Open Prompts II Revised: March 6th--"Passing" Over Answers (the Sequel)

2004. Critic Roland Barthes has said, "Literature is the question minus the answer." Choose a novel, or play, and, considering Barthes' observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers answers. Explain how the author's treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole. Avoid mere plot summary.

Readers tend to look for an “answer” in the text: an argument which can be clearly stated, and is conveyed through all of the texts thematic and stylistic elements.  However, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing offers no such clear-cut solution.  Passing takes place in Harlem during the 1920’s, a time when issues of racial and class identity were especially uncertain. The novel debates these issues, asking the reader to question what it means to be “black” or “white”, among other topics.  But the novel never gives answers to any of these questions, instead implying that they are unanswerable. 

The novel is narrated in 3rd person, but the narration is closely allied with the protagonist Irene Redfield, an upper middle class, light-skinned black woman.  As the novel follows her life and her family—focusing on her relationship with her friend Clare, an African-American woman “passing” as white—the reader can see that they cannot rely on Irene’s perspective to tell the tale.  Unfortunately, it transpires that Irene is deluded, prejudiced, and unaware, causing her account of events to be extremely suspect in the reader’s eyes.  The limited narrative perspective makes it more difficult for anything to become clear, especially the definition of race.

The setting of the novel, 1920s Harlem, is crucial, because at that period in history the idea of the “one drop theory” was being debated.  Did “one drop” of African blood make you “black”?  If the reader only considers Irene’s perspective, this is the definition of race.  Irene says that Clare “cared nothing for her race; she only belonged to it”—but whether she acted as Irene thought “blacks” should, she was definitely Irene’s “people” because she had African ancestry.  However, for Irene, this became a sort of positive idea of kinship, not a negative and demeaning reference to slavery.  But the reader can see that Irene’s views on class made her simplistic definition problematic.  In Passing, middle and upper class blacks like Irene see themselves as separate from working class blacks.  Here, class culture becomes almost like another race.  The reader sees that Irene is prejudiced against poorer blacks, and delusional in her definition of race because she does not treat her darker servants as equals.  Her opinions need to be taken with a grain of salt, and so the reader turns to her husband, Brian, for possible answers.

Brian brings up the possibility that race is the magnetism felt by all members of the race toward each other.  This theory is supported at the end of the novel, when Clare’s white husband storms into an all-black party she is attending (he has discovered she is actually “black”).  All the “blacks” in the room—regardless of their own personal tensions, class, or percentage of African ancestry—band together to defend Clare against the unquestionably white intruder.  By Brian’s definition, Clare is “black”, because Clare uses Irene as a guide to her “poorer darker brethren”, and attempts to insert herself into this society any way she can.  However, this is paradoxical, because if Clare was completely a part of Irene’s “race”, then she wouldn’t need a guide.  In this way, Clare is “white”, just like the Caucasians who would go to African American clubs like the Cotton Club, and observe the culture but only be able to spectate.  As we hear the story from Irene’s point of view, we are invited to scorn Clare as a “passing” African American.  She is part of the African American race, and yet seems to belong simultaneously to another race of passing individuals.  Every time a definition of race is offered up in this novel, there is a problem with it, and race remains ambiguous and the reader without answers.  

One could argue, though, that in this non-argument there is, in fact, an “answer”." Larsen could be arguing that there is no way to tell what “race” is; it is impossible to define because our own limited perspective on the world will blind us from the truth.  Larsen could be showing the reader that we are all Irene Redfield—all be prejudiced and blinded, our own worst enemy in the human quest for certainty.  But Larsen doesn’t even definitively make that argument—in Passing, there is no way to tell anything for sure, and there is no way to define anything with certainty.  And so perhaps, Larsen suggests, we shouldn’t try.