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"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing Monique Rooney continued . . .  | |
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Part Three: Crossing Shifting between Irene's desire for containment and Clare's threat to stability, between spectacle and gaze, the narrative locates the generation of meaning between these two poles. Passing positions Irene as a hesitant, often muted narrator who often "recoils" from exact expression. At one point in the novel, Irene shrinks from Clare when she plants a kiss on her bare shoulder (233). This hesitancy reflects Irene's role as a casual passer who will not commit fully to passing as an act of crossing. The casual passer, it is implied, does not want to give up occasional passing as an autoerotic secret that is cordoned off from everyday life. Irene's fear that Clare is crossing one boundary also leads her to phobically conclude that she is crossing most others. She imagines Clare crossing other boundaries; this is most phobically projected through Irene's belief that Clare is having an adulterous affair with Brian Redfield, Irene's own husband. At one point, Irene worries about her conjugal responsibilities even though she avows her marriage to be a "shell," empty of genuine feeling. She concludes by fixing on Clare and determines to eject Clare from her life as the only answer to her equivocations. Although Clare is characterised throughout as tenacious and ambitious, it is Irene this time who displays the masculine qualities of hardness and determination:
The fixation on Clare's imminent "departure" carries the double meaning of the outing of Irene's "truly known love." This outing is accompanied by Irene's resistance: setting her mouth in a thin line of silent determination, she refuses to speak. Involuntarily, Irene's body threatens her with the other sensory modes of taste (what is the "distasteful reality" to which Irene enigmatically alludes?) and touch (she is on the "edge" of recoiling) as senses that unlike sight and sound rely on proximity rather than distance. The possibility of distancing the body as a purely visible object, an act which is central to the passing narrative, is already found to be based in failure. In the following passage, Irene again tries to locate the passer. The scene is ostensibly one in which Irene accuses Brian, who has gone against Irene's wishes and invited Clare to a charity ball, of having an affair with Clare. Irene's anger, originally directed at Brian, becomes self-punishing:
Irene looks at Brian and realises that he is looking at her, "his brows lifted in an odd surprise" and continues to regard her "with that air of slight amazement." Irene's secret obsession with Clare is, as Brian's surprised face registers, not as invisible as she imagines. Realising that she has protested too much (her voice "had gone queer"), Irene ostensibly describes Brian's reaction to her outburst: "Hadn't it been like that of a man drawing himself up to receive a blow? Her fright was like a scarlet spear of terror leaping at her heart. Clare Kendry so that was it." If it is Brian who is about to receive the "blow" of Irene's accusation of adultery, why is it that the "scarlet spear of terror" leaps into Irene's heart, unless it is Irene who enacts her desire for Clare over the drama of a sexual ambiguity that is written on her own body. Looking at herself in the mirror, following this self realisation of her own passing position, Irene surrenders momentarily to the loss of herself as a reliable image: "the face in the mirror vanished from her sight" (217). This defacing of the face, the recognition that the visible cannot be stabilised, leads to an aborted narrative "for, prompted by some impulse of self-protection, she recoiled from exact expression" (218). Irene's arrested attempts to know and have herself and Clare are terminated through a reversion to the convention of the passing narrative, which ends in the passer's failure to cross over to another subject position, and a cognate failure to transcend the body. After deciding that Clare Kendry can no longer safely occupy the same geographical and metaphorical space as herself, Irene goes shopping again in a white neighbourhood. Like the shopping trip to Chicago that began the narrative, this excursion enacts a primal scene—a scene of recognition as misrecognition that leads to Clare's death. On this excursion, she is accompanied her unmistakably black girlfriend Felise Freeland. The shopping trip will be one in which she is unable to pass for white. The shopping trip signifies a stepping out, for Irene, of the metonymic chain which defines her as white when she passes and black when she is in Harlem: linked arm in arm with the dark skinned Felise, Irene knows that she risks being read as a "mulatto," both black and white. Irene accidentally collides with Bellew who, recognising her, realises that she can pass for white and that therefore his wife, Clare, may be passing for white. Irene looks away as if disavowal will extinguish his presence: "Instinctively, in the first glance of recognition, her face had become a mask. Now she turned on him a totally uncomprehending look, a bit questioning" (227). The use of masquerade in order to evade recognition is a deployment of passing as an abstraction of the body and effects the totalisation of an otherwise anatomised body. In Passing, this moment leads not to Irene's but to Clare's death. Passing and the murder of Clare are, for Irene, not death but her only chance at life. Passing is often interpreted as ending ambiguously, with Clare either jumping or being pushed to her death by Irene from a high window (a death that returns the reader to the transcendent heights that Irene experienced in the Drayton Hotel). Claudia Tate takes up the narrative's oscillating placement of subjectivity by focussing on the uncertainty of whether Clare is murdered by Irene. For Tate, Irene is a quintessential modernist and she, in opposition to Clare, is seen to be "the unreliable centre of consciousness" (146). Other critics read Irene's ultimate desire to destroy Clare as the text's final burial, which forecloses the disruptive and transgressive themes that the text had opened. For Butler, as for McDowell, Wall and Mary Helen Washington, passing operates as a metaphor of death in which crossing the colour line in the face of white racism leads inevitably to a "crossing over into death." [9] Yet by focussing on Clare's death as passer, these readings seem to forget that Irene, also a passer, survives. Or is this what the narrative subversively intends? The debate over whether Irene pushed Clare to her death at the end of the novel is interpreted by Butler as an attempt to contain Clare's sexuality against the dividing force of the white man's exposing and destructive gaze (183). Although the narrative undeniably sets up this racial and gendered opposition, such an interpretation seems to shift the focus away from the effect of Irene's murderous gaze. [10] It is Clare, not John Bellew, who threatens Irene's containment of passing as a casual, private pleasure. Clare's catachrestic oscillation between black and white/homosexuality and heterosexuality must, as Irene has already determined, be outed. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Next Node | Notes | Works Cited
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