We have been reading Passing by Nella Larsen in class recently, and today we had a very insightful discussion. Passing is the story of Irene Redfield, who is a black woman living in New York. Clare Kendry, an old childhood friend, butts her way back into Irene’s life and disrupts many of Irene’s ideas about herself and the world she lives in.
We began class with an exercise where we picked a word that we thought the book was about, for example “envy”. We were told to take this word and think about an expected approach to thinking about it as well as an unexpected approach. It is very clear that Irene is in some way envious of Clare, but less obvious or expected that Irene might envy her son’s ability to discern the emotions and outbursts of her husband, Brian. I chose the word “belonging,” and I began by thinking about different types of belonging. I decided that there were two types of belonging in the book, the communtiy one is a part of and identitfies with as well as servitude or a kind of obligation towards something or someone. In a discussion with a classmate, I shared my ideas about how Junior, named after his father Brian, belongs to him in a way and is forced by Brian to conform to the standards he sets for his son. Brian wants Junior to be just like him, but Junior is said to be more like his mother, Irene. I also discussed how Irene talks about Clare with Brian one day, saying that “eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her” (90) and making it clear that she did not believe Irene belonged in her life or community.
My classmate relayed their thoughts on the word they chose, “satisfaction,” to me, and we spent some time after class discussing. I really liked their idea about how Clare disrupted Irene’s satisfaction with her life, and they furthered this idea by bringing in the topic of opportunity and how each of the characters see each other as a kind of opportunity, which I hadn’t considered before.
This made me think about how race interacts with belonging in the book, both dictating what circle you belong to and perhaps to an extent who you belong to, as race and power and wealth are very closely related. I began to think about Irene also says that Clare would belong in the South if she hadn’t made the “mistake” of being born black. This comment is very loaded in many ways, but after the discussion I had I was most interested in this quote as an example of how Irene voices her ideas about race and belonging. She herself is black, and although Clare passes as white, she is actively seeking out a connection to the black community which she abandoned after childhood. Irene making this very harsh comment clearly demonstrates how she does not want Clare in her life, and that she feels that Clare belongs more with the white community she has forced herself to belong in by passing rather than the community she was born into. Such an idea contrasts how Irene uses passing, as she goes back and forth as it is convenient for her. For her to feel that Clare does not belong in her community since she passes is slightly hypocritical, but also demonstrates Irene’s discomfort with the danger and deception present in passing and is maybe even worried about what passing would do to her sense of belonging, both in her family and community.
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