passing ended with the death of the passer who is caught, unhappily, betwixt and between the black and white worlds. Insofar as Clare has no place in the social order and, therefore, must exit the text, Larsen would seem to conform to conventions of the tragic mulatta. In the more traditional treatment of the passing novel, the existing racial order is restored and the essentialist assumptions underpinning that order are affirmed. Clareâs successful performance of whiteness, however, effectively disrupts the social order and reduces essentialism to a virtual absurdity. Nevertheless, Clareâs performance comes at a high price indeedâ her death.
Most critics and readers agree that the reasons for Clareâs death remain inconclusive. Either she falls, jumps, or is pushed from a sixth-story window, thus rendering her death either an accident, suicide, or homicide. And there is, as Claudia Tate warns, âno tangible proof to support one interpretation over another.â 69 Nonetheless, the inevitability of Clareâs death is signaled throughout the text by images that foreshadow Clareâs fate: the âoffending letter,â which Irene â[tears] into tiny ragged squaresâ and scatters over the trainâs railing, and, later, Ireneâs âboiling rageâ resulting in a âslight crashâ and a âshattered cup,â leaving âdark stains [which] dotted the bright rug.â Indeed, her death is unwittingly anticipated by Brian as he, Clare, and Irene climb up to the sixth-story apartment of the Freelands to attend a Christmas party; Brian jokingly tells Clare, âMind . . . you donât fall by the wayside . . .â Moments later, Clareâs death is again prefigured by Irene who, opening the âlong casement-windows of which the Freelands were so proud,â then âfinished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.â
In the conclusion of the novel, Irene hears âa strange manâ attributing the event to âdeath by misadventure,â and while it seems likely that Clareâs death, on the surface of it, could be the consequence of an accident or mishap, it is equally true that both Bellew and Irene must be regarded as co-implicated in her demise. Earlier Irene desperately desires Clareâs death, becoming âfaint and sickâ while trying vainly to âdrive awayâ the thought that â[i]f Clare should die,â she could rid herself of the âmenaceâ to permanence that Clare represents for her. And arguably, it is Ireneâs aphasia, or â[failure] to speak,â about her inadvertent encounter with Bellew that leads ultimately to Clareâs death. On the verge of telling Clare about the meeting with Bellew, Irene fears that âClare wouldnât avert the results of the encounter [exposure of her racial identity],â and represses âthe flood of speech on her lips.â In some respects, then, Clareâs death can surely be construed as the indirect consequence of Ireneâs âkeeping back information.â However, if Ireneâs aphasia leads indirectly to Clareâs discovery, it is Bellewâs verbal accusationââSo youâre a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!ââthat, as we have seen, redraws the color line. In so doing, Bellew verbally âpushesâ Clare across that lineâover which she stumbles. Bellewâs speech is, in its affect, performative: The moment of its utterance coincides with the moment of Clareâs fatal fall to her death, symbolically through the blackness of night into the whiteness of the snow below.
Yet however one reads Clareâs death, the reader must inevitably return to Irene who, through an act of memory (âSuch were Irene Redfieldâs memoriesâ), produces a narrative that is fundamentally, albeit fragmentarily, reconstituted through the