The debate as to whether Nella Larsen’s work can be rightly tagged as ‘tragic mulatto’ fiction is a complex one. And while this is an important argument to consider, the issue of class in Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing has often been put to one side. It remains, however, a critical factor and a key concern of Helga Crane, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, whether they are conscious of it or not. The factions of race, class and gender are all interwoven and inextricably linked within the texts, and cannot (and should not) be considered in isolation from one another. The issue of class feeds into the racialisation of the novels and is of at least equal significance as to whether or not Quicksand and Passing should be labelled as ‘tragic mulatto’.
It is therefore necessary to first consider the relationship between ‘race’ and ‘class’, bearing in mind the historical period in which Larsen was writing (Quicksand first appeared in 1928, with Passing just a year later). I will then define ‘white America’ in relation to both Quicksand and Passing, and contextualise its stratifying forces with regard to, firstly, African American society as a whole, and secondly, to the smaller communities Helga Crane transgresses into and out of, and I will define where she is placed within that stratification.
Without approaching the issue monocausallly, it has been observed that the strongest and singularly most important bond between the two stratifying forces of race and class is that of skin tone. As Verna Keith and Cedric Herring have observed, “light skin color continued to be a distinctive characteristic of upper-class status and to shape the opportunity structure in the black community well into the 1920s” [1] (emphasis mine). At the close of the Civil War, light skinned African Americans emerged at the top in terms of social stratification in black communities (they held a monopoly in that position for the next 50 years, according to Keith and Herring), and their occupations were one of a small number: the small businessman; the skilled labourer; service workers with white clientele; or a sprinkling of professionals. [2] Larsen’s manipulation of this long and widely understood set of conventions is indisputable: Irene’s husband Brian is a doctor (playing the role of the professional), and Clare, in her younger days, is described as “the daughter of Mr. Bob Kendry, who, it was true, was a janitor, but who also, it seemed, had been in college with some of their fathers.” [3] In some instances the class structure as defined by one’s occupation usurps race in importance, i.e. connections are made across the colour line through ties of class similarities. Larsen utilises this complexity in the minor character of Gertrude, another light skinned African American, who, when she married Fred Martin (a white man), was marrying a man who inherited from his father the local meat market, making him a small businessman. Indeed, on account of its moving to the more lavish sounding Maryland Avenue from the more ordinary Cottage Grove, the meat market appears to be doing an exceptional trade. [4] Nevertheless, the fact that this complexity is of very little significance to the structure, plot and outcome of the story reflects that, in the late 1920’s, such crossings of the colour line based on class (and more specifically occupation) were extremely rare. It is here where the novels of Quicksand and Passing gain their ‘depth’ with regard to class: Larsen manipulates these given understandings of the social fabric in a way which intertwines with, encroaches on, and (more often than not) eventually refutes the white world.
But what is the ‘white world’? And why is it refuted? If one looks at the United States in the 1920’s, one sees the nation becoming indisputably the richest country in the world, with share prices constantly rising and with no sign of them ever falling. Even if one had no money, the ‘hire purchase’ was there to supply the goods instantly, with payment spread across the coming months and years. This was an America based around modern consumerism and unprecedented consumption of material goods. Whether it was refrigerators, wirelesses or Ford Model T automobiles, happiness, it appeared, was quite for sale, even if you did not have the money just at that time.
At least, this is what the high school history learning resources say. [5] For those with the blood of former slaves running through their veins, reality often afforded no such pleasures. With the repealing of reconstruction came disfranchisement. Second class citizenship became the norm through Jim Crow legislation, and extremely limited access to the nation’s growing wealth was thus part of the raw deal for African Americans. Added to which, the fear of lynching and the rule of the mob in many southern states cemented African Americans as being less than whites, and very often less than human. Those of mixed heritage, however, were, as has been described previous, closer to the white standing in the stratification of the social order of the United States as a whole than darker skinned African Americans. Their ‘passing’ into and out of the ‘white world’ gave them more access to (or at the very least a better glimpse of) ‘white privilege’ and ‘wages of whiteness’ (to use David Roediger’s phrase), than their darker skinned brothers.
The life of Helga Crane in Quicksand is one mixed with varying degrees of contact with white values, standards, and norms. By the time the novel comes to a close, she has limited contact with whiteness. Whilst Helga was portrayed as somewhat apprehensive about returning to the United States from Denmark, she has a sudden revelation on the streets of Harlem once she was there: “these were her people” [6] (Larsen’s emphasis). From then on, she heads along a confused path, culminating in her residing in rural Alabama as the wife of Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. Her physical move to the south is an authentic journey away from white economic superiority in New York City, which provides the financial underpinning of white values and beliefs. She literally turns her back on these and walks in the opposite direction. From early on in the story, her lack of concern for financial wellbeing sets her apart from a lot of her fellow instructors at Naxos:
She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with. With Helga it was almost a superstition that to concede to money its importance magnified its power. Still, in spite of her reluctance and distaste, her financial situation would have to be faced, and plans made, if she were to get away from Naxos with anything like the haste she now so ardently desired. [7]Helga’s journey can therefore be seen as one of refutation of consumerism, economic power, white power structures, and white values and beliefs: she heads back into the heart of what used to be the black belt, where the white man built an uncivilised society on the foundation of slavery.
The journey in Quicksand is one through distinctly different locations, and the novel observes her closely in each. Naxos, Chicago, New York, Copenhagen in Denmark, New York again, and finally a small village in the depths of Alabama each act as a different canvas and backdrop to put Helga Crane in different places within the social stratification. [8] Helga’s overall journey, when viewed in terms of her standing within the social stratification in relation to class, is one down the social order, regardless of the fact she illustrates an immense capacity of mobility throughout the story which would almost certainly have been beyond the possibilities of most African Americans in the United States. This journey down the social order sets Quicksand at odds with Passing, as no such clear cut path is travelled in that narrative by either Irene or Clare. Indeed, on the face of it, Passing offers a journey-ending conclusion far more destructive than Quicksand, but I will return to this confused resolution later in the paper.
Nevertheless, if we consider Helga in each of the different settings as a separate entity, then another, radically different picture becomes clear. At the start, she lives the life of yet another English teacher at a southern institution geared towards the uplift of a race. I would suggest that her desire for material possessions, which is emphasised very clearly at this point, acts as a signifier of Helga’s inability to completely separate herself from whiteness. She acts as just another instructor at Naxos through her materialism: “[m]ost of her earnings had gone into clothes, into books, into the furnishings of the room which held her.” [9] The fact that they hold her, as well, places her in the palm of a ‘white world’: Helga no longer holds the goods: they hold her in conjunction with the room, which has become an imitation of ‘white’ life.
Helga’s escape from this leads her to Chicago, where it is spelled out to the reader in breathtaking clarity exactly how alone she is: she has no father and her mother is deceased. The reader is given reason to believe that she has only one relative alive in the United States, one Uncle Peter. When his new wife turns Helga away, she literally has no family left (in America at least). As Helga has no siblings, and no parents, and whilst this may not be by choice, it is in stark contrast to the white nuclear family. At this point she is further away from white America and its beliefs and values than at any time she was at Naxos. And, “oddly enough, she felt, too, that she had come home. She, Helga Crane, who had no home.” [10] A new sense of belonging holds Helga in its grip, even though she has apparently never ‘belonged’ anywhere before in her life. Significance rests, also, on the start of this utterance. What comes ‘oddly enough’, is this new sense of an ‘Other’, and this ‘Other’ is her and her life in Chicago: a sensation unique to the African American and absolutely foreign to anybody white. It’s ‘oddly enough’ arrival is made stark to her by the time she was at Naxos, which masked her form such a sensation.
Her nomadacy, of course, continues as the story progresses, as she soon ends up in New York, transfixed by the community in Harlem. The Harlem Larsen describes, and Helga’s relationship to it, is one built outside economic fundamentalism. As Cheryl A. Wall has observed, “for black artists [like Larsen] coming of age in the 1920's the unprecedented urban migrations and the increased freedom of city life provided the background for a spiritual awakening which celebrated the glories of a rediscovered African past and the unique lifestyle of Negro Americans.” [11] The vitality which is bound up and centred around this rediscovered spirituality creates a new America, with new beliefs, goals and dreams, separate from main America where one president declared in the 1920’s that “the chief business of the American people is business.” [12] Harlem is thus set as a black space in the heart of modern economic potency, seemingly hollow due to a strange rejection of money which enthrals Helga: ““But,” said Helga Crane, “what of it? Money isn’t everything. It isn’t even the half of everything. And here we have so much else - and by ourselves. It’s only outside of Harlem among those others that money really counts for everything.”” [13] Helga suddenly shows an awareness of a community which, through its lack of caring about money, distinguishes itself from the white community: it is not specifically a black community; it is explicitly not white. There is no mention of Helga craving for material goods in New York, as she sees a large African American population existing on a deeper level than white consumerism. The shallowness of white consumption is made clear to Helga as she grapples with “a sense of freedom, a release from the feeling of smallness which had hedged her in,” first in Chicago as a child, and later in Naxos. [14] The bonds which tie the fabric of Harlem together as a community are not drawn from wealth and financial power, and hence the stratification of the community in terms of a class structure is drastically altered, though Larsen gives no explicit description of this. Helga appears on the edge of certified classification, and this is something which broadens as a theme once she reaches Copenhagen.
Her expectation of life in Copenhagen is of an even greater freedom. When we see her heading across the Atlantic, we meet her “revelling like a released bird in her returned feeling of happiness and freedom, that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race.” [15] The lure of Copenhagen is its ability to make her unclassifiable within the given social stratification while she is there. The status she entertained whilst she was in the United States simply cannot be transferred to Danish society. When Helga tells one old Copenhagener lady she is an African American, Helga notices that the old lady had “become indignant, retorting angrily that, just because she was old and a countrywoman she could not be so easily fooled, for she knew as well as everyone else that Negroes were black and had woolly hair.” [16] If this old lady’s portrayal of Copenhageners’ views towards African Americans is anything close to accurate, Helga’s skin tone twists their racialised understanding so much so that it shatters into pieces: their comprehension of what an African American looks like is destroyed; her racial appearance, centred around the light colour of her skin, makes her unplacable in relation to Danish social order. Her race takes precedent over her class in that it manages to put her outside and beyond the comprehension of the standard organising forces in Denmark. Helga’s race made her unclassifiable. And whilst Danish society in the 1920’s could classify everybody else, it allowed them to gaze out upon this new Other, and Helga does not feel, in the beginning, at least, any resentment about being exhibited. Helga’s position outside the social order gives her more freedom than she has ever had before in her life, and she becomes “incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression … and after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.” [17] She comprehends the gazing of Copenhageners differently to the gazing of white Americans: the gazes of the former are not, to Helga, inherently abusive, whereas the gazes of the latter are bound up in connotations of ‘keeping one in one’s place’, and thus reinforcing the social structure.
The influence of Copenhagen, an overwhelmingly white European city, plays itself out on the character of Helga. Her transition from the white desire of goods at Naxos to life in Harlem which gave her no such cravings is played out in reverse: “[a]lways she had wanted, not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things.” [18] It is important that this remembering of material desires occurs in Copenhagen, and not while Helga is still in Harlem. She is no longer protected from rediscovering her white desires and cravings for consumerism, and the Danes soon set about adorning her physical body with emblems of financial wealth and (white) sophistication. Helga has barely been in Denmark a number of hours before her hosts are telephoning Garborg’s, the local jewellers, and purchasing earrings and bracelets for her. [19]
When the novel ends, Helga is, in terms of location, in a place similar to Naxos: back in the south of the United States. Her residence in a small rural Alabama village places her in another (apparently) entirely black community, yet it is wholly unlike Harlem in terms of landscape, culture and social stratification. Helga’s position is a privileged one, as the private resentment of the other townswomen shows. [20] In this sense, it differs from Naxos. Whilst she may no longer be striving towards ‘racial uplift’ at Naxos, she is very close to the top of the social order within this small community, and garners the face-to-face respect of the washerwomen who are clearly subservient to her. If we consider this position with regard to the stratification of the entire African American population in the late 1920’s, it is safe to say it is one below where she was when we first joined her story: she no longer shows signs of higher education (her life, now, does not require such a liberal education); she no longer shows any concern whatsoever for ‘racial uplift’; and she resides in a small rural village in the deep south still reeling from the abolition of slavery.
Adam Meyer speaks for a number of scholars when he comments that “writers more often than not castigate the very characters who try to cross the line, either killing them off … or having them return to their "proper" place on the "Black side".” [21] Such an observation does not suffice with regard to Helga’s position at the conclusion of Quicksand, though. Whilst it is accurate to state that our protagonist moves from a black community (Naxos) to a white one (Copenhagen) and then back to a black community (rural Alabama), the two black communities are not equal in terms of their positions within the social fabric, and so a fundamental transition has occurred.
So the searching of Helga Crane is one borne out of rebellion against white values and white standards of ‘civilised’ and ‘respectable’ life. When we first join the novel, Helga is an uninspired teacher at the fictional Black southern college of Naxos, although the institution bares strong resemblance to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Like Tuskegee, it is described as having “grown into a machine. It was now a show place in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the blackman’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it. It was … a big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to pattern, the white man’s pattern.” [22] As Anna Brickhouse has noted, “the prevailing ideology of whiteness in the literary territory of Naxos (an anagram of Saxon, as critics have observed) is inseparable from its aesthetic priorities.” [23] Helga’s desire to leave her job as a teacher in the English department (a professional position) even though she consciously realises she will almost certainly be unable to get another teaching job, is one with implications as regards her class status. While it is worth remembering again that one’s class is certainly not entirely dependent upon one’s occupation, it is one of the main markers of social standing. The ease with which Helga puts her position within the social stratification in the balance highlights a disdain for social order pertaining to class. As the novel proceeds, the reader is painted a picture of how she takes the same stance with regard to the social order in terms of race.
Helga’s desire to leave Naxos is a consequence of her frustration with the school’s teaching methods and its stifling curriculum -- a desire to avoid being cut to the white man’s pattern. Indeed, with the strict enforcement of some of its regulations, Naxos appears to adhere more formerly to white standards than a great many white people do. Helga’s love of clothes catches “the hawk eyes of dean and matrons,” as she adorns the correct attire with “old laces, strange embroideries [and] dim brocades.” The authority figures, narrates Helga, “felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft, luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks.” [24] Larsen manipulates Helga’s desire for bright, flamboyant clothing as a vehicle for emphasising the character’s uneasiness with this potential assimilation with white standards: Helga is understood through this passage to not find white middle class values -- the values which Naxos (and Tuskegee) teaches and holds dear -- as being in any way desirable. Helga Crane encapsulates what the Harlem Renaissance was about for a lot of African Americans: finding a new ‘Africanness’ attractive, and finding it enviable and uplifting in a way which the assimilation of whiteness could not offer. In essence, the Harlem Renaissance offered a higher class existence equal to what the white world could offer for those who cared to ‘pass’, yet it did so in a way which did not cast the ‘African consciousness’ into any subservient position.
During the brief period Nella Larsen was a central figure on the Harlem literary scene, W.E.B. Du Bois was known to hold her in extremely high regard;[25] without putting words into Dr. Du Bois’s mouth, I would suggest that this is partly due to Larsen’s ability to work Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness into her fiction, as she does here. Helga Crane explicitly steps outside Washingtonian uplift and actively searches for her place in the Talented Tenth, a group Du Bois always saw as separate and apart from the Black middle class. [26]
Nella Larsen’s second novel Passing has two main characters whose lives are very different (though not completely polarised), but each lives life in a way that Helga cannot. As Wall puts it, “each assumes a role Helga Crane rejects: Irene is the perfect lady, and Clare, the exotic Other.” [27] Irene’s lifestyle is one centred on her family life. She has a loving husband with a respectable profession, and a young child whom she puts most of her time and effort into caring for. In essence, Irene manages to maintain a white pattern of family life, and her attitudes and behaviour adhere to the white middle class pattern. [28] Furthermore, the transformation into a white structure of life is one which is so complete for Irene that race is, for the majority of the story, of little significance. Indeed, Claudia Tate writes:
The work’s central conflict develops from Irene’s jealousy of Clare and not from racial issues which are at best peripheral to the story. The only time Irene is aware that race even remotely impinges on her world occurs when the impending exposure of Clare’s racial identity threatens to hasten the disruption of Irene’s domestic security. Race, therefore, is not the novel’s foremost concern, but is merely a mechanism for setting the story in motion, sustaining suspense, and bringing about the external circumstances for the story’s conclusion. [29]
Nevertheless, Tate goes too far in her analysis and ends up understating the role race plays in Larsen’s work. After all, it is the transgression of the racial line which gives the novel its thrust and is the reason for the dramatic scene at the end of the book. Whilst it is not the novel’s foremost concern, it is a mechanism for setting the story in motion, it remains an ever-present undercurrent influenced by class, gender and sexuality.
The differing reactions to ‘passing’ from Black people and whites have often a profound effect upon how the person ‘passing’ becomes to be understood. In Passing, the minor character of Felise, who struggles to ‘pass’ is with Irene when she bumps into Clare’s white racist husband Bellew in the street. The racial identity of Irene and Clare is laid bare by the presence of Felise; her reaction once Bellew has gone is one of ambivalence: “Aha! Been ‘passing’ have you? Well, I’ve queered that.” [30] Her reaction is not one of striking judgement and condemnation. Why is this? The white reaction is certainly one borne out of fear, in that it becomes an expression of danger based upon a shift in social culture and challenges social norms: the rationality of such a fear is questionable, though, as whites have no firsthand experience of the phenomenon, and thus their reactions are based on distortions and stereotypes. [31]
In contrast, it is important to consider the depiction of Felise’s reaction as speaking solely on behalf of herself and not for all African Americans. Being careful that we do not generalise, we can read a sense of surprise (“aha!”) quickly followed by the verbalisation of a common deed (“Been ‘passing’, have you?”).The ending of the utterance leaves space for broad interpretation (“Well, I’ve queered that”). From the following conversation, Felise is apologetic for any insult she has made towards Irene. She is not angry at her for ‘passing’, and she shows no sign of bitterness that Irene should ‘pass’ while she is unable to. Ultimately, Felise offers no criticism that she should ‘pass’ into the white world and then out of it once more. The final utterance is loaded with shared knowledge between Irene and Felise: the understanding that this ‘passing’ has happened before in history, that it is happening again now, and that it will undoubtedly happen again in the future. On one level, it is communicated as a shared sin, but it can also be understood as a prideful thing to do, that the transgression and queering of the colour line which Irene (and also Clare) is able to undertake is a gesture of race pride in that some African Americans can achieve it, benefit from it (benefit according to white standards, though), and then cross back into the Black world and be Black and proud once more.
That much, for sure, is revealed through the contextualisation of ‘queer’ here. [32] On one level, Felise’s reaction seems to reinforce Adrian Piper’s generalised observation that African Americans “do not ‘out’ people who are passing as white in the European American community.” [33] Piper’s pitying remark that those who ‘pass’ are “already in so much pain that it's just not possible to do something that you know is going to cause [them] any more” [34] is misguided with regard to Larsen’s portrayal of Felise here. There is no acknowledgment from Felise of weakness and neediness on the part of her light skinned companion(s), and the crux of this is built around a notion of rebellion against the system. ‘Passing’ becomes, for some African American observers, including Felise, an act of rebellion not against whiteness, the Othering effect of whiteness or even white America as a whole, but against the system because the system is a white one. The system is made white because it is white people who held a monopoly with regard to the power structures which set the boundaries, whether those boundaries were concerned with the ‘one drop’ rule, or the drawing up and enforcement of Jim Crow legislation.
Furthermore, the “I’ve queered that” relies entirely upon the vagueness of the definition of ‘queer’ for its ambiguity. The Oxford English Dictionary offers no set explanation as to what ‘queer’ means: as an adjective, it means “[s]trange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious.” The same entry further down offers “[o]ut of sorts; unwell; faint, giddy” as another definition. [35] To further complicate matters, ‘queer’ has a second entry in the OED, offering “[b]ad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable” as a definition. [36] Larsen manipulates the distinct lack of clarity afforded to the word ‘queer’ and uses it consistently throughout both Quicksand and Passing a total of twenty three times. Judith Butler’s observation that it “did not yet mean homosexual, but it did encompass an array of meanings associated with the deviation from normalcy which might well include the sexual” is one useful explanation. [37] Therefore the lack of clarity based upon meanings associated with deviations from normalcy serves conjunctively between the transgression of both racial and sexual boundaries. It is upon this one word which these boundaries become confused. Examples of this are not hard to find, and in Passing they often share adjoining pages, and yet the contextualisation of ‘queer’ alters its meaning from one to do with race to one linked with sexual desire. [38]
But what about boundaries of class? Does class even apply to the dynamic described above? Rosemary Hennessy has written that, “[l]ending a new elasticity to the categories “lesbian” and “gay”, “queer” embraces a proliferation of sexualities … and the compounding of outcast positions along racial, ethnic, and class, as well as sexual lines - none of which is acknowledged by the neat binary division between hetero- and homosexual.” [39] Although Hennessy deals with ‘queer’ in an explicitly sexualised way (which, it would appear, is now the norm), even Larsen’s employment of the word breeds new elasticity into concepts of race and sexual desire. This newfound flexibility impacts upon how class works in conjunction with (and against) the two. An ‘outcast position’ along class lines undoubtedly means a lower status in terms of that stratifying force. From the beginning through the end of Larsen’s Passing, this is not yet the case: the sexual desire remains spoken / is not discovered by surrounding characters, thus class status is in no way compromised.
Fictional accounts of ‘passing’, whilst just that (fictional), remain of great value to historians and also contemporary cultural critics. Berzon is quite correct to establish a firm link between fiction and reality: “fictional accounts of the black bourgeoisie … have a corresponding historical reality.” [40] Helga Crane’s encapsulation of the African essence of the Harlem Renaissance and its capacity for ‘uplift’ is symbolic of what was happening within the African American community during the 1920’s, and the problems of ‘passing’ so forthrightly dealt with in Larsen’s second novel are the markers of a then-emerging new black culture -- one with class distinctions built on and around racial pride. At the time, this new black culture may have been a response to hegemonic (and repressive) white society, but it soon became a movement on its own, thanks in part to the dynamic fiction of writers such as Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and countless others. Larsen’s portrayal of Helga Crane as a chameleon-like person who could be one thing in one setting and another in entirely new surroundings -- this in itself cannot be achieved in the fullness Larsen describes by simply crossing one single boundary. Moreover, the boundary of race is blurred by Helga on so many occasions and in so many different ways that it relies upon and impacts upon her social stratification in terms of her class. Larsen’s sharp use of language, like the word ‘queer’ in both her works, confound an elasticity amongst all ontological categories that they almost always grow malleable together.
Notes
1 Verna M. Keith and Cedric Herring, “Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community”, in The American Journal of Sociology, 97, 3 (Nov., 1991): 764.
2 Ibid., 763.
3 Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001): 154
4 Ibid., 166-7.
5
6 Larsen, 95.
7 Ibid., 6.
8 Larsen was not reinventing the genre of the passing narrative by manipulating the use of different locations. Quicksand is set partially in Europe, something which bears great similarity not only to Larsen’s own life, but to the narrative of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (London: Dover Thrift, 1995). Johnson is considered to be the first writer to seriously employ Europe as a space for change in this genre.
9 Larsen, 6.
10 Ibid., 30.
11 Cheryl A. Wall, “Paris and Harlem: Two Culture Capitals”, in Phylon, 35, 1 (1st Qtr., 1974): 64.
12 This statement by Calvin Coolidge is very often mis-quoted as “the business of the government is business.” The following two sentences of this speech given before a group of national newspaper editors in 1925 further emphasise white America’s love affair with consurism and fiscal wealth: “[t]hey are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life.” Calvin Coolidge, “The Press Under a Free Government.” Jan 17, 1925. Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. January 11, 2010.
13 Larsen, 46.
14 Ibid., 46.
15 Ibid., 64.
16 Ibid., 76.
17 Ibid., 74.
18 Ibid., 67.
19 Ibid., 69.
20 Ibid., 119.
21 Adam Meyer, “Not Entirely Strange, but Not Entirely Friendly Either: Images of Jews in African American Passing Novels through the Harlem Renaissance”, in African American Review, 38, 3 (Autumn 2004): 442.
22 Larsen, 4.
23 Anna Brickhouse, “Nella Larsen and the Intertextual Geography of Quicksand”, in African American Review, 35, 4 (Winter 2001): 539.
24 Larsen, 18.
25 W.E.B. Du Bois is quoted as saying Larsen produced “on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chestnutt.”
26 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem.
27 Cheryl Wall, “Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels”, in Black American Literature Forum, 20, 1/2 (Spring - Summer 1986): 105.
28 Judith Berzon, Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York U.P., 1978): 168.
29 Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation”, in Black American Literature Forum, 14, 4 (Winter 1980): 143.
30 Larsen, 227.
31 Berzon, 145.
32 This is a case-in-point of Butler’s observation that queering works as the exposure within language of both sexuality and race, in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993): 176.
33 Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black”, in Transition, 58 (1992): 14.
34 Ibid., 14-5.
35 “queer, adj.1” OED Online. Sept. 2009. Oxford University Press. Dec. 29, 2009.
36 “queer, adj.2 and n.1” OED Online. Sept. 2009. Oxford University Press. Dec. 29, 2009.
37 Butler, 176.
38 On page 171 of the Serpent’s Tail edition, ‘queer’ is used to express possible hidden sexual desire, as Larsen writes “[i]n Claire’s eyes … was a queer gleam, a jeer it might be. Irene couldn’t define it.” On the very next page, Larsen uses it as an expression to do with racial etiquette: “[f]rom Gertrude’s direction came a queer little suppressed sound…”
39 Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture”, in Cultural Critique, 29 (Winter 1994-5): 34.
40 Berzon, 163.
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