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 7 Passing in the City the liminal spaces of amy levy’s late work O Alex Goody And you, you passed and smiled that day, Between the showers. Amy Levy, “Between the Showers” She wished to Wnd out about this hazardous business of “passing,” this breaking away from all that was familiar and friendly to take one’s chances in another environment, not entirely strange, perhaps, but certainly not entirely friendly. Nella Larsen, Passing Such a notion of “passing” is not becoming “invisible” but becoming diVerently visible—being seen as a member of a group with which one wants or needs to identify. Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful T he idea of “passing” still carries a particular resonance for those individuals traversing the diYcult ground between polarities of selfidentiWcation . In Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of that name, passing delineates an ambivalent state, an endless journey between the oppositions of race, of sexuality , and of culture.This experience and the liminal subjectivities it produces are particularly the eVect of the transient environment of the modern city. This chapter suggests that the idea of “passing” (and the multiple resonances of the word) can also be used to explore the profoundly ambivalent emotions and subjectivities of Amy Levy’s late poetry—poetry that Cynthia Scheinberg describes as exploring, “among other things, a particular aYnity for the urban You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Alex Goody  life of Jewish London, an unorthodox spirituality that refuses clear identiWcation with either Christian or Jewish traditions, and her most direct intimations of lesbian sexuality.”1 Reading these poems cross-culturally, even anachronistically , alongside the dynamics of “passing” serves to expose both the potentials and the limits of what could be termed the “nomadic”consciousness of Levy’s writing: “the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity.”2 The following discussion examines how the ambiguous sexuality and racial awareness of A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889), when traced across an urban context, highlight the modernity of Levy’s late poetry, an aspect that has been identiWed by recent critics including Linda Hunt Beckman and Ana Parejo Vadillo.3 Alongside this orientation toward the modernist experimentation of the next century, the ambiguous urbanism of Levy’s poems produces but also endangers radically interstitial, mobile subject positions. Larsen’s Passing focuses on two central protagonists: both light-skinned, mixed-race American women. Irene RedWeld has stayed true to her “race” by marrying a man darker than her and committing herself to the bourgeois life of cultural uplift in 1920s Harlem. An old school acquaintance, Clare Hendry, has chosen to pass as white, deceiving and marrying a white man who turns out to be an extreme racist (who calls her “nig” as a joke, unconscious of its resonances ). The narrative follows Clare’s attempts to get in touch with her racial origins by acts of cultural tourism in Harlem, while Irene feels unable to stop Clare’s entering her life. Clearly, the transgressive spaces of the city/Harlem are fundamental to the identities that Clare and Irene perform.These two opposite poles of the “passing” divide become increasingly entangled until Clare falls from a window after Irene surmises that Clare is having an aVair with Irene’s husband.4 One way of reading Larsen’s novel is as a reworking of the tragic mulatto narrative, with the beautiful Clare unable to exist in a world that would categorize her. CherylWall argues that “for Larsen, the tragic mulatto was the most accessible convention for the portrayal of middle class black women in Wction.”5 The mulatto can thus come to function “as a narrative device of mediation.”6 However, many African American women writers, such as Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, have recognized the eroticism and complex sexuality of the book.7 Not only are Irene and Clare both passing in diVerent ways—crossing social, cultural, and economic boundaries—but also there is a dynamic of desire between the two women.They can be read as a split subjectivity recognizYou are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. the...

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