“EXQUISITE, GOLDEN, FRAGRANT, FLAUNTING”: CLARE KENDRY’S COLLAPSING HOUSE OF RACE CARDS
by Andrea Everett
In some sense or another, everybody is performing at all times. For the sake of upholding communal values, one must believe that privileged desires are innate and certain hierarchies are indisputable; thus, most people go to great lengths to suppress knowledge of their own performativity or to hide their performativity from others. For this reason alone, in a novel filled with white supremacists and potential murderers, Clare Kendry is the most transgressive character in Nella Larsen’s Passing. After years of keeping white company, marriage to a white man, and parenting a light-skinned daughter, Clare decides to reclaim her black background and become part of a black community. Like a falling house of cards, Clare’s negotiation of her identity dismantles the carefully constructed existences of the characters around her. Clare’s subversion of performance—in other words, “un-performance”— undermines the performances of the novel’s other characters and exposes the malleability of the identities around which they have constructed their lives.
By virtue of the novel’s limited third person narration, the audience is never granted Clare’s perspective (except for a few written correspondences); everything there is to know about Clare comes from the novel’s protagonist, Irene. Irene’s moment of undoing comes at the beginning of the novel, when she and Clare reunite after decades apart on the rooftop of a swanky hotel. Despite Irene’s better judgment, the meeting marks the beginning of a torrid, occasionally strained, and challenging relationship. In terms of comfort with her sex appeal and willingness to pass in more than a casual sense, Clare operates as a foil to Irene and enables Irene to hold a mirror up to her own behavior. She elicits emotions that Irene would rather keep hidden—jealousy, rage, depression, and desire—and brings them to the forefront of her consciousness, threatening the performance of her secure, respectable middle-class life. The biggest threat to Irene is the dissolution of her marriage to her husband, Brian. In the novel, marriage does not function as a union between two loving souls, but rather a means of securing status and family structure. After an especially terse interaction with Brian, Irene admits that she “couldn’t now be sure that she had ever truly known love. Not even for Brian. He was her husband and the father of her sons. But was he anything more? Had she ever wanted or tried for more?” (77). Irene’s overwhelming desire for security exists on a separate, superior plane to the particulars of any interpersonal relationship she might have, though she must continually repress herself to keep the illusion alive. After passing judgment on Clare’s provocative appearance and (according to Irene) objectionable lifestyle, Irene finally becomes aware that she herself is performing.
Irene’s concerns about Clare’s presence in her and Brian’s life may be less banal than her paranoid speculation that Clare and Brian are having an affair; in fact, Irene could secretly harbor sexual or romantic feelings for Clare. Because so many scholars have noted the homoerotic undertones in Clare’s and Irene’s relationship, it feels unnecessary to mull over queer readings of Passing here. Besides, attempting to define the women’s relationship in terms of acceptable and pre-established romantic structures feels too limiting. If anything, this ambiguity functions to highlight the ridiculousness of trying to quantify “real” desire. Whether or not Irene desires a romantic or sexual relationship with Clare is unimportant; what matters are the feelings Clare evokes in Irene, and that their relationship functions outside of the normative heteropatriarchal framework. Though the novel champions a queer worldview (the characters openly suffer under the yoke of performativity), Clare’s undoing of Irene results in both characters’ downfalls.
Clare’s capacity for destruction does not exclusively manifest through her friendship with Irene. In her essay “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge,” Judith Butler addresses how Clare’s un-performance of her white identity also calls into question the “boundaries of [her husband John’s] whiteness, and surely that of his children” (421). Butler constructs a syllogism that outlines the conditions of Clare and John Bellew’s whiteness as well as the forces that threaten to undermine it. John, a man with self professed white supremacist beliefs, claims that he would never associate with black people. Because he associates with (and appears to show genuine affection for) Clare, she must not be black. Clare’s association with John thereby establishes her whiteness and implies her refusal to associate with black people. However, “if she associates with blacks, she becomes black, where the sign of blackness is contracted, as it were, through proximity, where ‘race’ itself is figured as a contagion transmissible through proximity” (Butler 421). And just as Clare’s association with black people signals the undoing of her constructed white identity, in turn, it signals the undoing of John’s. Overwrought though the syllogism may seem, it is useful in identifying one of the text’s moments of undoing; In John’s case, undoing comes in the form of a chance encounter with Irene (another light-skinned woman John had presumed white) shopping with a darker-complexioned friend. In John’s mind, if Felise is black, and Irene associates with Felise, and Clare associates with Irene, his wife’s racial identity is put into question and thus his own. The destabilizing effect of Clare’s passing, as well as the ease with which John’s racial identity unravels, speaks to the startling arbitrariness of race categorizations. If John had seen Irene with another light-skinned woman, he would have never had reason to suspect Clare’s identity. Felise was apparently dark-complexioned enough to signify blackness for John, but how dark is “dark enough”?
Destabilizing as she is, one can argue that Clare’s attempts to transcend her performance and navigate black and white spheres are not unqualified; in fact, her reintroduction to the black world is governed by inviolable parameters. Though the text never provides concrete evidence of an affair between Clare and Brian (the idea is often read as Irene’s projection of jealousy or desire), the pairing makes narrative sense. Another would-be escapee, Brian frequently expresses desires to escape his grounded, quotidian existence and flee to Brazil. The mutual desire (or need) to transcend the performance of particular roles could have drawn the characters to one another. Or, one might argue that Clare must (and does) continue to perform through Brian. Scholar Ann duCille posits that “If we read Clare as a departed daughter desperate to return to the racial fold, an affair between her and Brian becomes almost a narrative necessity. For just as marriage to a white man confirmed Clare as white, coupling with a black man is an alchemy that may turn her black again” (440). DuCille’s assertion, in junction with Butler’s, suggests a logic to the way in which Clare must reestablish her blackness. She cannot be a black woman with a white husband or a white woman with a black husband; because Clare’s identity is ultimately contingent on who she is standing next to, she does not have the power to name herself. Given that either John or Irene probably murdered Clare—unless she jumped or fell out of a window—she likely had little agency over her death. Larsen leaves ambiguous the root of Clare’s undoing, leaving readers free to speculate as to who or what led to the character’s demise. As Vassar professor Hiram Perez once joked, perhaps it is the trope of the tragic mulatta that kills Clare.
What separates Clare from the novel’s other characters is her apparent lack of shame. Clare expresses no real remorse over deceiving her husband or neglecting her child, concerned only with finding peace with her identity. Irene describes Clare as “being just a shade too provocative” when talking to a waiter (10), which could mean that Clare exhibits too much self-awareness about her performativity by refusing to temper her allure. Perhaps her refusal to moderate herself is what makes her so dangerous, and perhaps this is why she cannot survive to the novel’s end.
Clare’s presence evokes in the novel’s other characters—Irene and John, especially—the sort of existential dread most people spend their lives trying to evade. Her existence is an affront to the idea that the lives that John and Irene live—as well as the values they uphold— have any inherent meaning at all. If one establishes that categories like race, class, and gender are meaningless, the notion of performing a gender or race identity might seem disingenuous. However, order and performing rites are ways of making sense of our surroundings and quelling anxiety that the universe is too vast for any of us to comprehend. Freedom from the mandates of performativity, enticing though it seems, is terrifying in its very nebulousness. Though Clare Kendry never murders anybody, goes on racist tirades, or commits infidelity (that the audience has confirmation of), she leads those to whom she has contact down a path toward internal, all-consumptive anarchy.
Works Cited
Butler, Judith. “Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge.” Passing: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and
Contexts, Criticism, edited by Carla Kaplan, Norton Critical Editions, 2007, 417-435.
DuCillle, Ann. “From Passing Fancies.” Passing: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Carla Kaplan, Norton Critical Editions, 2007, 435-444.
Larsen, Nella. “Passing.” Passing: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, edited by Carla Kaplan, Norton
Critical Editions, 2007, 1-83.
Andrea Everett (’20) is an English and Russian Studies double major at Vassar College. She enjoys searching for the literary across all forms of media (from novels to films to saucy finsta posts) and considers writing one of the best modes of thinking. When she’s not holed away in some corner of the library, she can be found cooking, reading, listening to music, or taking photographs. She occasionally acts on the impulse to live dangerously by sending an email to a professor without first consulting a friend.
