thoughts on passing “by mistake”

I guess the big question here is, is that even possible?  Can people actually not think about how people will see them.  Earlier in the year we talked about Wentworth Miller and how he didn’t know that people would think he wasn’t part black.  He assumed that people would know, or he just forgot that anyone wouldn’t know.  If we try to liken this to Irene, we can wonder about her ability to be “mistakenly passed for white”.  She didn’t tell John Bellew she was white, but at the beginning of the conversation she didn’t know that she would need to hide her blackness.  Irene let the conversation go where it would and let the people involved thing what they would about her racial background.  And I suppose that’s the complexity of Larsen’s book.  Irene can pass and she can’t. It seems like she has the agency to let everyone understand that she is black, but is it her responsibility to do this?  Should we all constantly be announcing their ethnic and racial history to everyone we meet?  It seems to me that Irene should have the right to just live as she thinks an African American upper middle class woman should live much like Wentworth should be able to be whatever he identifies himself to be.  I think the fact that Irene passes for convienence is problematic, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a fault or a transgression.  Actually, I find that Irene’s actions almost mimic the idea of “sticking it to the man”. She’s fooling everyone in there just because she can–and that it’s easier for her.  To come back to the idea of “mistaken passing”.  I watched  a movie in a class directed by Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust…and as I was looking online I saw that she directed a Tracy Chapman video) called Illusions.  It’s about a woman who works her way up in a movie company and very few people there knows she is black.  However, she does not pass in the “normal” sense.  She did not cut ties from her family and she is married to a black man.  So, she is only white in terms of her career.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find access to more than a minute of this movie online but we do have a videocassette in our library.  It’s only 34 minutes and the call number is PN1997 .I393.

some thoughts on “Passing”

In “Passing”, Irene makes a statement which I think is relevant to the novels that we’ve read so far. She says “Its funny about ‘passing.’ We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it.”(56) This element of blacks enabling passing although they may resent it or disagree with it is interesting to me. In Puddnhead and The House Behind The Cedars, we’re not presented with a Black character who is obviously opposed to passing or concerned about the effects of passing on the rest of the black community. However, I find it interesting that in both stories, there was a central Black character(who doesn’t or cannot pass) who enables the passing of another. For example, Roxy cannot pass because everyone is away of her lineage but she makes Tom’s passing possible and although Frank finds out that Rena is passing with her brother, he decides not to expose her secret. It can be argued that in both of these instances, the people who enabled to passing had an overwhelming love or sense of duty to the passing but what can be said for Irene’s complicity? Although her relationship to Clare is complicated and cannot be whittled down to one emotion or the other, she does not have an real obligation to Clare, besides that of their shared race.

Irene, Clare and Doubling: Explaining the “Accident”

I am fascinated by the way in which the novel ends and the resulting ambiguity we are left with. I however am fully aligned with those who would inculpate Irene for pushing Clare out the window. I feel like explanations for this theory are not only present in the cleverly suggestive language that Larsen employs to great effect after the tragedy, but to the structure of the novel as a whole. By using Freud’s idea of doubling, which Isabel presented in class, I believe we cannot only explaining the Irene’s emotions about Clare, but perhaps discover greater causality for the final moments of the play.

As Isabel suggested, Irene’s condition is such that she overextends her ego so that she assigns her own emotions to other people’s actions as part of a narcissistic expansion of the self. I believe that this is also the foundation of Irene’s obsession and love for Clare, in whom she finds not only a complement, but someone whose is sufficiently close in station, appearance and provenance so as to confuse her identity with her own. But that is precisely the point. Through Irene, she is able to live a double-life, as Clare is also permitted to do through Irene, with each sharing the experiences of the other as if they actually belonged in the other’s world. The undercurrent of “love” or repressed lesbian sentiment might be expressed as an outgrowth of the narcissistic love of self that motivates all relationships at the “primary” level suggested by Freud in the uncanny. This reading would suggest a retarded emotional development in Irene, which I think one could most certainly make a case for, where as Freud suggests “the ‘double’ reverses its aspect…from having been the an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” I feel that this quote does a great deal in offering a plausible psychological explanation for Irene’s behavior, but I think Freud also offers other possible solutions.

Freud also reminds us that the double may also represent “all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all of our suppressed acts of volition which nourish us in the illusion of Free Will.” In this scenario, we might say that if Irene had had a hand in Clare’s demise, jealousy might clearly have been a motive. Clare in many ways lives a reality that is inaccessible to Irene for many reasons and the significant closeness in prior identification with the same social circle in society implies a possible similar fate save for the all-important influence of uncontrollable external circumstance. Clare found herself in a position more advantageous for passing, while Irene simply did not. Unable to face her own failures and abysmal home-life and Clare’s success in her own friendship circle, it is entirely possible that Irene feels an imperative to eliminate the woman who undermines her entire identity and understanding of who she is and what her life is about.

But all of this is of course based on the assumption that Irene did it, which may or not be correct. What do other people think about this?

Thoughts on Irene

One of the things that struck me about Irene was that she criticizes Clare for passing, when in fact, she, too, passes.  Irene draws a distinction because she does not pass socially, but for matters of convenience; she says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever gone native in my life except for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theatre tickets…never socially, I mean, except once” (p. 100).  Irene’s reasoning made me think, because I felt that Clare’s decision to pass was one made for convenience; yes, it’s true that Clare’s racial background is even unknown to her husband, his family and their daughter, but she chooses to pass to gain something that she felt she could not obtain otherwise (or, rather, that it would be difficult to realize the standard of living that she desired).  Are we as readers supposed to judge Clare for her decision to pass?  And if so, should we judge Irene as well?