Mixed Race Studies

The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

College Literature
Volume 22, Number 3 (October 1995)
Race and Politics: The Experience of African-American Literature
pages 50-67

Corinne E. Blackmer, Associate Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and final novel, Passing, in 1929, the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had been law for over thirty years. Plessy turned on the issue of the constitutionality of so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated racially-segregated facilities for whites and “coloreds” throughout the South. Homer Plessy, a resident of Louisiana who described himself as “seventh-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood” (1138), was forcibly rejected, after he refused to leave voluntarily, from the first-class, whites-only section of a railroad car in his home state. Declaring that “the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race,” Plessy argued that the Louisiana law violated his constitutional rights of habeas corpus, equal protection, and due process. The Supreme Court denied the validity of this reasoning on several counts, among them that various state laws forbade interracial marriage on the grounds, as the State of Virginia later argued unsuccessfully before the Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Second, in an egregious instance of conceptual blurring of categories of persons that implied, without submitting the proposition toloical scrutiny, that white males were intrinsically more ‘adult’ and ‘able’ than non-whites or women, the Court argued that most states had established “segregated” schools “for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and … for poor and neglected children” (Plessy 114). The Court avoided responsibility for promoting institutional racism and established the constitutionality of de jure segregation by stating that “the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority … is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put the construction upon it” (1143). They made an invidious distinction between the cultural and political rights of whites and ‘coloreds’ on the basis of the intrinsic “reasonableness” of long-established cultural practices. Writing for a majority of seven, Justice Henry Brown allowed that while the officers, empowered to judge racial identity by outward appearances might conceivably err in their judgment, the “object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (1140).

In the fifty-eight years between Plessy and the Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), which declared separate public facilities based on race inherently unequal,” many African-American authors pursued an actively critical engagement with the convoluted and contradictory terms of racial identity and identification set forth in Plessy. On the one hand, African-American letters faced the onerous burden of proving the cultural worth of black culture to an often doubting, condescending, and largely white audience. On the other hand, the legal decision and the Social Darwinism underlying it provided an unwelcome opportunity to thematize the willful ignorance and blindness informing racial segregation by exploring how racial stigmas were not founded in the “natural” superiority or inferiority of the races but rather constructed through historical prejudices and arbitrary (often illusory) social distinctions. Moreover, since Plessy not only denied the long if publicly unacknowledged history of interracial sexual unions (which had produced, among others, Homer Plessy as subject) but also strengthened existing miscegenation statutes by forbidding the social commingling of the races, narrative treatments of interracial sexual unions featuring characters who “passed” racially became an ideal vehicle through which to explore the inevitable intersection of racism (and, in some cases, sexism) with sexual taboos.

Seen in the light of the legal and cultural assumptions informing its production, Larsen’s Passing, the curious plot of which has thus far eluded satisfactory analysis, becomes a searching exploration and critique of the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological incoherences that confronted Larsen as an urbane African-American woman author who eschewed racial separatism and nineteenth-century racial uplift, rhetoric – which might in part explain why she abandoned her promising literary career after writing this novel.(5) Indeed, Passing, a relatively late example of this topos of American writing, represents both an original reconfiguration of and commentary on more conventional plots of racial “passing,” which typically center on a psychologically and culturally divided “tragic mulatto” figure, in such novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, among others. While these novels offer trenchant critiques of institutional racism, they also emphasize the heavy personal costs of crossing over the color line” and thus in some measure reinforce the consequences of racial division in an equally separatist “national” literature. Passing, in contrast, stresses the interpretive anxieties and sexual paranoias that make convention-bound people reluctant to allow others the freedom to travel freely throughout the many worlds, identities, and sexualities of American society. Larsen’s novel not only explores a legally fraudulent inter racial union in the marriage between Clare Kendry and John Bellew, but also subtly delineates the intraracial sexual attraction of Irene Redfield for Clare, while the former projects her taboo desires for Clare onto her husband Brian. Ironically, Brian Redfield, who the text implies might be homosexual, evinces no sexual interest in women, but Irene nonetheless begins to suspect that Brian and Clare are conducting an illicit, clandestine affair. Since the term “passing” carries the connotation of being accepted for something one is not, the title of the novel serves as a metaphor for a wide range of deceptive appearances and practices that encompass sexual as well as racial “passing.” Focussed principally on the operation of chance and accident as well as the epistemological crises of unknowability that result from self-silencing and self-repression, Larsen’s novel ostensibly passes” for a conventional narrative of racial “passing.” …

Read the entire article here.