The Disappearance of Black Identity in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Year 2017, Volume: 3 Issue: 5, 49 - 66, 21.06.2017

Birdost Mohammed Karim

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

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