Nella Larsen by Passing Read Free Book Online Page B

various scenes of reading that structure her narrative. At the novel’s conclusion, Irene is rendered incapable of reliably reading or remedying her own situation; her story achieves neither resolution nor closure. Rather than invoke her narrative as a modernist stay against chaos, Irene sinks into virtual unconsciousness:
    [Irene’s] quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again. Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious. . . .
Then everything was
dark.
[Italics mine.]
    Significantly, Irene’s subsequent memory lapse replicates the textual equivocations and ellipses that are typical of (post)modernist narrative:
    What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly. . . .
    What would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backward? Certainly one or the other. Not— . . .
    She stammered: “Is she—is she—?” . . .
    . . . She just fell, before anybody could stop her. I—
    In an attempt to maintain the modernist ideals of order and harmony in her world, Irene has attempted to discipline and regulate her life, as well as that of her husband and sons, for “Irene didn’t like change, particularly changes that affected her smooth routine of her household.” Just as Irene represses her husband’s desire for Brazil, so she represses, much to Brian’s dismay and protest, the discussion of certain subjects in her household in an attempt to protect her sons from the knowledge of ideas such as “sex” and the “race problem.” Thus Irene attempts to repress not only self-knowledge, but the knowledge of others that she construes to be threatening or dangerous (and significantly that “knowledge” is “racial” and “sexual” knowledge). Yet Irene cannot escape “that fear which crouched, always deep down within her, stealing away that sense of security, the feeling of permanence, from the life which she so admirably arranged for them all, and desired so ardently to remain as it was.” But as Irene’s final physical collapse suggests, it is she herself who embodies internally the disorder and instability that seem to menace the surface order and organization of her world. In a moment of epiphany, Irene recognizes that although “life went on precisely as before . . . she . . . had changed.” It is “knowing” that “had changed her”: Invoking the image of the Platonic cave, Irene reflects, “It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows.” Irene’s illuminations, however, are submerged in the conclusion by a memory lapse and a final fall into unconsciousness. Irene must “black out” her epiphany, as well as its catalyst and agent, Clare.
    Metaphorically, then, it is the opening of the envelope, the door into a repressed or buried consciousness, that exposes Irene to the repressed knowledge of self-difference and that results ironically in tragedy for Clare. For, finally, the death of Clare represents Irene’s successful repression of self-difference. Symbolically, Irene’s “hand on Clare’s arm” links them corporeally in that final equivocal moment. If Clare indeed represents aspects of the self that Irene seeks to deny, then Clare’s death—whether accident, homicide, or suicide—represents the death of Irene’s “otherness.” In other words, the “other” in Irene effectively commits suicide. Put differently, Clare’s physical death functions as the equivalent of Irene’s psychic suicide.
    Although the
cause
of Clare’s death remains indeterminate, what is of greater importance is the
fact
of her death, and its necessity at the level of modernist narrative. Clare’s transgressive performance of whiteness