Sliding Significations: "Passing" as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction

Sliding Significations: "Passing" as a Narrative and Textual Strategy in Nella Larsen's Fiction

Martha J. Cutter

Kent State University

"I was determined . . . to be a person and not a charity or a problem, or even a daughter of the indiscreet Ham. Then, too, I wanted things. I knew I wasn't bad-looking and that I could 'pass.'"

--Passing

All of Nella Larsen's heroines want to "pass." Furthermore, as the above quotation indicates, "passing" is more than just a racial strategy: it is a strategy "to be a person." Yet how can "passing" for what one is not help an individual "to be a person"? Only when "passing" becomes a subversive strategy for avoiding the enclosures of a racist, classist, and sexist society does it become truly liberating. In Larsen's first novel Quicksand (1928), however, Helga Crane attempts to use "passing" as a way of finding a unitary sense of identity--a sense of identity structured around one role, a role which somehow corresponds to her "essential self." Although Helga Crane passes for many things (an exotic other, a committed teacher, an art object, a devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, a dutiful mother) she is only, at any given point in her career, one of the these things. So in the end, she cannot resist the enclosures of her world, and becomes entrapped in one stifling and constricting role--that of wife to a poor, rural preacher. Clare Kendry of Larsen's second novel Passing (1929), on the other hand, uses "passing" as a way of avoiding the enclosures of a unitary identity. Like Helga Clare passes for many things, yet unlike Helga Clare chooses not to be confined by any one signification, be it of race, class, or sexuality. She founds her identity not on some sense of an "essential self" but rather on a self that is composed of and created by a series of guises and masks, performances and roles. In so doing she transcends the labelling of society, for the more she passes, the more problematic and plural her presence becomes.

Thus in her second novel, Larsen raises "passing" to a subversive narrative strategy, and to an artful method for keeping open the play of textual meaning. Clare's sliding significations within the novel create what Roland Barthes would call a "writerly text" which makes "the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (4). Clare's problematic passing presents the ultimate mechanism for creating "a perpetual present . . . before the infinite play of the world . . . is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized, by some singular system . . . which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). In the galaxy of signs that is the novel Passing, Clare functions as a signifier whose meaning cannot be stabilized, fixed, confined, limited; and "passing" becomes the ultimate mechanism for creating a text which refuses to be contained, consumed, reduced to a unitary meaning.

Many critics have noted the frequency of "passing" in Larsen's works, but most seem to see "passing" in a limited and negative light. Cheryl Wall, for example, comments that "Larsen's protagonists attempt to fashion a sense of self free of both suffocating restrictions of ladyhood and fantasies of the exotic female Other. They fail. The tragedy for these mulattoes is the impossibility of self-definition. Larsen's protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide" (98).[1] I would contend that it is not the assumption of a false identity per se that causes Larsen's protagonists to fail. Rather, the assumption of only one guise or one form of passing causes Larsen's characters to become stable, static, fixed in their meaning, entrapped within social definitions. To assume a single identity in a world in which identity itself is often a performance, a mask, a public persona, is to ensure psychological suicide.

Larsen's novel Quicksand demonstrates the fallacy of belief in a "true self" most clearly through the character Helga Crane; Helga repeatedly attempts to find a true identity, only to learn that there is no such thing, only a variety of social roles. At Naxos, for example, Helga passes as a dignified and committed teacher; she tries to fit herself into Naxos' strict mold, even though this means curbing her own desires for colorful clothing and relegating her behavior to "the strenuous rigidity of conduct required in this huge educational community . . ." (1). This "strenuous rigidity of conduct" at Naxos requires accepting a particular social role for the school and for African Americans in general; as a white minister says of the school, "Naxos Negroes knew what was expected of them. . . . They knew enough to stay in their places . . . to be satisfied to the estate in which they had been called, hewers of wood and drawers of water" (3). Naxos is, in fact, a world where everyone must assume the same social identity--an identity as a "good" black who knows his or her place, an identity which stamps out individuality in favor of bland acquiescence. At Naxos, in short, everyone must "pass."

Helga pretends to support the school's mission and passes as a committed teacher, but in reality she sees the school as "a big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to a pattern, the white man's pattern" (4). Helga does not endorse this vision of education and she feels extreme dislike for this world: "The South. Naxos. Negro education. Suddenly she hated them all." (3). Yet ultimately Helga realizes that her inability to fit in Naxos has less to do with the role Naxos offers her and more to do with herself: "Helga . . . had never quite achieved the unmistakable Naxos mold, would never achieve it, in spite of much trying. . . . A lack somewhere. Always she had considered it a lack of understanding on the part of the community, but in her present new revolt she realized that the fault had been partly hers. A lack of acquiescence. She hadn't really wanted to be made over" (7). On the one hand, Helga has struggled desperately to pass for a true Naxonian. Yet Helga has also resisted this role, believing that the role itself is not entirely to her liking.

Helga's relationships with James Vayle and Robert Anderson also illuminate her desire to fit into a particular social group, yet still retain her "true" identity. With Vayle Helga feels the security which comes from having "family": "the Vayles were people of consequence. The fact that they were a 'first family' had been one of James's attractions for the obscure Helga" (8). Helga wants to have a powerful social identity and influential family connections, yet she does not want to give up any of her own personality to gain this: "She had wanted social background, but--she had not imagined that it could be so stuffy." Helga longs to be an "insider," yet she also feels smothered by the prospect of adapting herself to a particular social role. Similarly, Helga longs to be an "insider" to Robert Anderson's vision of education; when Anderson tries to convince her to stay at Naxos, she feels "a mystifying yearning which sang and throbbed in her. She felt again that urge for service, not now for her people, but for this man who was talking so earnestly of his work, his plans, his hopes. An insistent need to be a part of them sprang in her" (20). Anderson offers Helga the prospect of a new social definition--she will not be a Naxos devotee, but rather an Anderson devotee. Yet when Anderson makes the statement that Helga is "'a lady'" (21), Helga finds herself rejecting the role Anderson offers. Helga realizes that the role Anderson is imposing onto her does not mesh with her sense of self. As she tells Anderson, she is no lady, no docile and demure matron who belongs at Naxos: "My father was a gambler who deserted my mother, a white immigrant. It is even uncertain that they were married. As I said at first, I don't belong here. I shall be leaving at once" (21).

Ironically enough, in this scene Helga chafes at being labelled precisely what she has been trying to become for all those years at Naxos: a "lady." Helga does not want to become confined by this unitary definition of self. Yet as soon as she lets go of a particular social identity, as soon as she stops passing for something, she feels a terrifying sense of "apprehension" (10) and even vertigo: "the room whirled about her in an impish, hateful way. Familiar objects seemed suddenly unhappily distant. Faintness closed about her like a vise" (8). Throughout the novel, such moments of vertigo mark Helga's abandonment of a particular social identity, before she has located a new social role. Cut free from social restrictions, Helga experiences not liberation, but fear and a sensation of falling. Indeed, she may be falling into a void of nothingness--the nothingness of identity stripped from all its social moorings. In these moments Helga is confronting the possibility that perhaps she has no "essential self" to discover; she is confronting the idea that perhaps identity itself is a mask, a social and public role, rather than a reflection of some core of being. Such knowledge is terrifying to Helga, and she usually responds by fleeing to another persona.

In New York and Chicago, Helga thinks she has found "freedom" after "the cage which Naxos had been to her" (27). In fact, what she has actually found is another role. The key to this identity is provided by Mrs. Hayes-Rore, who hears Helga's tragic family history and comments, "I wouldn't mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won't understand it, and after all it's your own business. . . . I'll just tell Anne that you're a friend of mine whose mother's dead. That'll place you well enough and it's all true" (41). In fact, Mrs. Hayes-Rore does "place" Helga, both literally and metaphorically: she finds Helga a place to live, but she also finds Helga a social identity. Helga is to ignore her mixed heritage and take her place firmly within the black middle-class world.

Both women are aware that this new identity involves passing. As Helga completes the recital of the facts of her life, the women resume their social personas which according to Larsen do involve "passing," concealment behind socially acceptable masks: "During the little pause that followed Helga's recital, the faces of the two women, which had been bare, seemed to harden. It was almost as if they had slipped on masks" (39). Both Helga and Mrs. Hayes-Rore retreat into their safe, socially defined and acceptable roles--they resume their masks. This exchange clearly demonstrates that the society Helga moves in is one in which identity itself is a socially defined public construct, rather than an expression of inner or true self. Mrs. Hayes-Rore, for example, masks her true attitudes about topics such as miscegenation behind social conventions: "The woman felt that [Helga's] story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned--and therefore they do not exist" (39). What Mrs. Hayes-Rore actually feels about miscegenation is not stated; rather, her views are placed in their social context: what black and white people do and do not discuss.

Yet Helga still clings to the idea that she can find a social identity which corresponds to her inner self. In Harlem, Helga thinks she has lost "that tantalizing oppression of loneliness and isolation which always . . . had been a part of her existence" (45). Helga's immersion in the social role offered by Harlem's black middle-class society is so strong that for many months she does not question this identification at all; she firmly intends, one day, to marry and have a home and children in Harlem. Helga also thinks she has found a place where she can belong: "Again she had that strange transforming experience, this time not so fleetingly, that magic sense of having come home" (43, my emphasis). Larsen's language emphasizes that although Helga thinks she truly belongs, she is passing: once again, she finds a role which transforms her from an isolated individual into a connected member of a social network. But Helga confuses belonging to a certain social group with discovering who she is; she feels great joy "at seeming at last to belong somewhere. For she considered that she had, as she put it, 'found herself'" (44). Helga's sense of identity is clearly structured around her social and public role, yet she believes that she has "found herself"--that she has gained access to her essential identity.

Of course, this public role does not mesh completely with her perception of her inner self, and Helga's feelings of oppression return: "It was as if she were shut up, boxed up, with hundreds of her race, closed up with that something in the racial character which had always been, to her, inexplicable, alien. Why, she demanded in fierce rebellion, should she be yoked to these despised black folk?" (54-55). Helga realizes that she has been passing once again; although she has pretended to be part of this society she knows that "She didn't, in spite of her racial markings, belong to these dark segregated people. She was different" (55).[2] Helga's feelings of fear and vertigo reappear and she feels that "For a moment everything seemed to be spinning round; even she felt that she was circling aimlessly . . . " (58-59). Helga is indeed circling aimlessly, for she has not yet found a new identity. As Helga abandons her Harlem identity, she also feels "a little frightened, and then shocked to discover that, for some unknown reason, it was of herself she was afraid" (47). Helga's shock stems from a glimpse of the instability and perhaps non-existence of a self apart from social roles.

Rather than confronting the vacuum of her "essential" self, Helga makes her way to Denmark, where she believes she will find a truer identity. As when she first arrived in Harlem, Helga feels a sense of freedom, of having escaped; she finds "that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race" (64). Helga wants to "belong to herself alone," but never stops to question whether it is possible to have an identity which is completely self-defined. Moreover, Helga has not abandoned her search for a public identity: "With rapture almost, she let herself drop into the blissful sensation of visualizing herself in different, strange places, among approving and admiring people, where she would be appreciated, and understood" (57). Judith Berzon argues that Helga seeks "a status that will bring with it peace, but not stagnation" (224), but as these quotes indicate, Helga also seeks a status that will bring with it status, social prestige. Helga dreams of being "understood"--of not having to play a role which masks who she is. Yet her dreams also involve a specifically social aspect: she will be "among approving and admiring people." She dreams, in short, of a place where a powerful social identity will mesh perfectly with her essential self.

Denmark is no such place. Here Helga is again given a persona, a mask to wear, and she becomes trapped by this unitary definition of self. Helga's aunt has already "determined the role that Helga was to play . . . " (68); she is to be an exotic Other: "She was incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression. She was incited to inflame attention and admiration. She was dressed for it, subtly schooled for it. And after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired" (74). Helga allows herself to be transformed into an exotic Other, only to find that Axel Olsen's portrait of her--which depicts her as she has created herself, as a "sensual creature" (89)--disgusts her. Olsen's portrait does not individualize Helga, but rather assimilates her to the racist and sexist stereotype of the "jungle woman." Once again Helga has become trapped by a unitary definition of self. Helga is again passing for something she is not, as Larsen makes clear by continually referring to Helga's face as masked: "[Helga's] smile had become a fixed aching mask . . . " (71); "[Fru Dahl] gazed penetratingly into the masked face of her niece . . . " (79). Soon Helga's mask begins to suffocate her; she feels "discontent, and . . . growing dissatisfaction with her peacock's life" (81).

Helga wonders if the problem might be within herself, but quickly dismisses this possibility: "Was there, without her knowing it, some peculiar lack in her? Absurd" (81). Yet while in Denmark, Helga does begin to see some of the cracks in her identity. She wonders "Why couldn't she have two lives, or why couldn't she be satisfied in one place?" (93), and she sees "the division of her life into two parts in two lands, into physical freedom in Europe and spiritual freedom in
America . . . " (96). This is the first time Helga consciously acknowledges that her identity may not be a seamless, unified whole, the first time she consciously acknowledges that her identity might be split, dual. Helga equates these two sides of her identity with her two races and believes that in Denmark she has abandoned her black identity. In fact, it can be argued that in Denmark Helga feels closer to her race than she has ever felt before; in speaking of the black race she says: "These were her people. . . . How absurd she had been to think that another country, other people could liberate her from the ties which bound her forever to these mysterious, these terrible, these fascinating, these lovable, dark hordes. Ties that were of the the spirit. Ties not only superficially entangled with mere outline of features or color of skin. Deeper. Much deeper than either of these" (95). Whereas previously Helga has denied her allegiance to her race, seeing it as mere physical similarity, she now claims that her kinship with her race is much more than skin deep--it is spiritual and in fact allied with her essential self.

In Denmark, Helga believes she has been forced to ignore this part of her identity, yet in America, she has been forced to ignore the white part of her heritage--her status as a product of a mixed marriage. No wonder Helga sees herself as "moving shuttle-like from continent to continent . . . from the pale calm of Copenhagen to the colorful lure of Harlem" (96); in fact, Helga has been shuttling back and forth between white and black identities. And yet, in wishing for two lives, Helga reveals her ignorance of the complexity of her own search for identity. In America, Helga's "black self" has played a variety of roles: she has passed as a Naxos lady and a black bourgeois; and when she returns to New York she takes up yet another role: that of a religious convert. Helga wishes she could have two lives and two geographical spaces within which to define her identity, when in fact her identity seems more plural than dual. Larsen further emphasizes the plurality and instability of Helga's identity when Helga contemplates yet another identity--that of Dr. Anderson's mistress. After Anderson's impetuous kiss stirs Helga's passions, she contemplates an affair with him, all the while knowing that she is not "after all, a rebel from society, Negro society. It did mean something to her. She had no wish to stand alone" (107). Through Anderson, Larsen emphasizes that Helga's identity is not dual, but plural and even contradictory. Helga contemplates risking her place within society, even as she affirms that she is no social rebel willing to sacrifice all for passion.

Helga herself, however, does not face these conflicts; rather than realizing the plural nature of her identity she flees again. Her vertigo returns, and she is forced to cling to the Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green: "she had been seized with a hateful feeling of vertigo and obliged to lay firm hold on his arm to keep herself from falling" (115). Literally and symbolically, Helga does lay "firm hold" onto Reverend Green; she lays a firm hold onto the identity he offers her--that of a preacher's wife--in order to keep from falling into the abyss of nothingness which she now suspects is herself. Once again, Helga thinks she had found "a place for herself" (118), but realizes eventually that she is still passing. Helga turns herself into the perfect preacher's wife, only to find that this role controls and confines her: "She couldn't endure it. Her suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great. Not to be borne. Again. For she had to admit that it wasn't new, this feeling of dissatisfaction, of asphyxiation. Something like it she had experienced before. In Naxos. In New York. In Copenhagen. This differed only in degree" (134). Behind her mask, Helga is suffocating: she has found no liberation in her strategy of "passing." Barbara Christian has argued that Helga is trapped and destroyed by her womb (53), and certainly, as Hazel Carby states, "the novel ends with [Helga's] ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________it her "having" ways.

Through Clare, Larsen creates a character with multiple significations, and a text which refuses to be contained, a text which, with its plural sexualities and identities, remains mysteriously enigmatic to the end. Unlike Helga, Clare's identity never becomes fixed or stabilized, and unlike Quicksand, Passing never limits or constrains its own meaning, its own possible readings. Passing is thus a more open text than Quicksand, for while Quicksand's central character and its narrative structures end by closing down the possibilities of meaning, Passing's characters and narrative structures remain open and writerly. As Umberto Eco explains, there are texts which challenge readers' complacency and force them to construct their own solutions to enigmas. Such texts are characterized by narrative structures which are flexible and which "validat[e] . . . the widest possible range of interpretative proposals" (33).[3] Clare's presence within Passing creates a narrative which is unstable, flexible, open. In fact, Clare's sliding significations within the text are meant to destabilize both other characters' and the reader's sense of identity. Through Clare, readers are deliberately invited to construct their own interpretations of the text, and in so doing to see the problematic plural of Clare's identity and of identity in general. Eco suggests that open texts invite their "Model Readers to reproduce their own processes of deconstruction by a plurality of free interpretive choices" (40). Passing is a writerly and deconstructive text in that we as readers must create our own interpretations of Clare and of other characters in the novel, and we must do so by choosing from a number of different, equally plausible interpretative scenarios. And the more problematic and plural our own interpretations of the text as a whole become, the more we reproduce the instability of our own identities.

The narrative's deconstructive processes are thus produced on an intra- and intertextual level, both between characters within the text and between text and reader. Within the novel many characters insist on a unitary definition of identity for themselves and for others, a definition of identity which Clare destabilizes. Brian Redfield and Jack Bellew, for example, are ensconced within their social roles, yet both find that Clare destabilizes their sense of identity and of the world around them. Brian has rather reluctantly but solidly assumed his allotted place as a part of the black heterosexual middle class in America, despite the fact that he abhors his country's racism and his own profession and has no physical desire for his wife, calling sex a joke (189). Brian has suppressed the conflicts in his identity, the knowledge that he is in fact passing for something he does not want to be.[4] Yet in the process of the novel his role inscription becomes destabilized, and Clare seems to be connected to Brian's discontent. Irene believes that she has "a special talent for understanding" Brian, that she "knew him as well as he knew himself, or better" (187). Yet only six pages later Irene admits to feeling "helpless" (193) after Clare has infiltrated their lives. Irene fears that she has lost control of her husband: "It was as if he had stepped out beyond her reach into some section, strange and walled, where she could not get at him" (214).

Irene's explanation for these changes is that her husband is having an affair with Clare. Of course, many critics have pointed out that Irene is an unreliable narrator who has no hard evidence for this supposition. Yet there is also an omniscient narrative perspective within the novel which conveys information Irene does not know.[5] Brian's restlessness is confirmed by this omniscient narration, as well as by the overall development of the narrative. Brian's feelings of restlessness are intensified by Clare's presence; for example, in the later parts of the novel, when Clare is around the household more often, Brian's denouncements of the United States grow increasingly bitter and vocal. And at Clare's death, Brian speaks in a "frenzied hoarse voice, which Irene had never heard before" (241). Brian's usual calm and emotionless demeanor has been destabilized by Clare's death; symbolically, he has been shocked out of his usual and habitual pose by Clare.

Again and again Clare seems to have this effect on people: her presence destabilizes their role inscription. Clare's husband, Jack Bellew, through his insistence on the "innate" differences between the races, emphasizes a conception of identity which is essentialistic, fixed, and unitary: one is white or black, not both of these things at once. Like Clare's aunts who "couldn't forgive the tar-brush" and who believe that "the good God . . . intended the sons and daughter of Ham to sweat . . . " (159), Jack Bellew believes in innate differences between the races, claiming that blacks are "scrimy devils," always "robbing and killing people. And . . . worse" (172). Bellew even believes he can discern who is black and bar them from his household: "I draw the line at that. No niggers in my family. Never have been and never will be" (171). Bellew believes he can draw the color line, separate black from white, prevent the intrusion of the unwanted and savage Other. Of course, he cannot; as Irene notes he is in fact "sitting here surrounded by three black devils, drinking tea" (172). And before the novel ends, Bellew realizes this; literally, he learns that neither Irene, nor Gertrude, nor Clare are "white"; he learns that his knowledge of race is not as certain as he believes it is, that he can not in fact draw the color line. Bellew also learns that his own identity--which is so firmly founded on an opposition between himself and a black Other--is subject to erosion. Bellew bases his identity on a sense of innate differences between the races, differences which he can know and tell. The world is very simple to him: either you are white (and therefore "good") or you are black (and therefore "bad"). Yet Clare disrupts this binarism by being both his adored wife and black. And certainly, she disrupts his sense of the firmness of these divisions, for he has lived with Clare for twelve years and never discerned that she is black. Bellew's understanding of the world around him and of his own identity is thus disrupted, if not completely unhinged, by Clare.[6]

Clare's ability to disrupt an individual's role inscription is, of course, clearest in the case of Irene Redfield, for Irene is extremely committed to the persona she has achieved. Irene Redfield adheres "to her own class and kind" (166), as well as possibly repressing her homosexual desire for Clare, as Deborah McDowell has noted. Like Jack Bellew, Irene believes in the fixity of social and racial roles. Irene likes to be able to place people, and she also likes people to remain in their places. Clare's smile, for example, is judged by Irene to be "too provocative for a waiter" (152). Irene is consistently irritated by Clare's refusal to adhere to proper class distinctions and injunctions such as: one does not flirt with waiters, one does not chit-chat with the maid, one does not intrude where one is not wanted. Irene also believes in people staying in their proper racial positions; she claims to feel loyalty to "the race" and works hard to stay within her own social niche within black middle-class society. Any disruption of Irene's world frightens her greatly, and she fights off threats "to that security of place and substance which she insisted upon for her sons and in a lesser degree for herself" (190).

And yet, although she claims to be pleased with "the easy monotony" (190) of her life, there are contradictions within her behavior that reveal that she too is "passing," contradictions that Clare exploits. Although Irene claims that she never passes (160), when she first appears in the novel she is passing--she is eating at a fancy restaurant which would eject her if her racial identity was known. In fact, Irene enjoys "being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below" (147). Irene's passing is more than just a matter of convenience: she enjoys the sensation of leaving her habitual racial niche; she enjoys passing out of the dark, black, sizzling world, and into the magically pleasant, remote, and quiet white world of the Drayton Hotel. Irene's fascination with passing is also revealed when she questions Clare: "She wished to find out about this hazardous business of 'passing,' this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one's chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. What, for example, one did about background, how one accounted for oneself" (157). Irene sees passing as a problem of identity--how does one account for oneself, define oneself apart from all known social ties--but it is a problem which clearly interests her. So despite Irene's insistence on safety, stability and social fixity, she does have a fascination with that which transcends the limits and refuses to stay stable and fixed.

Irene usually represses this fascination; for example, she condemns Clare's passing and states that she herself has no desire to pass, that she has "everything I want" (160). Irene believes that she and Clare are "strangers in their ways and means of living. Strangers in their desires and ambitions. Strangers even in their racial consciousness. Between them the barrier was just as high, just a broad, and just as firm as if in Clare did not run that strain of black blood" (192). And yet, the parallels between Clare and Irene's lives and thoughts are all too clear; as Jonathan Little has noted, "Clare is Irene's projected psychological double. It is through Irene's descriptions of Clare that readers learn about Irene's deepest and unacknowledged impulses and desires" (177).[7] No wonder, then, that Irene fears Clare; like Helga Crane, Irene fears a confrontation with herself, with the contradictory, plural or even absent self behind the social facade. And like Helga Irene refuses to confront her fear: "For an instant a recrudescence of that sensation of fear which she had had while looking into Clare's eyes that afternoon touched her. A slight shiver ran over her. 'It's nothing,' she told herself.' Just somebody walking over my grave, as the children say'" (176). Irene reduces her feelings to a childish aphorism rather than examining them. Yet the feelings aroused by Clare do not disappear; three months later, after she has torn up Clare's letter and "dropped Clare out of her mind" (178), Irene's fear remains.

After Clare's arrival, Irene is no longer quite so content to stick to her race; in a scene which parallels Helga Crane's dislike of being boxed up with her race, Irene feels a similar sense of suffocation: "Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. . . . Surely, no other people so cursed as Ham's dark children" (225). Irene repeats Clare's language of being one of "Ham's dark children," and she reiterates Clare's sense of the constraints race imposes. Irene has never before questioned what her race means to her; her race is merely something to adhere to, not something to think about. And yet, race itself is a gap in this text, a mystery, something completely unfathomable. When Irene questions Brian about why people pass, Brian responds by saying "If I knew that, I'd know what race is" (185). Brian understands that race itself is difficult to define, enigmatic.

Irene's racial identity is thus destabilized by Clare's presence, and for the first time she begins to question what race means. Clare also destabilizes Irene's role as wife and mother. When Irene suspects that Clare and Brian are having an affair, her identity is profoundly destabilized: "She shook her head, unable to speak, for there was a choking in her throat, and the confusion in her mind was like the beating of wings. . . . The face in the mirror vanished from [Irene's] sight, blotted out by this thing which had so suddenly flashed across her groping mind" (217). Irene's face vanishes from sight; symbolically she becomes a gap, a blank, an absence. Larsen's imagery implies that without her identity as the wife of Brian and the mother of his children, Irene has no identity at all. Irene also realizes that Clare has changed her: "Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before . . . It was only that she had changed. Knowing, stumbling on this thing, had changed her. It was as if in a house long dim, a match had been struck, showing ghastly shapes where had been only blurred shadows" (218). We might say that Irene's identity has been "Clarified"--it has been illuminated ("a match had been struck"), but it has also been darkened, as Irene says: "Clare . . . had suddenly clouded all her days" (220).

What gives Clare the ability to disrupt so many people's role inscriptions? In a world of fixed identities, Clare is such a powerful presence because she denies all the boundaries the other characters work so hard to establish and maintain; she denies divisions of race, class, and even sexuality. In a world of fixed identities, she insists on asserting an identity which is plural, unstable, and enigmatically unfixable. Clare's plural identity destabilizes others' sense of identity, but it also destabilizes the narrative as a whole. For Clare is the element that refuses to be contained, the open textual structure which forces the reader to be not a consumer, but a producer, of the text. Clare's presence within the novel forces the reader to actively engage with and construct the meaning of the text, for Clare herself provides no answers; to the end, she is passing, plural, and ultimately unknowable. Like Barthes pensive text, Clare always "seems to be keeping in reserve some ultimate meaning, one [she] does not express but whose place [she] keeps free and signifying . . . " (216). But unlike Barthes' pensive and classic text, Clare's pensivity is not merely an "allusion" which creates "closure." Instead, Clare's pensivity is a product of her plural and uncontainable presence within the narrative, a refusal of closure.

From the start, Irene notices the differences between herself and Clare. Clare is uninterested in Irene's main preoccupation (safety); she does not care for the stable and sheltered life Irene works so earnestly to maintain. Clare admits she does not have "any proper morals or sense of duty" (210) and that "to get the things I want badly enough, I'd do anything, hurt anybody, throw anything away" (210). Clare's statements emphasize a refusal to bind herself by the same scruples Irene does, scruples about what is or is not proper conduct. Clare's attitudes clearly frighten Irene, for Irene knows they have the potential to disrupt her stable world and her stable identity: "Above everything else [Irene] had wanted, had striven, to keep undisturbed the pleasant routine of her life. And now Clare Kendry had come into it, and with her the menace of impermanence" (229). Clare represents such a menace because she refuses to play by the rules that Irene and others believe in so firmly. And a player who refuses to play by the rules in fact calls the rules into question, suggesting that they are not permanent, fixed, and closed, but changeable, unstable, and open.

The rules Clare calls into question involve race, class, and sexuality. Clare insists on having a plural identity which slides from race to race, from class to class, from one sexual orientation to another. Clare uses her sexuality, for example, in a variety of situations and with a variety of people to get what she wants. Although I do not disagree with Deborah McDowell's reading of a homosexual subtext in Passing, Larsen emphasizes that Clare insists on being an object of attraction to both sexes. Certainly Clare flirts with men, and even with strange waiters in restaurants. Yet Clare also turns her sexual appeal on Irene, and Irene usually responds by doing what Clare wants: "She'd done it again. Allowed Clare Kendry to persuade her into promising to do something for which she had neither time nor any special desire. What was it about Clare's voice that was so appealing, so very seductive?" (165). As it is in other passages of the novel, Clare's voice is here a synecdoche for her presence as a whole. Clare's voice is seductive and appealing, and Clare uses it as an instrument to further her having ways. She also uses her sexuality in this way, turning her "potent" smile on Irene to calm Irene's anger, or soothing Irene's feelings of outrage by "turn[ing] on Irene her seductive caressing smile" (169). Clare insists on a sexual presence which is plural and uncontainable, which is used with equal effect on both genders.

Clare also insists on a plural and uncontainable class identity. While Cl________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ing back and forth between races; Irene tells Clare: "I can't help thinking that you ought not to come up here, ought not to run the risk of knowing Negroes" (194). Irene wants Clare to stay in her place, in a fixed and stable identity as the "white" wife of the racist Jack Bellew.

But Clare is not interested in a fixed and stable identity; rather she is interested in an identity which is most "having." If Clare is to have Jack Bellew's wealth, she must maintain her white identity. But if Clare is to have the ability to flaunt her wealth in front of those who knew her as a poor and miserable girl, she must also maintain her black identity. Larsen's characterization of Clare shows a brilliant nexus between Clare's racial and class concerns: Clare initially passes from the black race to the white race to transcend her class position, but then in order to flaunt this class position she must pass back from a white racial identity to a black one.[8] To have all she wants Clare must maintain multiple identities, multiple subject positions, and pass back and forth between them. According to Mary Dearborn, Clare's passing is a symbol for the way she finds "freedom in her very marginality" (60). However, Larsen's text indicates that Clare insists on being central, not marginal, to a variety of different social networks. Clare actually finds freedom not in marginality, but in her plural and often contradictory subject positions.

When Clare initially leaves black society, she is described as having "disappeared" both literally and in terms of people's consciousness (153-4). When one of her former acquaintances sees her, Clare is completely ignored: "once I met Margaret Hammer in Marshall Field's. I'd have spoken, was on the very point of doing it, but she cut me dead. My dear 'Rene, I assure you that from the way she looked through me, even I was uncertain whether I was actually there in the flesh or not" (154). Clare has passed over into another world; literally and figuratively she is a ghost to her black former acquaintances. Through this imagery, Larsen emphasizes that for Clare's friends passing is a permanent and irrevocable act; once one passes into the white world, one's black identity dies. Yet Clare insists on passing back and forth between these separate realms; she insists on being alive and living in both worlds.[9]

In so doing, Clare throws into question racial divisions, as well as the idea that there are firm and irrevocable differences between the races. Larsen's descriptions of Clare's appearance also continually remind the reader that Clare refuses easy racial categorization, and that race itself is unknowable, mysterious, and even unstable. Irene describes Clare as having "ivory skin" and "gold hair," but she also has "Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them . . . They were Negro eyes! mysterious and concealing" (161). Clare's skin and hair mark her as "white," yet her eyes mark her as "black." Larsen also insists that Clare's eyes both conceal and reveal her racial identity. Clare's fair skin also becomes a trope for the way her physical appearance obscures her racial identity. Jack Bellew, for example, joking refers to the 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level Clare's presence within the text thus creates a great deal of openness. In this sense, character and discourse are complicit with each other; as Barthes would say, "the discourse creates in the character its own accomplice" (178). The discourse creates a character which cannot be known, and the character then contributes to the unfathomable quality of the discourse. When discourse creates characters "it is not to make them play among themselves before us but to play with them, to obtain from them a complicity which assures the uninterrupted exchange of the codes: the characters are types of discourse and, conversely, the discourse is a character like the others" (Barthes, 178-9). As both a figure of discourse and a character, Clare facilitates the uninterrupted exchange of codes, the text's plurality.

It is this uninterrupted exchange of codes which frightens Irene. Clare's murder by Irene at the end of Passing is Irene's attempt to erase the problematic signifier <Clare Kendry> which has destabilized Irene's entire universe.[10] As Davis says, "it is symbolically appropriate that Irene kills Clare, who embodies the dangerous, subversive, and willful characteristics of an individual who would risk everything for her own potential well-being, who would try on one way of being and discard it if it were found wanting" (Nella Larsen, 320-21). Yet does ClareÕs death return Irene to her previous world of fixed identities, of stable significations? Does the murder contain the text's meanings? Certainly, Clare's demise removes Clare physically from IreneÕs life, but it also leaves open the questions Clare has raised, for she dies with her secrets intact.[11] Literally, Irene attempts to push Clare into the void of nothingness which Helga Crane feared so much; Irene attempts to force Clare to pass over permanently into another realm, the realm of the dead. Yet she does not succeed. Irene knows that Clare is not "gone": "She was utterly weary, and she was violently staggered. But her thoughts reeled on. If she could be as free of mental as she was of bodily vigour; could only put from her memory the vision of her hand on Clare's arm!" (239). Clare remains in Irene's memory, a presence that continues to jar, that cannot be erased. And Irene herself is the one who falls into the void of nothingness, of vertigo: "Her quaking knees gave way under her. . . . Then everything was dark" (242). Clare's death does not enlighten Irene or the readers of the text; the mysteries are actually compounded and multiplied--not contained--by her death.

Many critics have faulted the ending of Larsen's novels, arguing that Larsen is unable to resolve the complexities she has raised.[12] But Passing seems to illustrate that Larsen is not seeking resolution; rather, she is seeking to create a text which remains open and uncontainable. According to Barthes, reading "does not consist in stopping the chain of systems, in establishing a truth, a legality of the text . . . [but] in coupling these systems, not according to their finite quantity, but

according to their plurality . . . " (11). Clare's removal from the novel facilitates this reading process, this plurality of interpretations, for her death leaves the systems of meaning open and plural. Thus in the scope of Larsen's narrative strategies, Clare's death at the end of Passing is a stroke of genius which maintains her problematic "passing" presence. Having used Clare to destabilize the universe of her other characters, Larsen removes Clare from the novel before she can become enclosed by one meaning. For with her death, no one will ever know the "truth" about her: what she really was, what she really wanted. To the end Clare is passing, but truly, as Cheryl Wall has asked: Passing for What? Larsen's answer seems to be: for everything, and for nothing. "Passing" thus becomes a narrative strategy for creating a presence which can escape the heterosexist, racist, and classist ideologies which usually confine the "tragic mulatto."

Yet "passing" is also a textual strategy which Larsen uses to destabilize our notions of identity and textuality, returning us to a galaxy of significations, of plural and uncontainable meanings. Quicksand and Passing are inverse images of each other, as even their titles hint. Both novels concern the search for an identity and also a text which can escape from heterosexist, racist, and classist ideologies. But Quicksand portrays how both individuals and texts get stuck in various roles; it concerns the ways both identities and texts get confined by various "resolutions." As readers, we finish Quicksand with a degree of certainty: Helga has become fixed in her identity as a preacher's wife, and most likely this will be her last identity, for the role seems to be consuming her. When we finish Quicksand we thus experience the same sense of suffocation that Helga does, for we cannot escape from the novel's inexorable sense of closure. Passing, on the other hand, concerns moving from role to role, from reading to reading; it concerns the plural and unstable nature of identities and of texts themselves. And so when we finish reading Passing, we are not suffocated by the text's meaning, by its closure. Rather, we are free to construct our own interpretations of the text, as Roland Barthes says, not by giving it a stable and fixed meaning, but by appreciating the plural it constitutes.