Color and Line: Scandinavian Post-Impressionism and the Figure of Passing in Nella Larsen

In a 1907 volume of essays entitled Kunstens Historie i Danmark (The History of Art in Denmark), edited by Karl Madsen (who served as director of the country's National Gallery from 1911 to 1925), Danish art historian Francis Beckett celebrates his compatriots' special affinity for color: "We Danes understand, perhaps better than most others, the human qualities that express themselves through color."¹ A few years later, in the introduction to the catalog for the renowned "Scandinavian Exhibition" that toured the United States in the winter of 1912–13, international collector Christian Brinton posits a direct link between this affinity and the Danes' "inalienable racial heritage," declaring that "the leading Scandinavian countries […] may be counted among those fortunate peoples who, despite external influences, have stoutly guarded their native artistic birthright" by "achiev[ing] a fusion of form, line, and colour that […] commend[s] itself as universal in appeal" while at the same time "preserv[ing] those fundamental factors" that are unmistakably "national in substance." Thus, he concludes, Scandinavian "achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, and industrial design" are branded "above all" with "the salutary stamp of race."² Brinton proceeds to undermine projects of linguistic cross-pollination such as Volapük and Esperanto (Scandinavians, he stresses, "do not speak, and do not attempt to speak" such "superficial" and "facile" auxiliary languages³), thus echoing the eugenicist ideology underpinning anti-miscegenation laws and sentiments. By disdaining the fusion of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary, Brinton implicitly denigrates what many considered its biological analogue: interracialism.⁴

In this article, I examine the intersections between Scandinvian post-Impressionist painting, which was attended by a highly racialized critical discourse, and Nella Larsen's account of race in her second novella, Passing (1929), whose painterliness critics have not yet attended to. I argue that Larsen, the biracial American daughter of a white Danish mother and a black father from the West Indies (which were colonized by Denmark in the eighteenth century) adapted principles native to visual arts in order to depict an experience uniquely enabled by the absence of racial "stamp": specifically, that of "passing" as white in the United States under Jim Crow. In other words, she enlists color and line in order to depict the experience of crossing the "color line," a term coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1900 to refer to a global dilemma ("the color line belts the world and the social problem of the twentieth century is to be the relation of the civilized world to the dark races of mankind"⁵), which gradually came to designate the condition of social, political, and economic apartheid that defined American society during the century of de jure and de facto segregation between Reconstruction and the civil rights legislation of the mid-twentieth-century.

Larsen's only two novellas, published within a year of one another in 1928 (Quicksand) and 1929 (Passing), have both been read as modernizations of the "tragic mulatta" paradigm, in which heroines who—to quote Langston Hughes' epigraph to Quicksand—are "neither white nor black" meet grim fates.⁶ But although Passing ends with Clare's death, Larsen figures passing itself, through which she consummates the wish not to be seen as "colored," as colorful in the Impressionist sense: aesthetically and ontologically superior to line, as instantiated by narrative development and progression. Clare's centrality, in other words, is not predicated on change or progress; her presence within the text is more incandescent than agentic, and in the end she is extinguished rather than altered. Larsen thus conceives of passing in terms of color and light: Irene, anchored by her respect for and comfort with the color line, is imperiled by the radiance that accrues to Clare in transgressing it.

Within nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American novels of passing, pale skin lends racially hybrid protagonists the out-of-place-ness that propels them through their imaginary worlds.⁷ They are endowed with a "double allegiance" that is not shared by their parents, siblings, spouses, offspring, and friends who are also "half-white" but...