Nella Larsen by Passing Read Free Book Online Page A

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. Clare’s successful performance of whiteness, however, effectively disrupts the social order and reduces essentialism to a virtual absurdity. Nevertheless, Clare’s performance comes at a high price indeed— her death.
    Most critics and readers agree that the reasons for Clare’s 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, “no tangible proof to support one interpretation over another.” 69 Nonetheless, the inevitability of Clare’s death is signaled throughout the text by images that foreshadow Clare’s fate: the “offending letter,” which Irene “[tears] into tiny ragged squares” and scatters over the train’s railing, and, later, Irene’s “boiling rage” resulting in a “slight crash” and a “shattered cup,” leaving “dark stains [which] dotted the bright rug.” 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, “Mind . . . you don’t fall by the wayside . . .” Moments later, Clare’s death is again prefigured by Irene who, opening the “long casement-windows of which the Freelands were so proud,” then “finished her cigarette and threw it out, watching the tiny spark drop slowly down to the white ground below.”
    In the conclusion of the novel, Irene hears “a strange man” attributing the event to “death by misadventure,” and while it seems likely that Clare’s 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 Clare’s death, becoming “faint and sick” while trying vainly to “drive away” the thought that “[i]f Clare should die,” she could rid herself of the “menace” to permanence that Clare represents for her. And arguably, it is Irene’s aphasia, or “[failure] to speak,” about her inadvertent encounter with Bellew that leads ultimately to Clare’s death. On the verge of telling Clare about the meeting with Bellew, Irene fears that “Clare wouldn’t avert the results of the encounter [exposure of her racial identity],” and represses “the flood of speech on her lips.” In some respects, then, Clare’s death can surely be construed as the indirect consequence of Irene’s “keeping back information.” However, if Irene’s aphasia leads indirectly to Clare’s discovery, it is Bellew’s verbal accusation—“So you’re a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!”—that, as we have seen, redraws the color line. In so doing, Bellew verbally “pushes” Clare across that line—over which she stumbles. Bellew’s speech is, in its affect, performative: The moment of its utterance coincides with the moment of Clare’s fatal fall to her death, symbolically through the blackness of night into the whiteness of the snow below.
    Yet however one reads Clare’s death, the reader must inevitably return to Irene who, through an act of memory (“Such were Irene Redfield’s memories”), produces a narrative that is fundamentally, albeit fragmentarily, reconstituted through the