{"id":46033,"date":"2016-03-14T15:13:19","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46033"},"modified":"2016-05-24T00:41:27","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T00:41:27","slug":"beautiful-white-girlhood-daisy-buchanan-in-nella-larsens-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46033","title":{"rendered":"Beautiful White Girlhood?: Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen\u2019s Passing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beautiful White Girlhood?: Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen\u2019s <\/a><\/strong><\/em>Passing<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

African American Review<\/a>
\nVolume 47, Number 1, Spring 2014<\/a>
\npages 37-49<\/p>\n

Sin\u00e9ad Moynihan<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer in English
\nUniversity of Exeter<\/em><\/p>\n

This article expands recent scholarship on race in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s<\/a> <\/em>The Great Gatsby<\/a> and intertextuality<\/a> in Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> <\/em>Passing<\/a> by arguing that the latter is a \u201cblackened\u201d version of <\/em>Gatsby. Mapping the genealogy of <\/em>Passing, from Gatsby through Larsen\u2019s first published work of fiction, \u201cThe Wrong Man\u201d (1926), it proposes that Larsen\u2019s allusions to Fitzgerald\u2019s novel work to destabilize radically any secure sense of Daisy Buchanan\u2019s whiteness by linking her quite emphatically with Clare Kendry. By reading <\/em>Passing in this way, the article also reveals the extent to which Larsen built covert engagements with reading, writing and authorship into a text thematically preoccupied with looking, seeing and interpreting.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is that we\u2019re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and\u2014\u201d After an infinitesimal<\/em> hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again.\u00a0 \u2014F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby<\/em> (1925; emphasis added)<\/p>\n

She couldn\u2019t betray Clare, couldn\u2019t even run the risk of appearing to defend a people that were being maligned, for fear that that defence might in some infinitesimal<\/em> degree lead the way to final discovery of her secret. \u2014Nella Larsen, Passing<\/em> (1929; emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In October 1927 The Forum<\/em> published a debate entitled \u201cShould the Negro be encouraged to cultural equality?\u201d Writing in favor of the proposal was Alain Locke<\/a>, one of the leading intellectuals of what was subsequently termed the Harlem Renaissance<\/a>; writing against it was the nativist and eugenicist, Lothrop Stoddard<\/a>. Although the thrust of Locke\u2019s argument rests on encouraging cultural equality through white recognition of \u201cNegro genius\u201d as evidenced in the work of Count\u00e9e Cullen<\/a>, Langston Hughes<\/a> and others, he anticipates Stoddard\u2019s concern that \u201ccultural equality\u201d equates with interracial sex, marriage and reproduction. Locke identifies the hypocrisy of a situation by which a man who opposes \u201camalgamation<\/a>\u201d so passionately is the very man who \u201cby the sex exploitation of the socially and economically unprotected Negro woman, has bred a social dilution which threatens at its weakest point the race integrity he boasts of maintaining and upholding\u201d (Locke and Stoddard 503, 505). What is striking about Stoddard\u2019s rebuttal is his refusal to acknowledge, as Locke does, that \u201camalgamation\u201d is a fait accompli<\/em>, that the amalgamation horse, if you will, had long ago bolted. For Stoddard, \u201cthe plain facts of the case\u201d are as follows:<\/p>\n

Since the Negroes form nearly one-tenth of the population of the United States, we are statistically light mulattos<\/a>. In the last analysis, the only thing which keeps us from being biologically mulattos is the color-line. Therefore, once the principle of the color-line is abandoned, White America is doomed, and a mulatto America stands on the threshold.<\/p>\n

(Locke and Stoddard 515)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the term \u201cstatistically light mulatto,\u201d Stoddard means that the American racial body (envisaged as white) is already one-tenth black. Stoddard believes that the color line must be policed rigidly if the other nine-tenths of the population are not to become \u201cbiologically mulattos,\u201d as if America\u2019s \u201cwhite\u201d majority were not already racially mixed. Here, Stoddard makes no admission of the possibility of what Joel Williamson <\/a>terms \u201cinvisible blackness\u201d (103): the prospect of a \u201cblack\u201d subject\u2019s looking, and potentially passing as, \u201cwhite.\u201d<\/p>\n

This debate appeared halfway through the four-year interval between the publication of two apparently unconnected novels: F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby<\/em> (1925) and Nella Larsen\u2019s Passing<\/em> (1929). In Tom Buchanan, as several critics have noted, Fitzgerald creates a mouthpiece for the ideas of Lothrop Stoddard, especially those articulated in The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy<\/em> (1920), thinly disguised in The Great Gatsby<\/em> as \u201cThe Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard\u201d (Gatsby 18). Meanwhile, Larsen was not only an exemplar of \u201cthe cultural flowering of Negro talent\u201d that Locke identifies; she was also, being of Danish and African Caribbean ancestry, the embodiment of the \u201chybridization\u201d Stoddard so feared (Locke and Stoddard 507, 514). Here I consider the tissue of connections suggested by this exchange between Locke and Stoddard: between the Harlem Renaissance, contemporaneous eugenicist discourses and racial passing<\/a> and, ultimately, between The Great Gatsby<\/em> and Passing<\/em>. This article argues that in Passing Larsen responds to both Stoddard and Tom Buchanan, that Passing<\/em> is in fact a \u201cblackened\u201d version of The Great Gatsby<\/em>. Indeed, as Thadious Davis<\/a> discovers, Larsen wrote to Carl Van Vechten<\/a> in 1926 of the possibility of \u201cblackening\u201d Francisco de Quevedo-Villegas\u2019s<\/a> novel Pablo de Segovia<\/em> (1595), and it was a similar kind of literary blackening that led to the plagiarism charge leveled at her in 1930 when readers of \u201cSanctuary\u201d noted the remarkable similarities between this and a story published by British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith<\/a> in The Century<\/em> in 1922 (Davis 165\u201366, 351). In fact, \u201cSanctuary\u201d appeared in The Forum<\/em> and Larsen was the first black writer to place fiction there. It is therefore possible, indeed likely, that she read the exchange between Locke and Stoddard. While the plagiarism charge is not my primary concern, Larsen\u2019s engagement with Fitzgerald\u2019s text is so obviously critical and self-conscious as to raise questions about where we draw the line between what Linda Hutcheon <\/a>would term a \u201ccritical reworking\u201d of the literary past, and one that is more uncritically derivative (4)…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beautiful White Girlhood?: Daisy Buchanan in Nella Larsen\u2019s Passing African American Review Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2014 pages 37-49 Sin\u00e9ad Moynihan, Lecturer in English University of Exeter This article expands recent scholarship on race in F. Scott Fitzgerald\u2019s The Great Gatsby and intertextuality in Nella Larsen\u2019s Passing by arguing that the latter is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,6462,20],"tags":[2758,2588,87,6642],"class_list":["post-46033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","tag-african-american-review","tag-f-scott-fitzgerald","tag-nella-larsen","tag-sinead-moynihan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46033"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46033\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47102,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46033\/revisions\/47102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}