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.’

'Clare awakens in Irene a jealousy that is less about Brian than about Clare's dangerous freedom – her refusal to accept the limits Irene has internalised.'

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.’

Kroeger

‘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’

(The endings to Quicksand & Passing) ‘show NL grappling with the conflicting demands of her racial and sexual identities & the contradictions of a black & feminine aesthetic’

'Irene's jealousy of Clare is inseparable from her fascination with her; desire and envy are intertwined so tightly that they become indistinguishable.'

Claudia Tate

‘a site of bourgeois self-fashioning’

“In fact, Larsen seems to have deliberately avoided narrative clarity by weaving ambiguity into Irene’s every thought and expression.”

‘Irene gives form to Clare but we are left with the task of fashioning Irene from her reflections of Clare’s extraordinary beauty’

Toni Morrison

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

Griffin

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

Kaplan

‘Brian’s question of ‘what race is’, the novel suggests, can never really be answered’

‘While portraying the absurd contradictions on which our ideas of race are built, Passing probes our longing for the very identitities that it questions’

Scruggs

“Although critics argue over this point, one thing about Irene’s sexuality is obvious. It has been replaced by her desire for safety and ‘security’

Hutchinson

‘the question in this mystery story is not ‘who killed CK’ but why did Larsen decline to represent the act itself? why keep the ‘truth’ sequestered?’

‘To Clare, there is nothing tragic about being black. She makes no profound sacrifices, no deeply ethical choice for one race over the other. Her choices are entirely selfish & epicurean; she does what pleases her’

Hutchinson continued

‘Larsen herself no doubt felt like a shadow through much of her life. She did not long inhabit the sort of place in which she could feel at home’

Fuller

The world of Passing is ‘artificial and ultimately as lifeless as a glamourous stage set’

Bernard

‘CK is markedly different from other passing subjects in American Literature. For one, she is not concerned with the moral implications of passing for white…ultimately she sees passing as a play. She is not an incarnation of the ‘tragic mulatto’ figure…she is a gambler, playing the high stakes game of racial roulette. For her, passing is a sport and she is unrivalled in her technique.

Naylor

‘She (Irene) is unable to move as herself or as a human being in that society - she is constantly second guessing’

‘the richest black was not equal of the poorest white’

Zacharek

‘The dance these two perform with one another is entrancing and heady and a little mysterious - it’s steps not easily parsed but always captivating’

‘Brian’s desire to leave for Brazil reveals his desire to escape the American colour line’

Younge

‘Nella Larsen’s iconic novella, Passing, draws from the human toll & intrigue that emerges from the transgression, subterfuge & outright deceit involved in an African American woman passing as white in 1820s America’

NPR

‘I have read and re read Passing more than a dozen times. Each time I think I can hear Larsen’s own voice more clearly asking, demanding really, that each of us abandon the labels we’ve been assigned and celebrate the story we are’

Electric Literature

‘(Passing) is about changing definitions of concepts like race and gender and the inextricable relationship between whiteness and blackness. It is a meditation on the uneasy dynamic between social obligation and personal freedom’