The Disappearance of Black Identity in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Abstract

The practice of racism has always left negative impacts on the colored and black people in white societies leading them either to self-loathe or detesting the white culture. This study is an attempt to explore the melting of Irene’s and Clare’s black identities in Nella Larsen’s Passing and how they deconstruct them. They experience the awful impacts of rejection in the white society as black women; therefore, they fail to achieve what they aspire in the dominant culture. Both are terribly in need of white recognition in the white society, which does not recognize them unless they obtain the standards set up by the white dominant culture. Irene cannot find security and pleasure in the black community; therefore she feels comfortable and insists on living in New York, furthermore Clare concludes that she cannot escape her arduous life as a black servant who is expected to work hard. As a result she disguises herself as a white woman. Striving to embrace the white culture, they consider “passing for white” and refusing their black heritage. The dominant culture causes the black characters of both novels to suffer and struggle to identify themselves. The black community in the novel is in a terrible situation, and the black characters are expected to act and work in favor of the interests of the white society, which looks at the black characters as secondary people. I argue that Irene and Clare lose their identities as black women in the novel and take on white identity, although Clare does not feel comfortable in the white society. 

 

Keywords

• Nella Larsen,“Passing”

References

1. Benn Michaels, Walter. “American Modernism and the Poetics of Identity”. Modernism/Modernity, 1.1 (1994), 38-56.
2. Benn Michaels, Walter. Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
3. Brody, Jennifer. Devere. “Clare Kendry's "True" Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen's Passing”. Callaloo, 15,4 (Autumn, 1992), 1053-1065.