Nella Larsen's Passing

But what about the children? no one asks in Nella Larsen's Passing. The question, or the thought of the question, gives rise to modes of anxiety to both mothers: For Irene Redfield, trapped in a voiceless passivity imposed by her sons, she sees the counterfeit lifestyle in the simplicity of her blackness; for Clare Kendry, by virtue of her rejection of her daughter's welfare, motherhood is an empty site to be replaced with a desire for escape and re-invention. This paper will explore Larsen's dialectic of motherhood - the hyper-sensitive Irene and perma-detached Clare - and to what ends these versions of motherhood coincide.

The reader is introduced to Ted and Junior on the day Irene Redfield reunites with Clare Kendry, as a symbolic placement of dueling antagonisms. Before her encounter, she shops for them, on an errand for gifts, though the manner in which she buys them suggests the act to be a painstaking chore:

Characteristically, she had put it off until only a few crowded days remained of her long visit. And only this sweltering one was free of engagements till the evening. Without too much trouble she had got the mechanical aeroplane for Junior. But the drawing-book, for which Ted had so gravely and insistently given her precise directions, had sent her in and out of five shops without success. (146)

It is a loveless task and she sweats, not out of the passion for her children, but by the imposition of their demands. Even the toys imply a distance from the mother: Junior's mechanical gewgaw suggests rigidity, a lack of imagination and spark, while Ted's toy, though perhaps in the vein of art and creativity, is more or less viewed as a directive, an order to the mother. Not once in the novel do either of the boys follow Irene's commands: When meeting Clare for the first time, they are rude and shrugging, and their attitudes barely change when Irene attempts to correct their behavior [200-1]. Her children are little adults and the reader sees Irene not as a mother, but as distant and ineffectual sufferer for her children and she will never make them happy.

Irene will never make them happy because she will never make Brian happy. Her children are only referenced only by the way they remind her of Brian - as if for justification of their worth and her subsequent worthlessness.

Junior, tall for his age, was almost incredibly like his father in feature and colouring; but his temperament was hers, practical and determined, rather than Brian's. Ted, speculative and withdrawn, was, apparently, less positive in his ideas and desires. About him there was a deceiving air of candour that was, Irene knew, like his father's show of reasonable acquiescence. If, for the time being… he submitted to the force of superior strength… it was because of his intense dislike of scenes and unpleasant argument. Brian over again. (192)

In her thoughts - written in a Modernist prose-style crippled with commas-splices and anxious sentence-fragments - she is reminded of the antagonistic fixity of the loveless relationship between mother and sons, which leads to her absorption in her husband and their sexless relationship.

Her mental and physical languor receded. Brian. What did it mean? Who would it affect her and the boys. The boys. She had a surge of relief. It ebbed, vanished. A feeling of absolute unimportance followed. Actually, she didn't count. She was, to him, only the mother of his sons. That was all. Alone she was nothing. Worse. An obstacle. (221)

Irene's compulsion towards motherhood-as-sacrifice reflects upon her own uncertainty with race - and her attempts to reconcile both motherhood and race are the sum of ignored results. Her notion of race only activates itself in pat reference: In the conversation with Irene and Gertrude, she rebukes the latter's antipathy towards dark children, "Once of my boys is dark" (168); when Clare before their going to the seventeenth floor party, Irene remarks with poor irony, "I always seem to keep C.P. time, don't I?" (233); and most problematically contradictory is her work with the Eurocentric, bourgeois Negro Welfare League. But, when dealing with America's race problem with her children, her response is flat denial:

At dinner, Brian spoke bitterly of a lynching that he had been reading about in the evening paper.

"Dad, why is it that they only lynch coloured people?" Ted asked.

"Because they hate 'em, son."

"Brian!" Irene's voice was a plea and a rebuke.

....

After the boys had gone to their own floor, Irene said suavely: "I do wish, Brian, that you wouldn't talk about the lynching before Ted and Junior...There'll be time enough for them to learn about such horrible things when they're older... I want their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly be." (231)

With the idyllic relationship between mother and sons severed, and with her own conceptions of race facing bankruptcy, Irene comes to terms with the boys' and the father's subjugation - a troika of leveling attitudes running her into the ground: the microcosmic dismissal of Irene as an individual, and the doubly damaging macrocosmic dismissal of Irene as both an African-American and as a woman. This inharmonious medley of antagonisms is magnified for Irene by her indifferent feelings towards Christmas ("She herself didn't feel the proper Christmas spirit this year… She was weary and depressed [213]), and comes to a head not long after:

Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed.Sitting alone in the quiet living-room in the pleasant fire-light, 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 brutality, and undeserved. (225)

Race, children, husband, America, and self: Each pressure vying, not for attention from Irene, instead wanting nothing to do without her. The only person who demands Irene is Clare.

In coming to terms with the Clare's crude detachment for her daughter, it is necessary to examine her mottled past. During their meeting in Chicago, the reader glimpses into Clare's alienated positionality: When answering Irene's incredulous question about how she explains her background to John Bellew's family and friends, she states, "I've a good imagination, so I'm sure I could have [passed] quite creditably, and credibly. But it wasn't necessary. There were my aunts" (158). After her father's death, she comes to live with them, not out of love for the niece, but of necessity for their love of the brother - a saving face. She is treated like a foundling child, a housemaid. In Clare's denial of racial self-surveillance (or, in Irene's phraseology, "account[ing] for oneself" [157]), she explains the history by which she came to this denial. Her aunts were white, described by Clare as "authentic" (158) and "good Christians" (158); yet, at the same, the aunts refuse to hazard mulatto Clare into their world:

"The aunts were queer. For all their Bibles and praying and ranting about honesty, they didn't want anyone to know that their darling brother had seduced - ruined they called it - a Negro girl. They could excuse the ruin, but they couldn't forgive the tar-brush. They forbade me to mention Negroes to the neighbours, or even to mention the south side." (159)

This seduced, ruined Negro girl - Clare's mother - receives only this brief cold reference in the light. There is no mother figure for Clare, only the aunts, thus shutting out the personal or collective African American history (Stavney 554). They reject not only her, but her race, as well, reading and writing "long articles headed: 'Will the Blacks Work?'" (159). (This is mostly likely Larsen's clever punning and a reversal of race consciousness on the popular 1927 Charles Wesley study, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925: A Study in American Economic History, whose fifth chapter disrupts the racist mentality of supposedly innate African-American laziness, "Will the Negro Work? - The Problem with Reconstruction." [Wilson, 83]). As Irene recounts her meeting with Clare, she also flashes to their childhood days and Clare's only parent:

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. (144)

With the establishment of child abuse and, most likely, episodes of sexual abuse from the father (an act of hate by dint of his daughter's Otherness as a mulatto and her mother's sharp blackness), Clare becomes the site of pre-Oedipal conditionality. Dr. Germain Guex states: "It is this tripod - the anguish created by every abandonment, the aggression to which it gives rise, and the devaluation of self that flows out of it - that supports the whole symptomatology of this neurosis" (Guex qtd in Fanon 73). Therefore, with this diagnosis the reader can decode, or create a traceable line, Clare's past, present, and fatal future. She marries John Bellew out of abandonment, gives birth to her daughter in a nine-month period of hostility and anguish, then out of aggression for her misstep in passing for white, marrying a white man, and giving birth to a socially-constructed white daughter, attempts to rejoin the black community knowing full well the deathly consequences in being discovered.

In Elizabeth Brown-Guillory's Introduction to Women of Color: Mother Daughter Relationships in 20th Century Literature, she states:

Studies also suggest that when a mother looks at her daughter, she sees herself. She is constantly reminded of her mistakes, yearnings, dreams, successes, and failures. When the daughter looks at her mother, she often sees herself and rejects the image in the mirror. Sometimes the daughter rejects her mother's values as inappropriate to her reality. Yet a daughter often fears separation from her mother because it is to her mother that she most often turns for validation. It is this friction, inextricably linked to fear and frustration, which challenges bother mothers and daughters to create a space in which the experiences of both members of the dyad can be vaporized. (Brown-Guillory 2)

If Irene Redfield's relationship with her children lends itself to Irene's overall erasing and ultimate invisibility of self, then Clare's actively hostile relationship with Margery suggests a momentary reclaiming of identity. If what Brown-Guillory states it true, that the mother sees herself through the eyes, face, and actions of the daughter, then Margery is the body representative of all errors of passing and rejection of race. During the girl's birth, Clare states, "I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness she turned out all right" (168). In other words, Margery's rejection, much like Clare's, is doubled from within and without: From within, the noise amplified by the ultrasonic waves of amniotic fluid where the child's sense of hearing is at its greatest - the child in essence "hears" this rejection without ever knowing the circumstance; and, from without Margery is rejected by the simple fact that she and Clare are rarely in the same place at the same time. In fact, it is no small statement of Larsen's to deny Margery's presence in the book at all, other than a hovering presence, a threat, a reminder, a stranglehold. Even so, she is never seen. She is either "in Milwaukee" with "Jack's people" (166) or "left in Switzerland in school" (209). Not only is Clare passing for white, she is also passing the pre-Oedipal neurosis of abandonment and self-hatred to her daughter. Therefore, by virtue of her daughter's alignment in symbolic locations of whiteness - as far away as either can interconnect - Clare can freely, without the restrictive designations of motherhood, correct her error of whitewashing. However, this final stage of correction coincides with the final stage of the pre-Oedipal complex, the devaluation of self, where also, in Larsen's elegant structural design, the two versions of motherhood intersect, not on that fatal seventeenth floor, but in two conversations preceding the novel's Finale.

In the first, Clare admits to Irene the joylessness of motherhood, and, at the same time, calls out Irene's passive aggressive sacrificing:

"Remember, there's Margery. Think how glad you'll be to see her after all this time."

"Children aren't everything," was Clare Kendry's answer to that. "There are other things in the world, though I admit some people don't seem to suspect it." And she laughed, more, it seemed, at some secret joke of her own than at her words.

Irene replied: "You know you don't mean that, Clare. You're only trying to tease me. I know very well that I take being a mother very seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house. I can't help it. And, really, I don't think it's anything to laugh at." (210)

The tension in the conversation is further aggrieved by Clare's interaction with Irene's children: "If Irene happened to be out or occupied, Clare could very happily amuse herself with Ted and Junior, who had conceived for her an admiration that verged on adoration, especially Ted" (208). Since Irene only views her sons through the critical body and mind of her husband, their loving approval towards Clare is most damaging - particularly Ted's, since Irene identifies him as a miniature-version of Brian. In the intimate playroom with Clare, one of the boys perhaps told of episodes with their mother and her heavy-sweating for the protection. This, too, might have stimulated Clare's private laughter, which Irene rejects. She rejects because she knows.

The second conversation occurs nearly a year later, several minutes before Brian, Clare, and Irene depart for the fateful soirée. In an emotional appeal, Clare admits her indefatigable willingness to reinstate herself in the black community:

"I'd do what I want to do more than anything else right now. I'd come up here to live. Harlem, I mean. Then I'd be able to do as I please, when I please."

Irene leaned forward, cold and tense. "And what about Margery?"

"Margery?" Clare repeated, letting her eyes flutter over Irene's concerned face. "Just this, 'Rene. If it wasn't for her, I'd do it anyway. She's all that holds me back. But if our marriage is broken, that lets me out. Doesn't it?" (234)

This is a complicated statement for Irene to hear: It represents an admission of love for both Clare's race and daughter, for both her black pride and selflessness, for non-conformity and maternal boundaries.

However, Clare's admission comes at too late a time, at too high a price, and on ears too angrily deaf to hear. This reader will not crowd for space within the voices of speculation as to whether Clare fell seventeen stories down by her own step, or was pushed by Irene: Locked within the construct of the pre-Oedipal complex, a pre-born, pre-destined, tragedy of design, Clare must fall; for Irene, murderer or passive-aggressive participant, her fate is already written in steel, by the hands of Ted and Junior, the loveless solitude of motherhood.

Works Cited

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove, 1967.

Guillory-Brown, Elizabeth. Introduction. Women of Color: Mother-Daughter

Relationships in 20th Century Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Guillory-Brown. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. 1928, 1929. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Staveny, Ann. "'Mothers of Tomorrow': The Negro Renaissance and the Politics of

Maternal Representation." African American Review. Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998): 533-561.

Wilson, F.R. "Vindicating the Race: Contributions to African-American Intellectual

History." The Journal of Negro History. Vol. 81, No.1/4 (Winter-Autumn, 1996), pp. 72-88.