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The letter Irene Red¤eld holds in her hands in the opening passage from Nella Larsen’s novel Passing (1929) has been sent to her by Clare Kendry, a childhood friend who has emerged for the second time in two years from the shadows of the white world into which she “passed” twelve years earlier. The letter is mysterious, dif¤cult to read, uncertain of origin , and impossible to ignore, much like the woman who wrote it. By the end of the story, Irene will also hold Clare’s very life in her hands as well as her own future, the existence she has created since her marriage to Brian Red¤eld, a prominent local physician. Two worlds collide in this novel—that of the “passing” woman who has rejected her race for the material comforts of the white world, and that of the light-skinned black woman who remains in the African American community but within the narrow precincts of Negro society in the 1920s—with profound results. Thinking of the letter as a form of “correspondence”— with all that word signi¤es—opens up and complicates readings of this scene. It suggests the connections and even similarities between Irene and Clare, business dealings, sympathetic response, analogous relationships , congruity, and even sexual intercourse, for those interested in readings of the novel that focus on the latent homosexuality in the text (OED). The string of events that Clare’s letter initiates—renewed friendship , a possible affair, and murder—is the provocation for a complex examination of race, identity, and authenticity in Larsen’s novel. 5 Dressing to Kill Desire, Race, and Authenticity in Nella Larsen’s Passing To pass is to sin against authenticity, and “authenticity” is among the founding lies of the modern age. . . . And the Romantic fallacy of authenticity is only compounded when it is collectivized: when the potential real me gives way to the real us. —Henry Louis Gates, “White Like Me” The letter in question contains Clare’s plea for Irene’s help and understanding as she ostensibly attempts to reconnect to the life she abandoned when she married John Bellew, a white businessman who has no idea that his lovely and sophisticated wife is actually a black woman. Declaring that she is “lonely, so lonely” for those of her own race, Clare rambles on for several incoherent pages, comparing her estrangement to “an ache, a pain that never ceases.” However, in a rhetorical move that will be repeated in various forms, Clare also “blames” Irene for her current unrest, tracing it back to the day in Chicago two years ago when the two accidentally met at the Drayton Hotel, where both women were passing. What Clare feels is a “wild desire” that cannot be ignored, regardless of the cost to herself or others (174). What Irene feels, on the other hand, is the combined fear of and desire for the other that is often directed at African Americans, an irony that attests to Larsen’s complex treatment of race in this text. Rather than examining constructions of race through the binary of black and white, Larsen focuses on the more subtle and complicated racial issues in the African American community : racial guilt and pride, the connection between skin color and class, the objecti¤cation of the self that began in slavery and continues under the mantle of commodity culture, and the way these various issues are implicated in racial passing. In order to do so, she co-opts the discourse of consumer culture; terms such as cost, value, exchange, speculation, desire, and envy are laced throughout the text. Irene, the casual “passer” who has created a life built on manipulation of others, denial, and selfdeception , is forced to face her greatest fears in the person of Clare, the permanent passer who admits she will do anything to get what she wants. The latter’s “having way,” as it is referred to throughout the novel (a trait that Irene shares, as we shall see), and the repeated references to the “cost” of getting what one wants, especially since that cost includes the denial of one’s race, link desire and race to the marketplace and consumer culture. Larsen’s novel has ¤nally begun to receive its share of critical attention after an extended period of neglect. However, like many works in a speci¤c mode (in this case the “passing narrative”), critical analyses have tended to privilege certain elements at the expense of others. Judith Butler...

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