Passing AO5

Flashcards about Passing AO5

Askew

‘What troubles Irene most about Clare’s passing is less that Clare has turned her back on her race than that she has refused her true station in the social hierarchy: through her racial masquerade, she has achieved a class status higher than Irene's own.’

Wall

‘Larsen’s protagonists assume false identities that ensure social survival but result in psychological suicide; passing for white is only one way this game is played.’

‘As they navigate between racial and cultural polarities, Larsen’s protagonists attempt to fashion a sense of self.’

Bernard

‘ It (the novel) reveals the power of desire to transform and unhinge us, and the lengths to which we willl go to get what we want.’

Little

‘Even after returning back across the colour line into the Black community, Clare Kendry finds no peace, rest, or loyalty even after returning to the Black community.’

Bernstein

‘It is a tragic story rooted in the inescapable facts of American life: that whiteness conferred an almost universal unearned advantage, and that loyalty to a black racial identity was not only an act of pride but also one of courage.’

‘(Irene) acknowledges that her greatest concern is for security, for the avoidance of danger, and she never accepts Clare's gesture of defiance as anything but foolishly risky.’

Greenidge

‘In her whiteness, Clare is not free; she has taken on an existence that assures her emotional and spiritual captivity.’

Lewis

‘Nick and Irene are obsessed with passing in part because they also are passing in order to enjoy economic and social mobility, albeit in more attentuated configurations since both possess a sense of pedigree that makes them feel superior to the main characters.’

Kreuger

‘We might ask if Irene also passing when she postures as the doctor's wife, mother, social do-gooder.’

Irene

‘It is possible to read her fears (over Clare and Brian) as a ruse she concocts in order to protect herself from her homosexual desires. Clare desires many things, among them to be among Negros again. But ultimately, the true nature of her driving need is as opaque as the ‘ivory mask’ she wears. What is transparent is Irene’s fascination with Clare.’

McDowell

‘the illusion of fixed racial categories’

Claudia Tate

‘a site of bourgeois self-fashioning’

Toni Morrison

‘draws attention to the novel’s whiteness of desire’

Griffin

‘Clare occupies the in between & moves through unstable social spaces’