that “right before
her smarting eyes a man toppled over and became an inert crumpled heap
on the scorching cement” (12). The “lifeless figure” of a man, a context
from which Irene had “edged her way out of,” is the frightening
possibility below. Irene thus becomes “put out” by Clare’s recognition of
her childhood acquaintance, not only in the literal sense that she
experiences Clare staring back and is disconcerted and embarrassed herself;
but through her reencounter with Clare and her own racial exposure, Irene
is put out, stripped of the privileged position of control and spectatorship
afforded to her through her adoption of whiteness.
As several commentators have marked, in Larsen’s novella, it is not just
Clare who passes, but Irene, who not only passes occasionally for
convenience, but passes in her securing of white values.4 But it is also
evident that Irene’s interest in passing runs deeper. In her casual
reencounter with Clare, Irene reveals the “truth,” her own attraction to
passing: “The truth was, she was curious. There were things that she

4 See, for example, Rottenberg, who argues that Irene’s routine “consists of maintaining

white middle-class prosperity,” and that it is the black servants who do most of the strenuous
housework (2003, 445). Jacquelyn McLendon also writes that in her devotion to “bourgeois
ideological codes,” Irene “strives to mask any feelings or behavior that appears to be
uncivilized or unladylike, measures herself by white standards, and lives in constant imitation
of whites” (1995, 97).
42 Min-Jung Kim

wanted to ask Clare Kendry. She wished to find out about this hazardous
business of ‘passing,’ this breaking away from all that was familiar and
friendly to take one’s chance in another environment, not entirely strange,
perhaps, but certainly, not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did
about background, how one accounted for oneself. And how one felt when
one came into contact with other Negroes” (24). Irene’s reflections here,
her concern with the “familiar and friendly” and with “how one felt”
when one came into contact with other blacks, appear to underscore again
the importance of routine and security for Irene. It seems that Irene does
not pass for some firm conviction or loyalty to her race but for fear of
losing the familiar that passing would engender. As such, without a
particular connection with her own racial identity, the appearance of Clare
rattles her because Clare reminds her and subjects her to terrifying
death-like blackness, “a Negro.”
One of the reasons that Clare’s second letter which starts the narrative
agitates Irene so intensely is that it also leads her to the memory of the
incident with Clare’s racist white husband Bellew when Irene is invited to
her friend’s home after their casual encounter at Drayton. Upon
discovering his wife in the presence of her friends (Gertrude, Felice, and
Irene) at their afternoon tea, Bellew greets his wife Clare as “Nig,” and
shares his reasons for his pet name as follows: “When we were first
married, she was as white as—as—well as white as a lily. But I declare
she’s gettin’ darker and darker. I tell her if she don’t look out, she will
wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger” (39).
Understandably, the incident upsets Irene immensely, for as she later
relates her anger to her husband Brian, “I’m really not such an idiot that
I don’t realize that if a man calls me a nigger, it’s his fault the first
time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it again” (110). To Irene’s
annoyance, Brian appropriately corrects that there is a distinction, that
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 43

Bellew didn’t’ “call you a nigger. There is a difference you know” (110).
However, for Irene, there is no difference between Clare and herself,
because in the eyes of white society her black blood would make her the
same with all Negros. Irene is enraged by Bellew’s racist insult, and
ultimately later furious at Clare for making her too a “black devil”—not
quite human, but some dark, corrupting ingression. During Bellew’s insults,
Irene thinks to herself in anger—“She had a leaping desire to shout at the
man beside her: ‘And you’re sitting here surrounded by three black devils,
drinking tea” (41). While Samira Kawash is right in pointing out that
Irene’s “anger takes the form of rage and shame at finding her race
insulted and vilified and being unable to respond” (1997, 157), Irene’s
fury comes from the fact that race equalizes herself and Clare, an object
of her contempt and separation since childhood.
Earlier in this afternoon tea party scene, as the women have met after
many years, conversation orbits around casual inquiries about the spouses
and the children. Irene again feels herself becoming raced in the presence
of other light-colored black women. When asked by one of her old friends
if Irene’s husband Brian is dark, “And your husband, is he—is he—er—
dark, too?” Irene’s reaction is that of embarrassment and hesitance: “Her
husband, she informed them quietly, couldn’t exactly pass” (Larsen 2003,
37). As Samira Kawash observes, “in the most simple terms, although
both Clare and Irene are ‘black,’ Clare has introduced a difference into
this sameness by passing for white,” which I might add, then reduces and
leaves Irene with her blackness. It is as if in the company of Clare, as
the racist white Bellew would have it, Irene feels as if “she’s turned into
a nigger.” Thus the “flood of feelings, resentment, anger, and contempt”
(36) reappears as chorus-like in her encounters with Clare, as previously at
the Drayton upon possible racial detection.
Even before Irene wrongly suspects of an affair between her husband
44 Min-Jung Kim

and Clare, her violent response to Clare’s presence in her life is revealed
in her reaction to Clare’s two letters. The second one which inaugurates
the story’s narrative present is the second of the two that Clare sends two
years after their casual meeting at Drayton. Irene has also received one
two years back after her visit to the Bellew home. Given Irene’s paranoid
like initial response to Clare’s second letter through her personification and
vilification of it, her destruction of the epistle does not seem inconsistent
with her character and temper: “Tearing the letter across, she had flung it
into the scrapbasket” (62). And as Gabrielle McIntire convincingly points
out, Irene’s destruction of the letter can be read as her attempt to “excise
Clare’s efforts at self-articulation” since it is possible to read the letter as
“a synecdoche for Clare’s body-text” (2012, 791). The narrative continues
of Irene, “In another, calmer moment she decided that it was, after all,
better to answer nothing, to explain nothing, to refuse nothing; to dispose
of the matter simply by not writing at all” (Larsen 2003, 62). The
“nothing” here may simply underscore Irene’s determination to sever all
connection and contact with Clare. But its repetitive use thrice seems to
underscore Irene’s own perverse preoccupation and fear of “nothing.” In its
last usage, “to refuse nothing,” nothing can be the object; nothing can also
be what Irene refuses. Interestingly, as well, “nothing” reads as the object
of the entire sentence, whereby nothing becomes “the matter” to be
disposed of. Irene projects the condition of nothing to Clare and her
relationship to Clare a nonexistence. Irene cannot have a self in the
presence of Clare, since Clare becomes a reminder of her own blackness.
Irene’s fear and obsession with her black race as nothingness can be seen
in Calvin Warren’s claim that “The Negro is the limit of both meaning
and being and embodies ontological terror (the terror of nothing within an
antiblack world” (2018, 37). The problem with Irene is that the
antiblackness in a white world that is critical in Warren’s study is a
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 45

condition that she is projecting to other blacks and to herself as well in

moments when she is forced to confront her own racial blackness: “The
being invented to embody black as nothing is the Negro” (39). Irene’s
enraged reaction to the letter is thus an expression of her own fear of her
own social destruction, akin to the “imposition of nothing’s terror onto
blacks” (9). Through her reconnection with Clare, Irene feels as if her
own sense of self and way of life are imperiled as she becomes reduced
to her blackness. The novella illustrates Irene’s growing anxiety through
her musings that become increasingly impassioned.
Irene’s reaction to Clare’s first letter is, if anything, even more
hysterical, also defined by a literal destruction, akin to physical attack and
annihilation. It seems to be symptomatic of her desperation to excise any
peril to her self-definition that her relationship to Clare could incur. Irene
receives the first of the two letters after her afternoon tea at the Bellew
home, in which Clare writes exclusively about her desire for connection
with her own race.

‘Rene dear:
. . . But if you could know how glad, how excitingly happy, I was to
meet you and how I ached to see more of you (to see everybody and
couldn’t), you would understand my wanting to see you again, and maybe
forgive me a little.
My love to you always and always and to your dear father, and all my
poor thanks.
It may be, ‘Rene dear, it may be, that, after all, your way may be the
wiser and infinitely happier one. I’m not sure just now. At least not so sure
I have been. (46)

If Clare’s second letter had been more “appealing” and had in fact
expressed intense emotions reminiscent of a love letter, this first one is
remarkably neutral in tone. It simply indirectly conveys Clare’s apology for
46 Min-Jung Kim

having subjected Irene to an unpleasant afternoon, Clare’s poor excuse

being that she just wanted to see more of Irene because she is a friend
from her past. Clare regards Irene not as particularly different from her
other old acquaintances. Clare merely wanted “to see more of” Irene as
part of her desire to “to see everybody and couldn’t.” Thus, Clare
acknowledges Irene’s father in her letter as well, since for Clare, both
Irene and her father embody her black race, her black identity, and her
black past. And yet, Clare’s letter infuriates Irene all the more not only
because it reminds her of the afternoon with Bellew, but because of what
it implicitly says. Clare wants to reconnect with Irene because Irene is
black and Clare misses the black community. The letter of course angers
Irene because it is a reminder of her own “humiliation” of bearing
Bellew’s racist insult—“what she had gone through yesterday afternoon for
Clare Kendry” (47). As marked earlier, in the presence of Bellew and his
racist epithet towards his wife, Irene finds herself being “turned into a
nigger” (39). Irene’s destruction of the letter is an apparent expression of
her determination to sever her connection from Clare: She “tore the
offending letter into tiny ragged squares that fluttered down and made a
small heap in her 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 the railing and watched them scatter, on tracks, on
cinders, on forlorn grass, in rills of dirty water” (47 italics added). That
for Irene, as a reminder of her own black race, Clare jeopardizes the
white bourgeois self and lifestyle that Irene has cultivated for herself can
be seen in the lines that follow: “She dropped Clare out of her mind and
turned her thoughts to her own affairs. To home, to the boys, to Brian”
(47 italics added). Once she destroys Clare’s letter and from her mind
Irene can return to her own unraced life—which is conflated with
domesticity, motherhood, and marriage—or a life in which she does not
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 47

need to reflect on her own blackness.

Persistently, Irene tries to establish her difference from Clare: the two
women as “strangers”—to term their relation as a non-relation by all
means:

Most likely she and Clare would never meet again. Well, she, for one,
would endure that. Since childhood their lives had never really touched.
Actually they were strangers. Strangers in their ways and means of living.
Strangers in their desires and ambitions. Strangers even in their racial
consciousness. Between them the barrier was just as high, just as broad, and
just as firm as if in Clare did not run that strain of black blood. In truth,
it was higher, broader, and firmer; because for her there were perils, not
known, or imagined, by those others who had no such secrets to alarm or
endanger them. (62-63)

As noted earlier, in dissociating herself from her racial self and using
other less privileged blacks such as Clare to define herself against, Irene
herself has adopted white position of projecting nothingness onto other
black subjects. In the U.S., “the African becomes black being and secures
the boundaries of the European self—its existential and ontological
constitution—by embodying utter alterity (metaphysical nothing),” whereby
this invention is “pure instrumentality and function” (Warren 2018, 38).
Irene’s musings in the passage above betrays that despite her attempts at
dissociation from Clare, the condition of “strangers” is itself a relation, as
is used here to maximize the two women’s specific differences of class
(“in their ways and means of living,” and “in their desires and
ambitions”). Although in claiming that she and Clare were strangers “even
in their racial consciousness,” Irene seeks to highlight Clare’s betrayal of
her own black race, the next sentence in fact illustrates that ultimately,
what connects the two women is the absolute reality of their black race.
The “as if”—“as if in Clare did not run that strain of black blood”—
48 Min-Jung Kim

suggests that both women are in fact black.

Irene’s reflections demonstrate that clearly because race so deeply
informs her understanding of the world, she refuses to identify with it:

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. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing,
she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.
[…,] 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 so cursed as Ham’s dark children. (Larsen 2003, 98)

There is a contradiction between the possibility of “a person” and race:

“Something would [have to be crushed]” for the other. “Clare, herself, or
the race” seems to indicate that for Irene, neither Clare nor Irene herself
can identify with the black race. Clare, for obvious reasons that she has
given up her racial background to pass as white. “Or the race” here can
mean Irene’s reference to Clare, that she cannot betray someone of her
own race, Clare. At the same time, the ordering of the words, with the
conjunction “or” seems to signal a separation between “herself” and “the
race.” For Irene, herself and race cannot coexist. One has to be gotten rid
of for the other’s possibility. Additionally, Irene separates the conditions of
being a “woman,” “an individual,” and black. Up until now, prior to
Clare’s reentry in her own life—both as she is made to serve as Clare’s
connection to the black community and as she is faced with the dilemma
of needing to protect Clare against racial exposure—Irene never had to
trouble herself with the meaning of her blackness. Her confrontation with
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 49

her racial identity is through her relationship with Clare, thus her wish
that “for the first time she had not been born a Negro.” The repetition of
“for the first time” in the next line, “for the first time she suffered and
rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race,” seems
to underscore the unwanted consequences of Clare’s reappearance in
Irene’s life. It is as if through Clare, Irene becomes black, “suffer[ing]” as
a black person (“burden of race”) in white society. Rafael Walker offers a
different reading of this passage. Walker notes that “Clare, herself, or the
race,” reveals that in Irene’s psychological economy, the dilemma is as
follows: if she can rid herself of race, she can pass; if she can be rid of
Clare, she can maintain her belief in race and social stability; if at last,
she can be rid of neither, she herself must perish” (2016, 183).5 However,
in Irene’s view, “race and social stability” cannot sit together, for what
upsets Irene insufferably about Clare’s presence is that she finds herself
threatened by the imposition of her blackness.
With Clare, Irene is made to see and accept herself as black—thus the
“instinctive loyalty to a race.”

That instinctive loyalty to a race. Why couldn’t she get free of it? Why
should it include Clare? Clare, who’d shown little enough consideration for
her, and hers. What she felt was not so much resentment as a dull despair
because she could not change herself in this respect, could not separate
individuals from the race, herself from Clare Kendry. (Larsen 2003, 100)

That Irene “cannot change herself” may indicate her overall feelings, but
another meaning could be that she must accept her race, that she cannot

5 Walker observes that Irene is confronted with “two conflicting desires: on the one hand,

to be rid of race, and on the other, to be rid of Clare,” and that “Irene’s dilemma over race
makes it clear how these two wishes conflict: Irene’s (and the United States’s) racial
ideology cancels out Clare and vice versa” (2016, 183).
50 Min-Jung Kim

separate her individual from her race, whereby despite her desire to
distinguish herself from Clare through class, she cannot separate “herself
from Clare” because of their shared blackness. It thus seems that Irene
does not identify with blackness (dignity of race) because she understands
how significantly race (the very principle of race) dictates one’s existence
in the U.S. Larsen’s critique of the influences of vicious mechanisms of
anti-black racism is made manifest in Irene’s obsession with race as an
ideology and identity, yet, expressly because she is aware of its hegemonic
force, implications, and social meanings, she obsessively attempts to
disclaim her black racial identification.

III

Despite and through the transgressive possibilities presented in terms of

the nature of identity, and its categories and constructions, Larsen’s novella
on passing closes with a tragic ending. Some readers have taken the
conclusion as a forceful commentary on the society at large, with Samira
Kamash cogently stating that since Clare “exposes the fault line in the
edifice of identity, truth, and order,” her death is “a violent dramatization
of the force of racial discipline to demand that each subject take up her
or his proper place in the racial order in accordance with, and as a means
of producing, racial separation and racial hierarchy” (1997, 166). Though
the ending is no doubt left ambiguous, if readers were to accept one
likely interpretation that this image insinuates, “the vision of her [Irene’s]
hand on Clare’s arm!” (Larsen 2003, 112) the novel ends as a horrifying
tale of a woman’s murder of her childhood acquaintance. Whether Irene
pushes Clare, resulting in her death, or whether Clare falls or jumps to
her death, or whether her white husband John Bellew pushes her, are all
 ‘She’s Turned into a Nigger’: The Terror of Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing 51

left uncertain. Yet, whether or not Irene is responsible for Clare’s death,
her reaction in its aftermath, that she “wasn’t’ sorry. She was amazed,
incredulous almost” (111) as she “struggled against the sob of thankfulness
that rose in her throat” (113), suggests that Clare’s death elicits a certain
relief and freedom in Irene’s own deeply troubled, insecure, and paranoid
consciousness.
In Passing, what upsets Irene so largely about Clare and her
reappearance in her present life is not that Clare has passed over into
white society, for Irene never outrightly condemns her, but the implications
of Clare’s passing for and potentially on her. On one level, Clare troubles
Irene’s sense of order in the broader sense of stable identities and
categories, including race, gender, sexuality, and class. On another, and
more intolerably for Irene, Clare’s passing and return to Harlem unsettles
the foundations of her own identity, which she has never in effect claimed
as black. As evidenced through Irene’s reflections dotted throughout the
novella, Irene finds herself being reduced to her blackness as she becomes
literally Clare’s connection to the black community. By the novella’s end,
in the tragic fates of the two childhood friends, readers are left with the
desolating reality that Larsen sought to probe and disclose. Irene’s
obsession with race through her murderous denial and expulsion of it
seems to echo Calvin Warren’s keen point that “it is impossible for any
black to be free in an antiblack world” (2018, 16). As noted in the
introduction of this essay, most readers would concur that the problematic
of race is central to Larsen’s work, animating the narrative plot and
especially the tension between the two black female protagonists. A closer
textual analysis, specifically Irene’s fear of the condition of blackness as
“nothing,” non-being, and social ejection, further illuminates the extent to
which through the theme of racial passing Larsen’s novella offers both
provocative analytical possibilities in conceptualizations of identity as well
52 Min-Jung Kim

as the hegemonic meanings of race in the U.S.

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Durham: Duke University Press.

Min-Jung Kim, professor

Department of English Language and Literature
Ewha Womans University
52, Ewhayeodae-gil, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul
Republic of Korea, 03760
[email protected]

Received: Mar. 18, 2020

Reviewed: May 10, 2020
Accepted: May 28, 2020