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Product Description
Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women?s literature. Larsen's status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston?s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan?s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich ?Background and Contexts? section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935?by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others?provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen?s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on ?The Tragic Mulatto(a)? in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. ?Criticism? provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
Review
The heroine of Passing takes an elevator from the infernal August Chicago streets to the breezy rooftop of the heavenly Drayton Hotel, "wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below." Irene is black, but like her author, the Danish-African American Nella Larsen (a star of the 1920s to mid-1930s Harlem Renaissance and the first black woman to win a Guggenheim creative-writing award), she can "pass" in white society. Yet one woman in the tea room, "fair and golden, like a sunlit day," keeps staring at her, and eventually introduces herself as Irene's childhood friend Clare, who left their hometown 12 years before when her father died. Clare's father had been born "on the left hand"--he was the product of a legal marriage between a white man and a black woman and therefore cut off from his inheritance. So she was raised penniless by white racist relatives, and now she passes as white. Even Clare's violent white husband is in the dark about her past, though he teases her about her tan and affectionately calls her "Nig." He laughingly explains: "When we were first married, she was white as--as--well as white as a lily. But I declare she's getting darker and darker." As Larsen makes clear, Passing can also mean dying, and Clare is in peril of losing her identity and her life. The tale is simple on the surface--a few adventures in Chicago and New York's high life, with lots of real people and race-mixing events described (explicated by Thadious M. Davis's helpful introduction and footnotes). But underneath, it seethes with rage, guilt, sex, and complex deceptions. Irene fears losing her black husband to Clare, who seems increasingly predatory. Or is this all in Irene's mind? And is everyone wearing a mask? Larsen's book is a scary hall of mirrors, a murder mystery that can't resolve itself. It sticks with you. --Tim Appelo
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Summary: Passing
Excellent! I could not put this down. The story is about two African American women. One (Irene) lived her life as an African American while the other (Clare) either because of her White aunts who she eventually went to live with, lived her life as White. After years apart, they meet while vacationing. The book focuses on their diverse lives. The ending is simply amazing.
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Summary: Another Larsen classic
No one captures the intracicies and complexities of living as an African American in the 20th century United States better than Nella Larsen. In this instant classic, the "passing" of the title refers to the ability of a black american to get by as a white person in society. Each of the diverse and intelligent women encountered in this book are all relatively light skinned african americans who each have used their skin complexion to "pass" to varying degrees in their lives. In the beginning of the novel, Irene uses her ability to "pass" to find some much needed rest at a "whites only" tea garden in downtown Chicago. While there, she gets recognized by a long estranged friend, Clare, also passing as a white woman. As Irene soon discovers in a devastatingly brutal encounter with this friend and her white husband, Clare is living a completely deceptive life, married to a man who not only believes his wife is white, but throws the 'n' word around freely in front of her "passing" friends.
The emotions that this evokes in Irene, coupled with the repeated encounters with Clare and Clare's lifelong attempt to be someone she is not, captures yet another of the many problems- both social and personal- that the african american had to deal with in a post-slavery america. Larsen barely addresses the violent and daily racism that white america heaped upon black society and still creates one of the most moving and eye-opening accounts of black struggle in America.
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Summary: Brilliant read.
Nella Larsen is one of those authors who, after reading her work, I can't really believe I'd never heard of before, and her slim novella, Passing, is the perfect example old saying about how good things come in small packages. Larsen was not the most prominent writer of the Harlem Renaissance but she manages to tackle race relations--the condition of being black in America at a time when it was really seen as a condition of the body, mind, and soul--in a way that no author before or since has done to the same extent.
When I was reading Passing, I couldn't help thinking that it was like a play, and indeed, the book is set up to mimic that setting with three clearly defined "acts." In Act One, two light-skinned black women meet in a Chicago restaurant while they are both passing as white. Irene Redfield is passing for the day, for convenience's sake, to get a seat in a whites-only restaurant; her estranged childhood friend Claire Kendry Bellew has crossed over for good. Claire is raising a white child with her white husband, who has no idea of his wife's heritage and even mocks her for her tolerance of Negroes. Though the women recognized the danger of renewing their old friendship, both seem intoxicated by the fluid, malleable position they occupy in society, and both crave, to a certain extent, what the other has. Staid Irene is dazzled by Claire's recklessness, and Claire misses the identity she put off in favor of her new one. In Act Two, the women return to their lives in New York, but can't help reaching out to the other, which leads to a dangerous showdown in the final, revealing scene.
Passing is not just a story of an American phenomenon which is mostly undiscussed today. Though it is that: and perhaps that's why Larsen is not taught in schools. The current teachable oeuvre has its emphasis on embracing blackness, the proud heritage, the strengths, the success of overcoming. Larsen makes no bones about admitting that at a certain time, it was better to white if you could manage it; or at least easier, open to more privileges, I should say. At the same time, Irene is proud to be an African-American, and her home life is not that of what you would expect. She is affluent, educated, and a sophisticated member of the black upper class, while the "luckier" Claire appears to have made her new life among attitudes of willful ignorance. Still, when Claire begins to captivate those in Irene's circle, including Irene's husband, Brian, Irene must face her own growing knowledge that her happy life, her pride in her identity, has perhaps been a sham. She begins to see that race, something she has tried to ignore, is more prevalent in her life than she had previously thought.
The result is an explosive mix of jealousy, anger, frustration, and humiliation, a powder keg of emotions. Larsen wasn't a very prolific writer in her career; perhaps it was because of the care she took with what she did write. To compare her to one who wrote at the same time would be apt: she takes the same care with language that Fitzgerald does with his Gatsby. Every word feels determinedly chosen to elicit a response, or provide a clue as to what the ultimate resolution of the story might be.
The one misstep comes during this explosive ending--there's a bit of deus-ex-machination going on when someone arrives somewhere they shouldn't be at just the wrong exact time to set everything off, but ultimately, Passing is a novel that is pretty damned near perfect, and pretty damned near original in its kind. We should read Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. DuBois, but there is nothing wrong with reading Larsen's ode to both pride and self-hatred, too. Passing exposes a new and different photograph of the time period and its emotional pitfalls. And more than that, it narrows the gap between prejudice and personal experience to a dangerously small margin. While other writers celebrate their black heritage, Larsen is asking, "What is black?" What does it mean? And how can it possibly matter in the ways people persist in thinking it does?
The epigram for this novel was taken from a poem by Countee Cullen: What is Africa to me? And indeed, Passing begs the question: what is Africa to someone like Claire Kendry, three centuries removed, with her seven white grandparents and her ivory skin? Larsen's answer is, of course, that it is nothing and everything, all at once. And then she turns the question on her white readers with subversive force: If Africa is all these things to yellow-haired Claire Kendry--what might it be to you, too?
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Summary: Love it!
This was a requirement for my online College class. I ordered it for next day delivery, because I initially ordered the wrong edition. It's a must have!
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Summary: A thoughtful and intriguing book
This novel is a remarkable story of two early twentieth century African American women who had grown up together but whose lives diverged as they grew up. When a chance encounter brings them together again after a number of years, we learn that one married a black man and became active in the Harlem Renaissance; the other -- who was light-skinned enough to "pass" -- married a white man (a racist one, at that), leaving her heritage and previous identity behind. Can one truly reinvent oneself? How succesfully can one construct a self out of nothing?
I used this book in leading discussions for a college-level American history class. It never failed to generate ideas and interest.
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