least because its attitude toward its own ambiguities is so ambiguous. Is the novel as unconscious of Irene’s demirepressed feelings about Clare as Irene is? If so, why plant the rather large, damning hint that Irene pushed Clare out the window, or at the very least had an overwhelming desire to do so? If the novel is skeptical of Irene’s righteousness, and open to puzzling over the contingency of identity, how does the reader square that with a final gesture that is so punitive toward its passing character? Why must Clare die to restore the marital and social order, and what does the novel think about this apparent narrative necessity? Like a passing person, the book can be seen simultaneously in several different ways depending on who’s looking, what the reader’s assumptions are, and what larger interests might be at stake. And like The Secret Sharer, Passing keeps a few cards up its sleeve, cards that slip, all but unnoticed, between its two main characters, who find so much of themselves in one another’s eyes. The intimacy between Clare and Irene is as alluring as it is ultimately fatal, literally to Clare and figuratively to Irene. The homoeroticism at play here need not beguile us into ignoring the fight to the death for psychic survival at the core of the novel.
Larsen, like Conrad, deploys blur, but, unlike Conrad, who creates a visual and sonic atmosphere of dimness, whisper, and soft glow, Larsen blurs the two women at the root: point of view. Irene is the close third, controlling perspective of the novel; we only see Clare through her (often narrowed) eyes. We get Clare’s backstory, her childhood, and her current concerns strictly via Irene’s point of view. Clare is rarely given the opportunity to narrate her own life or to step outside of Irene’s voicing of her. Even the long letter that Irene receives from Clare at the start of the novel is summed up in a few short, incomplete quotes that don’t challenge Irene’s idea that Clare must be, should be, miserable. As the critic Mae Henderson writes in the critical foreword to the Modern Library edition of the novel, “Metaphorically, Clare’s interiority is a gap within the text; her inner life (including her hidden identity) remains sealed in the envelope, whose contents (like Clare herself) are later destroyed by Irene.” The very tightness of this perspectival structure is so overdetermined that one tends to tilt toward a belief in Larsen’s skepticism about her main character’s hyperrespectability and its cost.
At the same time, and complicating any conclusions about what Larsen may have been up to, is this interesting aspect concerning point of view: when Irene first reencounters Clare in the hotel tearoom in Chicago, she, too, is passing. In fact, Irene, not recognizing Clare at first and assuming that the other woman is white, finds herself the object of Clare’s gaze, her “strange languorous eyes,” eyes that, Irene fears, see what she’s hiding, because she was in search of a cool drink on a hot day and, moreover, hated “the idea of being ejected from any place.” As the two women stare one another down over their respective tea services, the perspective of the novel is momentarily undone by the power of Clare’s gaze. Clare, here, knows Irene, and knows that she’s black and passing for white, but Irene doesn’t, for several pages, recognize Clare, nor does she know that the other woman is black, and passing, as well. Who, in this moment, knows what about whom? Very oddly, by the time they’re paying the bill, Clare has taken on the mantle of the passing woman, while Irene’s casual slip over the color line goes unremarked by the two women, and, from here on out, by the novel as well, which seems to forget about it as rigorously as its characters do.
But can the reader? In this opening scene, the reader is drawn sweetly and firmly into Irene’s pleasure, first, at being in the tearoom (it was “like being wafted
Larsen, like Conrad, deploys blur, but, unlike Conrad, who creates a visual and sonic atmosphere of dimness, whisper, and soft glow, Larsen blurs the two women at the root: point of view. Irene is the close third, controlling perspective of the novel; we only see Clare through her (often narrowed) eyes. We get Clare’s backstory, her childhood, and her current concerns strictly via Irene’s point of view. Clare is rarely given the opportunity to narrate her own life or to step outside of Irene’s voicing of her. Even the long letter that Irene receives from Clare at the start of the novel is summed up in a few short, incomplete quotes that don’t challenge Irene’s idea that Clare must be, should be, miserable. As the critic Mae Henderson writes in the critical foreword to the Modern Library edition of the novel, “Metaphorically, Clare’s interiority is a gap within the text; her inner life (including her hidden identity) remains sealed in the envelope, whose contents (like Clare herself) are later destroyed by Irene.” The very tightness of this perspectival structure is so overdetermined that one tends to tilt toward a belief in Larsen’s skepticism about her main character’s hyperrespectability and its cost.
At the same time, and complicating any conclusions about what Larsen may have been up to, is this interesting aspect concerning point of view: when Irene first reencounters Clare in the hotel tearoom in Chicago, she, too, is passing. In fact, Irene, not recognizing Clare at first and assuming that the other woman is white, finds herself the object of Clare’s gaze, her “strange languorous eyes,” eyes that, Irene fears, see what she’s hiding, because she was in search of a cool drink on a hot day and, moreover, hated “the idea of being ejected from any place.” As the two women stare one another down over their respective tea services, the perspective of the novel is momentarily undone by the power of Clare’s gaze. Clare, here, knows Irene, and knows that she’s black and passing for white, but Irene doesn’t, for several pages, recognize Clare, nor does she know that the other woman is black, and passing, as well. Who, in this moment, knows what about whom? Very oddly, by the time they’re paying the bill, Clare has taken on the mantle of the passing woman, while Irene’s casual slip over the color line goes unremarked by the two women, and, from here on out, by the novel as well, which seems to forget about it as rigorously as its characters do.
But can the reader? In this opening scene, the reader is drawn sweetly and firmly into Irene’s pleasure, first, at being in the tearoom (it was “like being wafted
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