Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance

Chapter 2: Reading the Body: Fashion, Etiquette, and Narrative in Nella Larsen’s Passing

65 Reading the Body Fashion, Etiquette, and Narrative in Nella Larsen’s Passing There is a striking convergence of issues between James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nella Larsen’s Passing. Not only do both novels of racial passing have narratives that revel in ambiguity, but also the frequently deceptive characters in the two novels are keenly attuned to bodies and to fashion. The ex-colored man’s perceptive appraisal of others is rooted in the glance at their clothes. Even before he learns of his mixed racial background , for example, the unnamed narrator is aware that he is different from the other boys at his school because of his impeccable manner of dress; and, newly arrived in Atlanta, he determines the cleanliness of a woman’s kitchen by assessing her clothes and appearance. Larsen’s characters similarly evaluate others by their fashion tastes, by measuring how well women match their frocks to social occasions. The travel-weary Helga Crane in Quicksand reacts with both approval and relief to the personal appearance and the home of the appropriately clad Anne Grey. Like the body of the ex-colored man, the bodies of Larsen ’s heroines are never concretely fixed and solidified in their stories: after a searching look at himself in a mirror early in the text, Johnson’s narrator does It is the spectator who manufactures the symptoms of a successful pass by engaging in the act of reading that constitutes the performance of the passing subject. Amy Robinson, “It Takes One to Know One” 66 Chapter 2 not focus again specifically on his body, and Larsen’s characters know how to disguise the body in order to achieve specific social effects. Finally, both novels are filled with uncertainties: Johnson’s book is a pseudo-autobiography that withholds the subject’s name, while the ending of Larsen’s novel can be interpreted in three different ways. How are we to understand these remarkable similarities between characters who are racially indeterminate and narratives that puzzle the reader or deny the reader full knowledge of their events? Novels that, however one interprets them, question the veracity of knowledge obtained through the gaze? Narratives whose literary and visual aesthetics have now come to be identified with an emergent black modernity? These questions amplify an issue addressed throughout this book: How did early-twentieth-century African American artists creatively capture recognizable but elusive elements of blackness in material, visual, or textual forms that would be regarded as Art? How, in other words, can one codify evanescent feelings , reactions, or emotions into material form, a question present as well in the realm in which the ex-colored man and Larsen’s heroines excel: the world and discourse of fashion. Their strategies for passing, racially as well as socially, involve transforming the subtle distinctions, equated in their world with an elite class of whiteness, into a material though still discrete quality, a strategy that is made possible by their awareness of fashion and appearance. Fashion provides more clues to the elusiveness of black modernism, more opportunities to quantify a sometimes ephemeral quality. In what may appear to be a superficial topic, we find an important lesson, a model of how image and text, concrete object and abstract description, function within a system that is notoriously indefinite and vague—qualities that correspond with reading and representing blackness. Roland Barthes’s interest in The Fashion System, for example, a quite dense and dry structuralist interpretation of fashion, is not so much with clothes but rather with the description of clothes, with the language that presents clothing to the reader of a magazine. By concentrating on the description of an outfit in a caption versus the picture of the garment, Barthes reveals the “transformation of an object into language.”1 As Jonathan Culler puts it, “language permits one to pass from the material objects to the units of a system of signification by bringing out, through the process of naming, meaning that was merely latent in the object.”2 Disclosing that latency, Barthes’s writings transfigure the elements of fashion into a perceptible mood or style and articulate the relation between the physical representation of a garment and the textual caption, between the photographic image of a garment and a garment’s Reading the Body 67 description. One finds in The Fashion System, then, an alternate way of negotiating the “image...