Nella Larsen by Passing

is “punished,” as it were, by the elaborate essentialist conceptions of her husand and Irene. Narratively, Irene’s nationalist essentialism combines with Bellew’s racialist essentialism to, in effect, reinforce the color line by “killing off ” Clare. As author, Larsen’s dilemma is that she has created a character who, through the successful performance of whiteness, demonstrates the falsity of black nationalist essentialism on the one hand and white racial essentialism on the other. However, Larsen’s successful refutation is not without a cost for both author and character, a cost prefigured in terms of a kind of discourse of the debt that threads through the novel. Importantly, at the outset of the novel, Clare informs her friend, “In fact, all things considered, I think, ’Rene, that [passing is] even worth the price.” Later, quoting her father, Clare expresses a similar sentiment: “As my inestimable dad used to say, ‘Everything must be paid for,’ ” a phrase later eerily repeated by Irene.
    The author, in other words, incurs a debt that her character must “pay” with the sacrifice of her life. (Surely it is ironically significant that Clare’s death, which occurs on Christmas, is meant to suggest something of a sacrifice to the dominant notions of essentialized racial identity.) Clare has, in effect,
lived
out
the complex identity that Larsen’s narrative has
theorized.
At the level of character and narrative, the essentialist divide is finally revealed to be illusory. And Clare’s exposure, in full view of Irene and Bellew, ensures her own disappearance in a world of modernity saturated by an essentialist conception of race. Clearly, at this point Clare is left with no place to occupy in the racially essentialized world of modernity: Irene will not allow her to assume an identity in the black world; Bellew will not allow her to assume an identity in the white world. Yet Clare goes on to claim a postmodernist identity that is predicated on self-difference and an identity that challenges Irene’s modernist self-sameness. Clare performs, and lives out, an identity that is foreign to Irene’s modernist conception of integral identity. In fact, Clare’s complexly reconstructed identity is fundamentally inconsistent and incompatible with the essentializing assumptions of her culture. Larsen has created a character, a mulatta, who affirms a complex, contingent, and multiplicitous postmodernist notion of identity in a modernist world that would nullify her very existence. Her continued existence would menace both Bellew’s and Irene’s world, so she must cease to exist.
    Clare’s successful passing from one “essence” (“blackness”) to another diametrically opposed “essence” (“whiteness”) demonstrates, finally, that these so-called essences are not biological but socially constructed. Larsen’s artistic achievement lies in the narrative performance of her refutation of essentialism. She does not challenge the presuppositions of essentialism either morally, philosophically, or scientifically; rather through the performativity of her narrative, she presents a reductio ad absurdum refutation of the essentialist position. As author, Larsen imagines a position that her narrative demonstrates to entail an absurdity. In other words, the presumption of essentialism would make it impossible for one to switch “essences.” It is precisely the successful performance of passing that would render such a presumption absurd.
    Just as Irene, in the final scene, sinks into unconsciousness and later, a memory gap, Clare falls into a kind of metaphysical gap. Clare’s fall into a metaphysical hole has its counterpart in both the textual “holes” as well as the “holes” in Irene’s memory. Such a conclusion can only confirm that there exists no place in the