{"id":63994,"date":"2022-09-06T02:35:45","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T02:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63994"},"modified":"2022-09-06T02:35:46","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T02:35:46","slug":"psychological-lens-reveals-racial-repression-at-heart-of-passing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63994","title":{"rendered":"Psychological Lens Reveals Racial Repression at Heart of ‘Passing’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Psychological Lens Reveals Racial Repression at Heart of ‘Passing’<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

University of Kansas<\/a>
\n2022-08-31<\/p>\n

Rick Hellman<\/strong><\/a>
\nKU News Service<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

LAWRENCE<\/a> \u2013 While many literary critics have found Nella Larsen\u2019s<\/a> 1929 novella \u201cPassing<\/a>\u201d to be frustratingly opaque, and others have concentrated on its themes of same-sex attraction and class consciousness, an essay by a University of Kansas professor of English finds that racial repression is the focus of the novel by analyzing it from a Freudian<\/a> perspective.<\/p>\n

Doreen Fowler<\/a> said she believed that the shift to a psychological reading explains why the two main characters \u2014 Irene, who lives as a Black woman, and Clare, who passes for white<\/a> \u2014 are doubled.<\/p>\n

In an article titled \u201cRacial Repression and Doubling in Nella Larsen\u2019s Passing<\/em><\/a>\u201d in the latest edition of The South Atlantic Review<\/em><\/a>, Fowler wrote that the main character, Irene Redfield, \u201cworks to erase signs of her black identity \u2014 but those signs of blackness return to haunt her in the form of her double, Clare. While many scholars have recognized that Irene is ambivalent about her African American iden\u00adtity and that Clare and Irene are doubled, my original contribution is to link the two. In my reading, Clare is Irene\u2019s uncanny double because she figures the return of Irene\u2019s rejected desire to fully integrate with the black race.\u201d…<\/p>\n

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

LAWRENCE \u2013 While many literary critics have found Nella Larsen\u2019s 1929 novella \u201cPassing\u201d to be frustratingly opaque, and others have concentrated on its themes of same-sex attraction and class consciousness, an essay by a University of Kansas professor of English finds that racial repression is the focus of the novel by analyzing it from a Freudian perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,125,8,6462,20,25],"tags":[33630,87,29772,33629,3495],"class_list":["post-63994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-usa","category-women","tag-doreen-fowler","tag-nella-larsen","tag-rick-hellman","tag-south-atlantic-review","tag-university-of-kansas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63994","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=63994"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63994\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63995,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63994\/revisions\/63995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}