SEOHYUN KIM

ESSAYS

JOY OR VEXATION: RESPECTABLE MOTHERHOOD AND THE TROPE OF CHILDHOOD IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING

SEOHYUN KIM

In 1929, W. E. B. Du Bois declared Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) “one of the finest novels of the year,” hailing it for exploring the psychological intricacy related to racial passing “fearlessly and with consummate art” (2007, 97, 98). Praising Larsen’s conscientious development of Black characters, Du Bois tacitly frames the novel as a contributor to racial uplift literature, texts that combat racist misrepresentations of Black people as incapable of moral thinking. Judith Butler takes issue with Du Bois’s assessment of Passing, pointing out his failure to recognize that “Larsen was struggling with the conflict produced . . . by the moral injunctions typified by Du Bois.” Butler argues that Du Bois misinterprets Passing by neglecting Larsen’s challenge to racial uplift’s “idealization of bourgeoise family life” and its “social constraints on black women’s sexuality” (2011, 132). Building on Butler’s argument, my essay claims that Du Bois’s idealization of respectable motherhood leads him to describe Larsen’s female characters as opposites: Irene as a “race-conscious Puritan” and respectable mother who “is proud of her dark husband and lovely boys,” and Clare who is “the lonesome hedonist,” indifferent to her daughter and threatening Irene’s marriage (2007, 98).

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Du Bois’s placement of Irene and Clare in opposition reduces Clare to being a threat to Irene’s family. Focusing on Larsen’s use of the trope of childhood reveals Irene’s fascination with Clare’s seemingly dishonorable but willful agency in creating joy and refusing self-abnegation. By featuring the complicated perception and practice of erotic power that cannot be explained by the principles of respectable motherhood central to the ideology of racial uplift, Passing fosters a space where Black women’s engagement with their childhood desires and passion can be a distinctive site to imagine and muse on their will and pursuit of Black joy.

Leaders and upholders of racial uplift promoted respectable motherhood as a primary virtue for Black women. This was part of a racial uplift mission to prove Black people’s capacity to maintain stable, monogamous families, thereby redressing a legacy left by enslavement that hindered Black people’s ability to form and nurture lasting family bonds. Importantly, uplift leaders did not regard Black motherly roles as passive or subordinate; Black respectable motherhood, which recognized Black women’s power in their attentive commitment to motherhood practices, thus differed from True Womanhood ideology, which underscored women’s submissiveness. This is why, along with male uplift leaders such as Du Bois, Black women leaders also played a vital role in moralizing and professionalizing Black mothers. For example, Black Baptist women who upheld the politics of respectability “fused the rhetoric of war with that of domesticity” in expressing their perception of themselves as “joined in a struggle for the economic, educational, and moral advancement of their people” (Higginbotham 1993, 146). However, as Kevin Kelly Gaines notes, racial uplift at the turn of the twentieth century became “an ideology of self-help articulated mainly in racial and middle-class specific, rather than in broader, egalitarian social terms” (1996, 20). This shift of racial uplift into a Black middle-class ideology is reflected in Irene’s approach to motherhood. Unlike racial uplift leaders’ lingering expectations that respectable motherhood should foster collective and personal empowerment, Irene’s narrow objective of preserving the stability of her middle-class family leads her to avoid vexing questions about her own and her family members’ happiness if they involve any challenges to middle-class respectability.

Passing intertwines two facets of Irene’s life as a critique of racial uplift’s excessive emphasis on respectable motherhood, which counts respectability and motherhood as essential components of Black women’s agency. On the one hand, Irene, who tries to present

herself as a respectable Black mother capable of protecting her family’s stability, fails to engage with the complex dimensions of Black joy. On the other hand, Irene is bemused by her attraction to Clare, her childhood friend, who prioritizes pleasure over both respectability and motherhood. Given the historical significance of racial uplift’s reclamation of Black motherhood, it is important to avoid the trap of proposing that Black women’s freedom and autonomy requires the refusal of motherhood. In this essay, I investigate the ways in which Passing reconfigures Black women’s erotic power and their willful resistance to self-abnegation by juxtaposing Irene’s abstract idea of her sons’ childhood happiness with her complex fascination with Clare, whom Irene sees as carrying the trace of her childhood passion for pleasure.

While Irene condemns Clare for being selfish in her attempt to rejoin the Black community at the expense of her own and others’ safety, she does not consider Clare’s behavior mindless. Although Irene never expresses her fascination with Clare forthrightly, the ways in which Irene narrates her observations, thoughts, and feelings about Clare suggest that Irene is drawn to Clare’s investment in the erotic power that Audre Lorde theorizes as “an assertion of lifeforce of women” and Black women’s “creative source” (2007, 55, 59). In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya V. Hartman extends Lorde’s emphasis on Black women’s exploration of eroticism into “experiments of freedom,” linking Black girls’ and women’s imaginative yearnings for a freer life with their love of beauty and pleasure, which reformers and Black uplifters in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries rendered as “promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward” (2019, xiv, xv). Hartman delineates how Black women’s ability to cherish deeper and richer feelings through beauty and pleasure empowers them to resist the social perception of Black girls and women “as nothing more than the victims of a long history of violation and destined for the trade” (120). As I examine the subtle evolution of Irene’s capacity to tap into Clare’s erotic power of pursuing self-nourishing joy, I am not claiming that Irene fully comprehends and unravels the significance of Clare’s passion for pleasure to the extent that Lorde and Hartman have articulated in their studies about Black women’s desires. Yet, their studies—which perceive Black women’s sexuality as a rich source of inner power with radical personal and political possibilities—are useful in illuminating how Clare’s erotic power prompts Irene to notice a Black joy that conflicts with racial uplift ideals. Ultimately, I aim to highlight the

significance of Irene’s recognition of Clare’s erotic power in contrast to her inability to expand her fleeting sense of and vague wish for happiness as a Black mother due to her internalized compulsion to maintain her family as an embodiment of American middle-class Black respectability.

Lorde’s and Hartman’s studies open a critical space where Clare’s erotic power, which is suggested in Irene’s depiction of her memory about Clare’s childhood, can be examined as her desire for a freer life in light of language relevant to Black girls and women’s quotidian feelings and experiences. My scrutiny of the unarticulated emotional components in Irene’s description about Clare complements the existing scholarship which tends to objectify Irene’s and Clare’s bodies or desires in their discussion of the representation of Black women’s sexuality in Passing. Given the fact that racial uplift’s idealization of motherhood silenced Black women’s sexuality in the 1920s, many scholars, such as Deborah E. McDowell and Ann duCille, have maintained that Larsen’s illustration of Black women’s sexual desire in the domestic setting should be considered one of her major achievements. However, many of these studies have ignored the fact that Irene and Clare were childhood friends, thus overlooking emotional components involved in Irene’s conflicting feelings about Clare’s erotic power which Irene links with Clare’s girlhood willfulness. For example, McDowell’s groundbreaking study on the subtext of homosexual desire between Irene and Clare unveils Irene’s attempt to deal with sexual desire awoken by Clare, yet the textual evidence McDowell analyzes to support her argument focuses on Irene’s sensuous descriptions about Clare’s exterior appearance and materials that serve as metaphors for Clare’s physical body. Considering that Kate Baldwin aptly notes that Irene’s fragmented nature of describing Clare’s body testifies to her apparent inability to “piece together Clare as a ‘person’” (2007, 477), we might say that McDowell’s analysis relegates Clare to an objectified state under Irene’s sexually intrigued gaze. Dissenting from McDowell’s exclusive focus on the sexual sensations that Irene has toward Clare’s body, duCille argues that Irene and Clare are drawn to each other out of their psychological desire for “a whole self”: Clare is Irene’s “exotic sexual other,” and Irene is Clare’s “exotic racial self” (1993, 105). duCille’s explication of Irene’s and Clare’s desire for each other in terms of their “exotic” otherness is instructive in understanding Larsen’s critical and creative engagement with the primitivism prevalent in Harlem during the 1920s. However, it is important to note that duCille’s heavy reliance on

language traditionally used to fetishize and objectify Black women may be viewed as a theoretical shortcoming, considering that other Black feminists, such as Lorde and Hartman, have worked to rectify the use of language that reflects racism and sexism.

Lorde insists that Black women recover deep feelings and powerful words for their rich emotions and spirits, not from outside of themselves, but from “within our lives” (2007, 59), including from their girlhood. Among many ways that Lorde puts forward to restore erotic power, she emphasizes the necessity of being gentle and kind to one’s inner “girl child” who is “brave” in the way they live through racism and sexism while being “bruised” in their struggle for freedom (175). Lorde uses the trope of childhood as a means of drawing attention to the often-overlooked layers of emotions experienced by Black girls but forgotten by Black women. The original intention of Lorde’s affirmation of underappreciated Black girlhood is to criticize anti-Black society for stereotyping Black girls, but her criticism is also applicable to racial uplift’s early education on motherhood. Uplift leaders imposed maternal obligations on Black girls so much so that Black girlhood is largely represented as an extension of dutiful motherhood; indeed, Anne Stavney interprets the cover of The Children’s Number (October 1924) of The Crisis as an example of the racial uplift movement’s expectation that even preadolescent Black girls should dream to be “the little colored mother of tomorrow” (1998, 540). In Passing, while Irene does not mention her own girlhood, she reconstructs her memory of Clare as a bruised but brave girl child living in poverty with a violent working-class father. In recalling Clare’s childhood after their reunion, Irene tries to relate Clare to beauty in the sense not only of her physical appearance, but also of her ability to live the kind of “terrible beauty” that Hartman describes as “a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given” (33). By juxtaposing Irene’s limited idea of her sons’ happiness with her attraction to Clare’s childhood power of willful pursuit of her desires, Larsen delves into how Black women’s relationality to Black childhood not only impacts their conceptualization of joy, but also their practice of willful refusal to submit to racial uplift norms of respectability.

By invoking Clare’s childhood and using childhood tropes in describing Clare, Irene reprimands Clare for acting like a woman who does not mature beyond the stage of a selfish and willful child. Sara Ahmed explains that the quality of willfulness is typically used

to stigmatize girls who place their own interests over those of others; willfulness is regarded as a problem that must be “straightened” into a “willing[ness] not to have a will of one’s own” and a willingness to prioritize the common good over her own will (2017, 68). Indeed, Irene’s analogy of Clare as a willful child conveys her discomfort with Clare’s dangerous pursuit of her desire even at the risk of her safety and that of Margery, Clare’s daughter. But is there more to Irene’s condemnation of Clare’s willfulness? In her labeling of her childhood friend as willful, Irene not only insinuates her captivation with young Clare’s ability to create a joy which is normally unacceptable for Black girls and women, but also reveals her apprehension that childlike willfulness can be so powerful that it may outlive adults’ control and thereby potentially destabilize the social codes that Irene herself adheres to in order to maintain a sense of stability and security.

The fact that Larsen adopts a free indirect style in Passing further supports the necessity of reading against the grain of Irene’s thoughts. Larsen tells the story mostly from Irene’s point of view while also including an external narrator who occasionally interrupts Irene’s justifications for her own viewpoint. Using this style, Larsen critiques Irene’s limits as a mother, her inability to expand her vague ideas about childhood joy and happiness. Moreover, Larsen also shows that Irene’s unarticulated intimacy with and her affinity to Clare’s childlike and willful erotic power are actually closer than she can admit. Felice Blake distinguishes “intimate antagonisms” from pure hatred by pointing out that the former encourages us to ruminate on “what language and vocabulary can best represent and affirm Black lives” (2018, 11). Drawing on Blake’s argument that intimate conflicts “refuse dominant conceptions of gender, sexual, and cultural normatively, and understand intimacy itself as countercultural” (21), I claim that Larsen uses Irene’s intimate antagonisms toward Clare, based on their different approach to motherhood, as a vehicle to reimagine Black women’s pursuit of self-serving pleasure in relation to their willful refusal to be undone by the social pressure for them to be “respectable.”

IRENE’S AMBIVALENT PRACTICE OF RESPECTABLE MOTHERHOOD

In Passing, the purpose of Irene’s motherhood is not to advance Black liberation, but to preserve the dignity of middle-class Black families. Therefore, despite the toll it takes on her, she constantly

endeavors to please her sons and her husband while hiding her perturbation and struggles in order to keep her family stable and maintain her reputation as a respectable Black mother and wife within Black society. Irene’s recollection of the day when she is reunited with Clare in Chicago begins with her shopping. On “a brilliant day, hot, with a brutal staring sun pouring down rays that were like a molten rain” (Larsen 2007, 7), she goes to several stores in search of specific items but comes up short. By focusing on Irene’s effort to get a drawing book about which her son Theodore “had so gravely and insistently given her precise directions” (8), Stavney claims that Irene presents herself as “the enduring, sacrificing mother” (1998, 552). Indeed, Irene strenuously pursues the task in the midst of “the heat and crowds” so much so that she begins to feel faint (Larsen 2007, 8). Also, in her role as a wife, Irene strives to prevent her family from falling apart. Being well aware of Brian’s restlessness in marriage, Irene “had prided herself on knowing his moods, their causes and their remedies” (60). Irene, however, gets exceedingly unnerved as she learns that he has invited Clare to come to her tea party even though he knew she disapproved it. Although agonized by her strong suspicion that Brian is captivated by Clare’s beauty, Irene acts as if all is well at the party in order to project a carefully constructed image of a stable, happy family. While Du Bois sees Irene as a model of respectable motherhood, this scene, by focusing on Irene’s efforts to conceal her pain and self-doubts about her approach to motherhood and being a wife, reveals the costs of maintaining that image for Black women.

Irene covers up her anxieties about motherhood in yet another way—by condemning Clare’s lack of parental commitment. During her conversation with Clare about what mothers should mean to and do for their children, Irene presents herself as a caring mother by contrasting herself with Clare. However, their dialogue discloses Irene’s agitation about her motherly responsibilities as much as it does Clare’s rejection of them. When Irene attempts to dissuade Clare from returning to the Black community after years of passing as White and after her marriage to John Bellew, she demands Clare consider the tragic consequences that would result from the exposure of her Blackness. In response, Clare, “with stricken eyes and compressed lips,” says that “being a mother is the cruellest thing in the world,” and Irene fleetingly sympathizes with Clare’s inarticulate uneasiness that “was so often in her own heart of late.” However, Irene immediately asserts that “we mothers are all responsible for

the security and happiness of our children.” Warning Clare of the possibility that Mr. Bellew would separate Clare and her daughter if her Black heritage is exposed, Irene calls Clare’s attempt to reconnect with the Black community “a selfish whim” (Larsen 2007, 48). Later, when Clare expresses an unwillingness to visit her daughter in Switzerland during the summer, Irene suggests Clare would feel happy to see her daughter again. Clare answers that “children aren’t everything” and continues with laughter: “there are other things in the world, though I admit some people don’t seem to suspect it.” Irene chafes at Clare’s nonchalance, but she also suspects Clare’s laughter is intended to mock her own preoccupation with motherhood. Assuming a “secret joke of her own” in Clare’s tone, Irene defends herself: “I know very well that I take being a mother rather seriously. I am wrapped up in my boys and the running of my house. I can’t help it. And, really, I don’t think it’s anything to laugh at” (58). Irene’s desperate defense of her preoccupation with the management of her house and her sons, despite the fact that Clare did not mention it explicitly, implies a deep ambivalence regarding the demanding practice of being a dutiful mother.

Irene performs the ideals of respectable motherhood to maintain the stability and security of her middle-class family and her personal respectable image, not for the sake of racial pride. To be more specific, she does not see motherhood as a respectable means to achieve other aspirations such as the expansion of education and the fight against racism to empower Black girls and women. While Irene insists that she is not “ashamed of” living and being perceived as a Black person (Larsen 2007, 11), the novel contains no explicit expressions of her racial pride nor pride in her Black family. For example, when her childhood friends Gertrude and Clare, who are married to White men, share the fears they had during their pregnancies about the possibility that their babies might have had dark skin, Irene tells them “‘one of my boys is dark’ . . . in a voice of whose even tones she was proud” (26). Irene is proud of her ability to maintain composure in the face of offensive comments about Blackness rather than actually being proud that one of her sons was born with dark skin. As Samira Kawash aptly puts it, Irene’s loyalty to race is “less a loyalty to the dignity of her race than it is a loyalty to the very principle of race, insofar as it is the condition of order, predictability, and security in her life. The alternative is the uncontrollable, the irrational, the unpredictable” (1997, 157). Irene’s endeavors to maintain respectability center on her own ability to exert self-control and maintain

her poise even when the dignity of Blackness is questioned. This is why, when Irene finds her duty of motherhood too overwhelming to restrain herself, she takes advantage of her ability to pass as White to maintain her self-control. The moment when she almost faints while shopping for her sons in Chicago, Irene decides to take a break from the arduous task and get some fresh air. The taxi driver perceives Irene as a White woman, and so takes her to the Drayton, a hotel with a rooftop tearoom from which Black people are “ejected” (Larsen 2007, 11). As Rafael Walker notes, Irene is not interested in disturbing “the stability of racial ideology” (2016, 180), so she lets others categorize her race for her and does not question it.

Despite Irene’s promulgation of the importance of motherhood to Clare, Larsen connects Irene’s ambivalence about Black motherhood to her habit of passing as White as well as her lack of interest in confronting racial injustice and asserting racial pride. When Irene shops downtown with Felise, who has “golden cheeks” and “curly black Negro hair,” they run into Clare’s husband. Believing Irene to be White, Bellew betrays his “displeasure” at Irene’s being with Felise. Irene explains to Felise that she only passes “for the sake of convenience, restaurants, theater tickets, and things like that” and Bellew is the only one to whom she is “socially” passing (Larsen 2007, 70). Although Irene downplays the seriousness of her deception, Larsen suggests that the way Irene engages with Whiteness significantly affects her ability to imagine happiness as a Black mother. In the elevator to the rooftop at the Drayton, Irene compares her experience to “being wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that had left below” (8). Irene distinguishes the Drayton rooftop, an all-White space, from the sweltering weather she has had to endure for her sons as well as the bridge party that night “whose atmosphere would be so thick and hot that every breath would be like breathing soul.” Her moment of respite in the Drayton is not, however, free from intrusive thoughts about her role as a dutiful mother and her role as respectable woman at the bridge party that night. She thinks of both her demanding son Ted and her husband Brian, who always want something “that was difficult or impossible to get” (9). Additionally, by settling “the problem of the proper one of two frocks for the bridge party,” she considers the proper image of a Black woman that she will display for both White and Black people in attendance (10). Nonetheless, Irene perceives the rooftop, where she is seen physically disassociated from her Blackness, as a delightful escape

from the spaces that require the constant maintenance of a carefully constructed image.

Irene’s active maintenance of Black respectability and her tendency to relieve her anxiety by periodically withdrawing from her Blackness, becomes even more problematic when she encounters vexing questions regarding the security and happiness of her husband and sons. On their way to a print shop to collect the handbills and tickets for the Negro Welfare League dance party, Irene discloses to Brian her apprehension that their son, Brian Junior, is “pick[ing] up queer ideas about things.” Hearing Irene’s concern, Brian asks her whether she is talking about “ideas about sex” and then he refutes it by responding “If sex isn’t a joke, what is it?” Two reasons may explain Irene’s wish to limit her son’s knowledge about sexuality. By specifying that Junior is engaging not just with “jokes” but with “dreadful jokes,” Irene does not plead for him to remain entirely ignorant about sex, but she still tries to define his childhood as the separation from anything that might disturb the notion of respectability which links sexuality to marriage and procreation, not to pleasure. Irene’s anxieties about what she sees as her son’s improper attitude toward sexuality are further compounded by the fact that anti-Black racism often criminalizes Black men and young Black boys through false accusations of sexual misconduct. Interestingly, Irene uses her concern as an opportunity to suggest they send Junior to “some European school” and to ask Brian “to take him over” (Larsen 2007, 42). Irene does not clarify her reasoning behind her wish to send him to Europe, but she might want to protect Junior’s knowledge about sex from being misconstrued as a threat. In addition, Irene probably believes that Junior’s childhood in Europe would help extricate herself from the fear that the jokes about sex Junior hears (and makes) will negatively impact not only his life, but also her careful and burdensome management of respectability.

As implied by her phrase “some European school,” Irene lacks concrete ideas and plans for her son’s life in Europe. Irene’s vague plan to send him to Europe indicates her willingness to admit the potential misunderstanding about Blackness if that misrecognition allows her and her family to avoid squarely confronting the fundamental difficulties associated with maintaining “the respectability” of Black people in America. Irene must know that Blackness is fetishized in Europe: she mentions Josephine Baker, a Black American performer who gained enormous popularity in France, during random conversation with the tea party attendees (Larsen 2007, 64).

European eroticization of the racialized body was manifested in “the negrophilia sweeping over Europe” (Cheng 2010, 14), which was implicitly projected onto Black men such as Jack Johnson (ArcherStraw 2000, 44–49). In Irene’s mind, the European version of subtle fetishization of Black men which Junior might experience would allow him to defer directly grappling with blatant sexualization of Black men at least during his childhood, much like she uses misidentification of her race in the Drayton Hotel as an opportunity to retreat from the demands required to maintain a respectable image of a Black mother.

Irene’s desire for Brian to take Junior to Europe is also linked to her discouragement of Brian’s desire to emigrate to Brazil. She expects that her suggestion would give Brian “a break in the easy monotony that seemed . . . so hateful to him” (Larsen 2007, 43). Although both Europe and Brazil were thought of as a refuge from US racism in the early twentieth century, Brazil was considered a site of Black nationalism and idealized as a land of opportunity (Meade and Pirio 1988). Brian remarks that “uplifting the brother’s no easy job” in America: he is tired of visiting “sick people, and their stupid, meddling families, and smelly, dirty rooms, and climbing filthy steps in dark hallways” (Larsen 2007, 39). Brian might have grown weary of striving for racial equality in the US and would like to escape it. However, his specific desire for his family to relocate to Brazil implies his commitment to envisioning new ways to express and elevate Blackness which dramatically differs from Irene’s conservative wish to preserve the status quo. In Europe, “plantation slavery was not focused on home territories [of Europe], as was the case in the United States” and “many European countries have no long-standing Black population” (Keaton, Sharpley-Whiting, and Stovall 2012, 6). Therefore, in Europe, Otherization of Blackness and Black people’s approach to it operate on a more individual level, whereas in Brazil, where there is a higher proportion of mixed-race people and those who identify as Black, Blackness is discussed as a more collective identity. These circumstances are true today, and it is likely that such attitudes were also prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. These cultural and political contexts suggest that Irene possibly fears that Brian’s time in Brazil would require her to actively redefine what an uplifted Blackness should look like and to figure out her new role in a new Black community. Such consideration would radically unsettle her attempt to maintain the stability and security of her middle-class Black family.

Although the narrator mostly delivers Irene’s observations and thoughts, when Irene insists that her wish is grounded on her concern for Brian’s happiness and her sons’ security, the narrator comments on her thoughts, critiquing the protagonist’s narrow-mindedness:

It was only that she wanted him to be happy, resenting, however, his inability to be so with things as they were, and never acknowledging that though she did want him to be happy, it was only in her own way and by some plans of hers for him that she truly desired him to be so. Nor did she admit that all other plans, all other ways, she regarded as menaces, more or less indirect, to that security of place and substance which she insisted upon for her sons and in a lesser degree for herself. (Larsen 2007, 43)

By assessing, rather than merely conveying, Irene’s thoughts, the novel makes clear that Irene’s preoccupation with managing her family members’ happiness acts as a deterrent to any contemplation of the complexity of Black happiness, reflection that might allow Junior to have joy with “queer ideas” of sex and Brian to envision new, more liberating forms of “uplifting” the race (42, 39). Irene’s idea of sending her son and her husband to Europe speaks to her reluctance to engage with both Junior and Brian’s desires, yearnings that challenge the security and stability of her heteronormative middle-class family.

Furthermore, Irene’s quarrel with Brian about whether their sons should learn about the violence of lynching displays her defensive and restrictive conceptualization of the happiness of her sons, which results in her failure to grasp the complexities of Black childhood. Irene tries to stop Brian from having a conversation with their sons about anti-Black violence, stating that she wishes “their childhood to be happy and as free from the knowledge of such things as it possibly can be” (Larsen 2007, 73). Irene characterizes her sons’ childhood happiness as a vacancy of knowledge about corruption prevalent in reality, which approximates the romanticized notion of innocence. Analyzing romanticization of childhood innocence, James R. Kincaid contends that innocence understood as “emptiness” becomes a defining characteristic of childhood as adults try to fill their desire in that imagined vacuum of innocence of children (1998, 12). While Kincaid’s study of child innocence unveils the complexities of adult erotic desires and sexuality projected on the construction of the child as an embodiment of purity, Robin Bernstein unmasks racialized innocence as a concept that defined children as White:

“innocence was raced white” and “angelic white children were contrasted with pickaninnies so grotesque as to suggest that only white children were children” (2011, 4, 16). Considering this historical and cultural context of childhood innocence, Irene’s wish that her sons remain ignorant of racism can be interpreted as her resistance to the exclusion of Black children from the purview of childhood innocence. However, Larsen problematizes Irene’s idea that her sons’ childhood happiness should repel knowledge about racial violence. Brian informs her that Junior has already been called a racial slur, so Irene’s wish for her sons’ innocence, which parallels the transcendence of corrupted reality, is more an imagined status that she wants her sons to have than one they can experience, and thus her idea of childhood happiness would leave them vulnerable rather than protected. Irene’s tendency to control her sons’ knowledge diminishes the opportunities that the boys might have to explore the complex dimensions of their lives as Black children.

Crucially, Larsen presents Irene and Brian’s views of Black childhood as a debate, suggesting disapproval of Irene’s view but not necessarily approval of Brian’s. By having Brian impatiently dismiss Irene’s opposition to his parenting philosophy as “evidences of such stupidity,” Larsen examines possible limits in racial uplift’s perception that Black childhood and Black adulthood exist on a continuum based on their mature ability to engage with racial issues. Brian maintains that giving their sons “proper preparation for life” and “giv[ing] them some inkling of what’s before them” are the duties that Black parents should exercise (Larsen 2007, 74), his claim resonating with racial uplift leaders’ emphasis on raising “race-conscious children” that grow up to be future race leaders (Mitchell 2004, 12). Racial uplift leaders needed to highlight the mature consciousness of Black people, including Black children, to restore their agency because anti-Blackness perpetuates the colonial trope of infantilization of Black people in the US. Bernstein explores this trope in Racializing Innocence: “The pickaninny, as a de-childed juvenile, ultimately reserved infant-hood for black adults. The libelous, de-childed pickaninny was interdependent with the libel of the ‘childlike Negro.’ At stake in the refutation of the pickaninny image was not only black childhood but also black adulthood” (2011, 55). Racial uplift leaders deemed children’s education integral to the project of establishing self-esteem in a racially unjust society. In Children’s Literature and the Harlem Renaissance, Katherine Capshaw Smith notes that the annual Children’s Number of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis, included

many “cross written” stories and poems that targeted both child and adult readers. Even The Brownie’s Book (1920–21), published to serve as a space where child readers could celebrate Black cultural identity through fantasy and playfulness (Smith 2004, 26–28), presented political issues in an indirect way, thereby encouraging child readers to cultivate their strength and work as young race leaders in a well-disciplined manner. While Larsen faults Irene for failing to trust her sons’ capacity to tackle racial issues, she also questions Brian’s argument that early education on mature themes would “keep [Brian Junior] from lots of disappointment later on” (Larsen 2007, 42). Brian’s claim that their sons’ “future happiness” might come at the cost of a happy childhood raises another issue of confining Black childhood to a temporally previous stage of adulthood (74). Portraying Brian’s intransigent stance that their sons should develop a tolerance for disappointment and hurtful feelings as early as possible, Larsen suggests his inflexible conflation of Black childhood with the pre-stage of race-leaders risks deferring meaningful discussions about Black children’s joy, unconstrained by scripts of racial uplift.

WILLFUL CHILDLIKE JOY: BLACK GIRLS AND WOMEN’S DESIRE FOR PLEASURE

Irene’s defense of middle-class Blackness prevents her from imagining alternative constructions of Black childhood, possibilities that go beyond racial uplift’s view that Black childhood should be a preparation period for race leaders. By contrast, Irene’s reunion with her childhood friend Clare reminds her of Clare’s childhood, marked by a longing for freedom, prompting Irene to notice Clare’s erotic power related to girlhood. The day when they meet again in the Drayton hotel, Clare tells Irene about her girlhood after her father’s death, an event that necessitated living with her racist aunts. Clare says, “I wanted things . . . when I used to go over to the south side, I used almost to hate all of you. You had all the things I wanted and never had had. It made me all the more determined to get them, and others” (Larsen 2007, 19). Clare does not identify the “things” she wished for. The lack of specificity in Clare’s desire for “things” and “others” suggests that Clare is not content with minimal safety but constantly driven to desire more liberating possibilities for her life. Irene remembers this as Clare’s “having way” (14), and Walker aptly interprets the “having way” of Clare as “oscillatory biraciality,” a subversive mode of passing, which has the power to disrupt binary

constructions of race in the US (2016, 180). Admittedly, Clare’s attempt to rejoin Black society while refusing her duty for her own family might look similar to Irene’s habit of passing as White. However, Irene uses passing as an opportunity to momentarily withdraw from her overwhelming obligations to maintain middle-class Blackness, to fortify her strength and resolve. Clare’s passing, on the other hand, disturbs and disrupts the stability of the color line and deregulates the standards of careful behavior expected from Black people who do pass as White, as exemplified by Clare’s marriage with a White man. The first day of their reunion, Clare shares with Irene that she was forced to pass as White at first by her aunts who “forbade [her] to mention Negroes to the neighbours, or even to mention the south side” (Larsen 2007, 19). Clare, however, did not remain a victim of her aunt’s abuses: she made the rebellious choice to marry Bellew. As Eric King Watts maintains, “Clare’s passing is not mobilized simply for ‘having,’ it is invigorated as a way of ‘making’” (2012, 181). In her choice to pass as White through marriage, Clare exercises her agency to live a freer life by leaving the aunts who provided her with “a roof over [her] head, and food, and clothes” (19), the minimal protection an adult can provide for a child in their care. Even within the marriage, Clare continues to mock the color line rather than remain a victim of it by ridiculing her racist husband when she invites her childhood friends to laugh at his use of his offensive nickname for her—“Nig” (29).

When remembering their first reunion in Chicago, Irene mostly recounts what she observed and rehearses what Clare said to her primarily through direct dialogue, rather than adding her personal thoughts and reflections. In comparison, starting from their second reunion that begins with Clare’s letter two years later, Irene interprets Clare’s actions and words. Irene’s interpretation about Clare is guided by her effort to contain her fascination with Clare in order to maintain her sense of security, so Larsen encourages readers to recognize the contradictions underlying Irene’s report about Clare. Irene’s dissimulation can even be identified when she professes the value of security. After repeatedly feeling perturbed by Clare’s attempts to rejoin the Black community, Irene eventually concedes that “in spite of searchings and feeling of frustration, she was aware that, to her security was the most important and desired thing in life” (Larsen 2007, 76). Irene’s assertion here ironically reinforces “the narrative ambiguity” that Claudia Tate sees resulting from “Irene’s emotional turbulence” (1980, 143). By depicting the process

of mental anguish that Irene undergoes to reach her conclusion, Larsen implies that Irene is actually concerned with halting her growing awareness of the values of “happiness, love, and wild ecstasy that she had never known” but perceived through Clare (Larsen 2007, 76). Likewise, in presenting Irene’s interaction with Clare, Larsen displays the complexities of Irene’s developing understanding of Clare’s erotic spirit, an understanding obscured by Irene’s condemnation of Clare as selfish. Larsen demonstrates her interest in Black women’s erotic expansion of their freedom, in tension with ideas of respectable motherhood, through Irene’s subtle disclosures and ongoing confusions concerning her attraction to her childhood friend’s commitment to pleasure.

In the novel’s opening scene, Larsen uses Irene’s reading of Clare’s letter to establish Irene’s complicated attraction to Clare’s willful way of expressing her desire. Finding the “foreign paper of extraordinary size” of the envelope “furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting” (Larsen 2007, 5), Irene senses that Clare wants more than what Irene herself tries so hard to safeguard—a sensible adjustment to Black middle-class culture and values. When reading the letter, by “puzzling out, as best she could, carelessly formed worlds [sic] or making instinctive guesses at them” out of the “sheets upon thin sheets of it,” Irene connects to the “wild desire” to reconnect with her life as Black that Clare writes she felt after their reunion (7). Larsen’s use of quotation marks and ellipses in presenting the content of the letter makes it ambiguous whether the powerful yearning of Clare to rejoin Irene is the product of Irene’s selective interpretation or the essence of Clare’s desire. Around the quotation marks that she uses to indicate what is written in Clare’s letter, Larsen notes that Irene is “making instinctive guesses at [Clare’s words]” and certain “words [in Clare’s letter] stood out from among the many paragraphs of other words” (7). Larsen thus makes clear that Clare’s words are mediated through Irene’s perspective and even her voice, assuming Irene reads the letter out loud. Moreover, Larsen uses ellipses in a way that makes it unclear whether an omission is made by Clare or Irene. The presentation of the letter, which begins “ . . . For I am lonely, so lonely . . . cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before” gives an impression that it is Irene who omits the parts where ellipses are used, and, simultaneously, Larsen leaves open the possibility that the ellipses were made by Clare herself, as suggested in the final words of the letter: “this wild desire if I hadn’t seen you that time in

Chicago. . . .” (7; ellipses in original). Larsen encourages readers to see that not only does Clare unleash her desires in an unconstrained way but also that Irene’s narration about Clare is at least partially influenced by Irene’s perspective, particularly her focus on Clare’s desires and interior longings.

Larsen hints that Irene perceives Clare’s approach to her desire as more powerful than Clare may actually possess, so much so that Irene constructs stories about Clare’s girlhood that Clare does not share with her. Even before reading the letter, Irene recalls that young Clare took a risk in actualizing her desire when she was a Black girl, and she reconstructs her memory about Clare as a child who lived with a working-class father in a “ramshackle flat” on the south side of Chicago (Larsen 2007, 77):

And for a swift moment Irene Redfield seemed to see a pale small girl sitting on a ragged blue sofa, sewing pieces of bright red cloth together, while her drunken father, a tall, powerfully built man, raged threateningly up and down the shabby room, bellowing curses and making spasmodic lunges at her which were not the less frightening because they were, for the most part, ineffectual. Sometimes he did manage to reach her. But only the fact that the child had edged herself and her poor sewing over to the farthermost corner of the sofa suggested that she was in any way perturbed by this menace to herself and her work. Clare had known well enough that it was unsafe to take a portion of the dollar that was her weekly wage for the doing of many errands for the dressmaker who lived on the top floor of the building of which Bob Kendry was a janitor. But the knowledge had not deterred her. She wanted to go to her Sunday school’s picnic, and she had made up her mind to wear a new dress. In spite of certain unpleasantness and possible danger, she had taken the money to buy the material for that pathetic little red frock. (Larsen 2007, 5–6) It is unlikely that Irene really witnessed Clare’s private moment that she narrates here: Irene “seemed to see it” (5). Nevertheless, through her imagined construction of young Clare as a Black girl who works dangerously to make “the red frock,” Irene reveals her interest in Clare’s persistent pursuit of beauty and pleasure in an environment which Irene thinks could not possibly provide any pleasure. Irene’s illustration in substantial detail particularly captures Clare’s “fugitive gestures of refusal” (Hartman 2019, 19)1 to be “undone” (Sharpe 2019) by her intemperate father. The process of Clare’s dressmaking constructed in Irene’s memory thus resembles what Christina

Sharpe dubs “a black aesthetics” of making “livable moments, spaces, and places, in the midst of all that was unlivable” (2019), which has its theoretical roots in Lorde’s discussion of the erotic as “a space where women can learn to find joy and feeling in life” (Musser 2014, 148). Irene’s attentiveness to Clare’s childhood suggests that Irene’s feelings about Clare are something other than what Lorde defines as the pornographic, which “represents the suppression of true feeling . . . [and] emphasizes sensation without feeling” (Lorde 2007, 54).

Despite her implicit fascination with Clare’s ability to create a self-nourishing pleasure, Irene simultaneously fears that Clare’s attempt to return to the Black community would be accompanied by a search for pleasure that would seriously undermine the safety and stability of respectable norms of Blackness. Consequently, Irene comes to a harsh judgment of Clare, reassuring herself that she is in a position to dismiss Clare’s proclivity for her passion. First, she describes the dress that Clare created as “pathetic.” Irene’s bitter commentary on the outcome of Clare’s work can be interpreted as her attempt to reclaim her control over how she perceives Clare’s quest for pleasure by interrupting her own, possibly inadvertent, elaboration on Clare’s erotic power. Furthermore, right after recalling that “there had been, even in those days, nothing sacrificial in Clare Kendry’s idea of life, no allegiance beyond her own immediate desire,” Irene adds that young Clare was “selfish, and cold, and hard” (Larsen 2007, 6). McDowell analyzes this moment to prove Irene’s unreliability as a narrator. According to McDowell, it is Irene who “with a cold, hard, exploitative, and manipulative determination, tries to protect her most cherished attainment,” including security, children, material comfort, and social respectability, and Irene delivers such an unfair assessment of Clare in hopes of dispelling her sexual desire awoken by and her feelings toward Clare (2004, xxiv–xxv). Though I disagree with McDowell’s conclusion that Irene’s response to Clare is primarily physical, choosing instead to base my analysis upon Lorde’s more expansive view of the erotic, nonetheless, I find essentially accurate McDowell’s assessment that Irene’s description of Clare as “selfish, and cold, and hard” reveals less about Clare’s true nature and more about Irene’s own limit in acknowledging her attraction to Clare.

Irene once again summons up the image of Clare’s childhood when she expresses her irritation over Clare’s insistence on joining the N. W. L dance party, at which point Irene reveals her slightly evolved sensitivity to Clare’s passion for a freer life. Irene asks Clare

to “be reasonable” by warning Clare of the dangerous possibility that any acquaintance of her husband might recognize her intermingling with Black people. Clare replies, “you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh,” which results in Irene’s eventual acquiescence (Larsen 2007, 51; emphasis added). Diego A. Millan parses Clare’s response and concludes that “her repetition of ‘with’ emphasizes a desire for intimacy that apexes in hearing laughter” (2019, 119). Indeed, Irene reveals her discernment of Clare’s longing to belong to a community intimated in Clare’s plea by noting Clare’s loneliness in her subsequent reflections on the conversation. Irene believes that “Clare . . . had remained almost what she had always been, an attractive, somewhat lonely child—selfish, wilful, and disturbing” (Larsen 2007, 52). Irene’s detailed elaboration of her sentiments about Clare, who carries the trace of her childhood into adulthood, contrasts with the opening scene, in which Irene is highly indirect in revealing her fascination with Clare through her reconstruction of Clare’s childhood. Furthermore, Irene’s verbalization of Clare’s loneliness through her invocation of a “somewhat lonely child” testifies that Irene at this point identifies with Clare’s vulnerability. Irene comes to recognize that Clare’s pursuit of her desire is more than self-centered action and is instead an expression of her yearning for intimacy with Black people. Irene’s evolving sensitivity to Clare, suggested in this scene, marks my departure from McDowell’s investigation of Irene’s increasing attempts to renounce her sexual desire toward Clare.

The phrase, “somewhat lonely child,” implies only an inchoate growth in how Irene perceives Clare. The notion of willfulness that Irene relates to Clare’s insistence coincides with Ahmed’s explanation of the term willfulness as “an individual in going astray gets in the way of the happiness of others” (2017, 71). However, Irene does not simply revile Clare’s willfulness; notably, Irene articulates her contradictory impression of Clare as “attractive” and simultaneously “disturbing” (Larsen 2007, 51). Irene is attracted to Clare’s retention of her power to boldly create and grasp a chance for her pleasure in the Black community as opposed to what she herself settles for—a fleeting sense of respite by withdrawing from Blackness in the rooftop of the White-only hotel. At the same time, Irene is disturbed that Clare in adulthood still retains the courage she exercised during her childhood because Irene perceives Clare’s childlike approach to self-serving pleasure as destabilizing to her own view of childhood happiness. In her role as a mother who exercises

mature self-restraint, Irene wishes that her sons could temporarily enjoy their childhood without regard to racial injustice and the need to prepare for it. However, Clare forces Irene to recognize that the spirit of willfulness Irene has associated with Clare’s childhood does not belong to childhood exclusively, but can and does outlive it.

Irene is even more confounded by her perception of Clare’s childlikeness when she notices that Clare’s childlike ignorance of the rules of the Black middle-class household engenders intimacies against and beyond its decorum. Ironically, while Irene thinks she wants to spurn Clare to safeguard her marriage, she allows Clare to visit her home frequently, giving her a great deal of freedom within it: She came to them frequently after that. Always with a touching gladness that welled up and overflowed on all the Redfield household. Yet Irene could never be sure whether her comings were a joy or a vexation. Certainly she was no trouble. She had not to be entertained, or even noticed—if anyone could ever avoid noticing Clare. If Irene happened to be out or occupied, Clare could very happily amuse herself with Ted and Junior, who had conceived for her admiration that verged on adoration, especially Ted. Or, lacking the boys, she would descend to the kitchen and, with—to Irene—an exasperating childlike lack of perception, spend her visit in talk and merriment with Zulena and Sadie. (Larsen 2007, 57) Presenting this scene of her sons’ and servants’ mirthful moments with Clare, Irene notes that Clare’s behavior in her house evidences “an exasperating childlike lack of perception.” The syntax in which “childlike” modifies “lack of perception” indicates that Irene chooses the word “childlike” to disapprove of Clare’s joyful intimacy with her sons and house servants, which Irene probably does not normally experience due to her constant maintenance of middle-class decorum. Moreover, with an assumption that “[Clare] wouldn’t have spoiled her own Margery so outrageously, nor been so friendly with white servants” (57), Irene is irked that Clare does not see the value of the domestic order and tranquility established in the Black household. Irene’s annoyance at Clare’s “childlike lack of perception” betrays Irene’s internalization of and deep investment in social hierarchies.

Alongside her discomfort, Irene feels bewildered by “a touching gladness” brought by Clare’s intimacies with her sons and her house servants, wondering whether Clare’s visitation is “a joy or a vexation” (Larsen 2007, 56, 57). In his analysis of playfulness, Jericho Williams

explains that the “childlike sense of joy” embodied by Irene’s sons represents “a children’s world free of social artifice that engulfs Clare and Irene” (2019, 137). Williams’s focus on the capacity of childhood joy to transcend restrictive social categories aligns with his reading of Clare’s “childlike freedom of motherhood” given her decision to be “a parent unshackled from the constraints of her child” (137, 136). Williams concludes his analysis on childhood and childlikeness with an emphasis on their transcendental spirit as “the promises of play away from . . . their own social expectations” (141). Indeed, the scene described above exhibits that Clare’s childlike disregard of Black middle-class domestic respectability, combined with her willful refusal to sacrifice herself for motherhood, challenges and disrupts social expectations, but it also builds transformative modes of relationality that allow for mutual joy across age and class.2

THE CHILD AS A TROPE FOR RESISTANCE TO SELF-ABNEGATION

The power of Clare’s childlike defiance in both Black and White communities is so unsettling to the strictures of 1920s society that her transgression results in her death. Strikingly, after Clare’s death, the narrator employs the trope of childhood to illustrate that the way in which Irene deals with her desires entails her own willful refusal of self-abnegation. In the ending, Mr. Bellew appears at the party hosted by Felise and calls out Clare’s racial heritage. The novel leaves it unclear whether he compels Clare to take her own life or if he impels Irene to push Clare out a window. Due to this vagueness, scholars posit varying interpretations of Irene’s role in that incident. Candice Marie Jenkins contends that Irene murders Clare with a “salvific wish” to “save herself, and her community, from the social stigma [of primitivism] that Clare’s behavior invites or, perhaps, confirms” (2007, 23, 31). Butler maintains that Irene’s ultimate allegiance to racial uplift’s double-bound relationship with the White patriarchal institution of the nuclear family makes her complicit in Mr. Bellew’s murder of Clare, arguing that Irene “accept[s] the terms of power which threatened her” and “become[s] its instrument in the end” (2011, 137). Jenkins and Butler propound that Irene ends up being assimilated into the patriarchal and racist confinement of Black women’s sexuality despite the strong possibility that she was sexually attracted to Clare. However, duCille puts forward that Irene, by murdering Clare, “ceases to be a typical, passive, conventional tragic mulatta who pales beside the powerful

image of woman-proud blues performers” and thus Irene proves that the “defender of middle-class marriage, bourgeois home, family, fidelity, and, above all, security” requires “blues force” (1993, 108). While each reading interprets Irene’s role in Clare’s death differently, all of them see Irene’s relationality with Clare vanishing at the point of Clare’s death. None of them take into account the narrator’s use of the trope of childhood, a trope that should draw our attention to the moment when Irene willfully refuses to erase her proximity to Clare.

At the end of Passing, Larsen rejects a voyeuristic gaze that can make Clare’s death a mere obscene crime scene. The absent portrayal of Clare’s dead body stands in sharp contrast to the early scene in which Irene, while shopping, witnesses “a man toppled over and became an inert crumpled heap on the scorching cement” (Larsen 2007, 8) and another scene where she vividly depicts the “white fragments” of a shattered cup and its “dark stains [that] dotted the bright rug” during the party at her house (66). In comparison, the confirmation of Clare’s death through the party attendees’ dialogues and reactions blocks the readers’ voyeuristic gaze that might derive perverse enjoyment from the depiction of the dead body of the lightskinned Black woman. Instead, the novel shifts its focus to Irene’s reaction to Clare’s death. In the final scene, the narrator, whose voice mostly has been inseparable from Irene’s, begins to distance itself from Irene’s inner thoughts and instead highlights Irene’s failure to restrain her emotions. After arriving on the street where Clare’s body had fallen, “Irene struggled against the sob of thankfulness that rose in her throat. Choked down, it turned to a whimper, like a hurt child’s. Someone laid a hand on her shoulder in a soothing gesture. Brian wrapped his coat about her. She began to cry rockingly, her entire body heaving with convulsive sobs” (81). In contrast to the previous instances where Irene scrupulously restrains herself from revealing her inner turbulence by reminding herself of “all the self control, common sense, that she was proud of,” the narrator portrays Irene’s bodily reactions which reveal her uncontrolled emotions (74). To understand the narrator’s role here, it would be helpful to refer to Butler’s analysis concerning another scene where the narrator discloses Irene’s “little choked exclamation of admiration” for Clare (Larsen 2007, 53). Butler argues that the narrator “serves the function of exposing more than Irene herself can risk” by supplying “the words Irene might have spoken [but that were] caught in Irene’s throat” due to her effort to exercise self-restraint (2011, 124). Butler’s

insight can be extended to the significance of the narrator’s description of Irene’s bodily reaction at the scene of Clare’s demise because the narrator reveals that Irene feels more than she can manage once more. By “struggl[ing] against the sob of thankfulness,” Irene at first struggles to regain a sense of control. The emotion Irene is conscious of and tries to hold back is “the sob of thankfulness,” which could suggest that she is relieved that her consternation regarding Clare’s unruly demeanor is finally over. However, when Irene fails to restrain “the sob of thankfulness,” she expresses vulnerability and grief, emotions she has suppressed. The narrator communicates this moment by deploying the trope of childhood: “a whimper, like a hurt child’s” (Larsen 2007, 81).

The narrator’s persistent observation of Irene’s reaction reveals that when Irene refuses restraint, she does not lose all agency but rather opens up a space for embracing the erotic power that she has described through the trope and image of the child—the erotic power that entails a willful refusal of self-abnegation. The narrator’s comparison of Irene’s crying to a hurt child’s whimper might suggest that Irene appears to need protection. Indeed, Brian seems to perceive Irene’s reaction that way because he comes to Irene and gives “a slight perfunctory attempt to comfort her” by saying “there, there, Irene. You mustn’t” (Larsen 2007, 81). However, while Brian patronizes her, Irene does not let his patriarchal gesture silence her. Instead, the narrator retools the trope of a hurt child and calls attention to Irene’s exertion of enigmatic willfulness. Hearing the suspicion from “a strange man, official, and authoritative” that Mr. Bellew might have murdered Clare, Irene asserts, “I’m quite certain that he didn’t. I was there too. As close as he was. She just fell, before anybody could stop her. I—” (82). In doing so, Irene refuses to be omitted from the narrative about Clare. Surprisingly, as she rejects the possibility that Mr. Bellew killed Clare, Irene willfully draws attention to her own culpability for Clare’s death. While talking to the official, Irene faints. According to Butler, this anticlimactic ending signifies that “Irene slipped into . . . a living death” (2011, 138). Larsen does not, however, leave us with an entirely pessimistic ending to the story. Irene loses her consciousness when she is about to say more about herself. Her words, which end with the singular first-person pronoun, enhance the speculation about possible intimacies between Irene and Clare. Many stories could have unfolded out of Irene’s unfinished utterance, left as a lingering sign of her willfulness: what “I” have done to Clare, how “I” have felt about

Clare when she was alive, or how “I” feel about Clare’s death. While this openness invites readers to wonder about what Irene could have said, it does not entirely yield to the readers’ arbitrary imagination. Readers’ speculation should be grounded on Irene’s insistence on her proximity to Clare and her refusal to make Clare disappear from her life. In the end, with her willful refusal of self-erasure in her relationship with Clare, Irene puts herself on “the edge of danger” in the same manner she thinks Clare has lived her life.

As Du Bois aptly points out, Larsen’s Passing delves into “the psychology” of racial passing (2007, 98). However, due to his idealization of Irene as mother in opposition to Clare, Du Bois glosses over the effect of Irene’s practice of passing as White and instead exclusively stresses the harmful consequence of Clare’s passing. In comparison, my essay has examined the ways in which Passing actually complicates Irene’s practice of respectable motherhood promoted by racial uplift and its relation to her trouble with conceptualizing happiness and joy. In addition to Larsen, other Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance have used the image and trope of the child to figuratively expand their longing for freedom beyond and against constrictions of respectability integral to racial uplift. Wallace Thurman, for example, refers to the “holy children of Niggeratti Manor [who] die from the want of a little gin” in Infants of the Spring to explore forbidden desires under heteropatriarchy (1999, 90). The figure of the child continues to play a role in conceptions of Black people’s pleasure and erotic creativity, as we have seen in the writing of Lorde who uses the child figure to encourage Black women to reclaim their pleasure. A critical examination of Black writers’ creative exploration of childlikeness would expand and enrich the discussion about various forms that Black joy and desire can take.

NOTES

I wish to thank the guest editors of this special issue, Ellen Butler Donovan and Laura Dubek, for their generous support and guidance in the revision process. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers,

Kristin Mahoney, Sarah Hamilton, Raven Baugh, Adam Pfau, and all others who read this article for their thoughtful comments on this essay. 1 Saidiya V. Hartman notes that her idea of “fugitive gesture” is inspired by

Tina M. Campt (2017). 2 When scholars read Nella Larsen’s biographical information alongside her novels, many pay attention to her forlorn childhood caused by the early loss of her West Indian father and the subsequent remarriage of

her White Danish immigrant mother to a man who did not like Larsen. Larsen’s traumatized childhood and trouble with motherhood could be understood in connection to the fact that Larsen and her husband, Elmer Imes, were a childless couple. However, it is widely overlooked that Larsen had a close and positive interaction with children outside of the role of a mother. The first Black librarian in New York, Larsen worked in the children’s departments between 1921 and 1929. The Harlem branch in the 1920s lacked children’s books with accurate representation of Black people (Hochman 2014), so “to make up for the dearth of books, Larsen read stories aloud and helped to create exhibits” (Hutchinson 2006, 156). Larsen’s personal experience as a children’s librarian could explain her conscientious interest in how Black adults and children can create delight in a condition which racial uplift leaders might not consider ideal and how they can expand childlike joy often underestimated by racial uplift’s high expectations of maturity and uprightness.

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SEOHYUN KIM is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Michigan State University. She specializes in twentieth-century African American literature and Black studies. Her dissertation explores Black and mixed-race writers’ creative and critical engagements with Blackness as contributors to the discourse of Black freedom at two moments of racial uplift, the post-Reconstruction era and the Harlem Renaissance.