“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s PassingPosted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2013-02-06 03:08Z by Steven |
“And None for Clare Kendry”: The Mulatta Clique and Female Jealousy in Nella Larsen’s Passing
AsianShakespearean ~ Poetic Justifications, Artistic Testimonies…
2012-04-25
Scholarship on Nella Larsen’s Passing has frequently been approached from the angles of race and queer theories. H. J. Landry and soon after, Brian Carr, have recently broken ground in their demonstrations of a new synthesized approach to the discourses, taking into account symptomatic readings of homosexual desire as an expression of hooksian feminism and ethnic pride. Nevertheless, by synthesizing, both critical approaches tread dangerously on the delicate lines concerning race and gender: Landry, although meticulously addressing his usage of the term, “mulatto,” in his third footnote, takes the political construction of “race” for granted; his perpetual separation of “black” and “white” as distinct figures even as he rebukes this constructed “blood quantum version of race” undermines the internal, complex “cultural authenticities” which Candice Jenkins just a year before him had striven to demarcate in her analysis of the same novel (46-47). So undermining, Landry problematically critiques that performance of conventional femininity through submission to black men is “embracing inferiority” (25). Carr, in a similar vein, situates paranoid interpretations of passing as “nothing” for “something,” implying consequently that “blackness” and “whiteness” are, in fact, differentiated by absence and existence respectively. Carr’s ironic dichotomy necessitates qualification throughout his assessment of paranoia. He admits repeatedly that concentrated focus on the nothing does, indeed, further paranoia itself. Controversy arises in Carr’s article when he subsequently links paranoia with homosexuality with the “killing desire” which ultimately eliminates Clare Kendry (291) — this time, without sufficient qualification. These racial and gender pitfalls caution us to re-evaluate our current synthesis when speaking of Passing…
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