Welcome to the reading guide for Part 1 of Passing, an enigmatic introduction to a novel full of secrets and long personal histories. Part 1 is titled “Encounter” and in today’s guide, we’ll explore why that’s such a fitting title.
If you have not started the novel yet, be aware that today’s guide includes many spoilers. If you are reading along and want to stay on pace with me, finish the novel by the end of next week. A final chapter guide, on parts 2 and 3 (titled “Re-encounter” and “Finale,” respectively) comes out next week.
A note on writing about race
I’m following APA and other academic writing guidelines to uppercase “Black” when referring to racial identity. There are ongoing debates about the best (most respectful and most inclusive) use of “b/Black,” and I’m evolving in my understanding of the different purposes for using each. When quoting Nella Larsen’s text, I will default to her use of capitalization for textual accuracy. In my own references, I’ll default to capitalization.
For additional readings on this topic, see:
Please note: as you read the novel, you’ll find outdated racial terms, as well as racial slurs employed by characters in the story. Please take the self-care steps you need to engage with the text, especially given the blunt racism of John Bellews’ character. I will not be replicating those terms in our guide. When quoting passages that employ such terms, I will use asterisks.
Earlier this week, we closely read the first paragraph of the novel together, in which a woman named Irene Redfield examines a mysterious letter amid her morning pile of mail.
Here’s what happens in the rest of Part 1:
Irene’s memory of the sender jettisons Irene back in time, to two years earlier, when she visited Chicago. The rest of Part 1 is a flashback to that weekend in Chicago.
While in Chicago, Irene gets overheated on the busy street and retreats to the roof of the Drayton Hotel for a cup of iced tea. It is there, Irene has an “encounter” with a white woman who cannot stop staring at her.
As the woman stares at Irene, we realize that Irene is a Black woman who is passing for a white woman, in order to gain access to the Drayton Hotel (which does not serve Black people).
Irene becomes increasingly anxious that the woman staring at her somehow knows she is Black — but then, when the woman approaches, Irene slowly realizes this is her childhood friend, Clare Kendry, who is also a Black woman.
Clare has been “passing” as a white woman for over twelve years and has all but abandoned her Black identity and history. Irene cannot help but ask about “passing” and all it entails for Clare’s life and relationships.
Clare convinces Irene to make more time for her during her visit and Irene agrees, then decides she won’t go, then for some reason, decides to go anyway. (Irene’s psyche is a marvelous thing to examine!)
Irene visits Clare and finds another acquaintance — a woman named Gertrude, who is also passing as a white woman — there at the house.
The three women discuss their varying levels of “passing” and their husbands’ feelings toward race. Clare and Gertrude also reveal their anxieties about having “dark” children (against which Irene bristles).
We learn that Clare’s husband does not know she is Black and that her pregnancy, therefore, was a terrifying ordeal as she wondered if her child’s skin would give away her “passing.”
Clare’s husband, John Bellew, arrives home and greets the women. He is a despicable, terrifying racist with a “dough” face. He calls Clare a racial slur because he is so amused by the fact that his very obviously white wife has started to become “darker” over the years.
Irene vows to forget the whole thing. Then, she gets a letter — the one she remembers in chapter 1.
In that letter, Clare admits: “It may be, ‘Rene dear, it may just be, that, after all, your way may be the wiser and infinitely happier one. I’m not sure just now. At least not so sure as I have been.” It seems that, after a series of “encounters,” with Irene, Clare is no longer sure she wants to pass as a white woman.
The anxiety of being seen
“Passing,” as defined in sociological terms, is the ability for a person to be regarded as part of an identity group—like race, ethnicity, social class, gender, age, or disability status—that is different from their own.
There is key legal, historical, and cultural context we have to consider as we read Passing. These women exist in a world of Jim Crow laws and strictly segregated public spaces. These laws, in fact, played a role in creating the growth of the phenomenon of passing as they emphasized and insisted on the visibility of race: a flawed belief that looking at someone can tell you everything about that person’s identity.
This is perhaps why these four chapters about passing are also, so often, about staring, a kind of pointed action that makes the one being stared at acutely aware of their own visibility.
Recall the scene, in chapter two in the Drayton Hotel as Irene watches Clare and Clare watches Irene. I’ve bolded all the words that have to do with visibility:
“Irene watched her spread out her napkin, saw the silver spoon in the white hand slit the dull gold of the melon. Then, conscious that she had been staring, she looked quickly away.”
Later, “she was acutely aware that someone was watching her.”
“Very slowly she looked around, and into the dark eyes of the woman in the green frock at the next table. But she evidently failed to realize that such intense interest as she was showing might be embarrassing, and continued to stare. Her demeanor was that of one who with utmost singleness of mind and purpose was determined to impress firmly and accurately each detail of Irene’s features upon her memory for all time, nor showed the slightest trace of disconcertment at having been detected in her steady scrutiny.”
So prevalent is the language of looking, staring, and gazing here that I plucked a highlighter off my desk and traced it across the scene. There are almost thirty references to eyes, seeing, staring, and looking in just two and a half pages.
By the end of their “encounter” of looking and staring, Irene has resolved to “outstare” the woman who can’t keep her eyes off of her.
This intense focus on visibility — and its connections to race, identity, and knowing — become a central theme throughout Part 1, especially when we meet Clare’s racist husband, John Bellew, who is convinced that appearances reveal everything about a person.
And so, these early chapters introduce us to a few key concepts:
Hiding in plain sight
The idea that race, despite what is so commonly believed, is actually not visible or easy to detect
That identity is fluid and shifting, rather than fixed and immutable
Danger and safety — and the tensions therein
The power of a stare
Secrets and lying (Is passing dishonest? In what ways? For whom?)
The power of a stare
My favorite quote from this week’s reading comes from chapter 3, when Irene visits Clare and meets her awful husband:
“Carefully selecting a cigarette from the lacquered box on the tea-table before her, she turned an oblique look on Clare and encountered her peculiar eyes fixed on her with an expression so dark and deep and unfathomable that she had for a short moment the sensation of gazing into the eyes of some creature utterly strange and apart. A faint sense of danger brushed her, like the breath of a cold fog.”
For a book section entitled “Encounter,” this, for me, is the ultimate encounter: Irene’s strange, foreboding moment of looking into the “eyes of some creature,” this odd woman from her past who has suddenly reappeared, twelve years later, with a new identity and deeply held secret.
In this quote, we get the kind of hair-raising tension I love to read all year long, but especially as summer melts into fall and we enter the spooky season. Here, we get a kind of classic ghost-story move, but the women in the room are very much alive. Irene has an “encounter” with Clare’s “peculiar eyes,” which are, once again, staring deep into Irene’s soul. She is unsettled and, as she felt in the tea-room, experiences the primal sensation of danger “brushing” across her body.
Notice the language: oblique, peculiar, unfathomable, strange and apart.
This is the language of liminal spaces, of experience stretched to its limits of understanding and reason. Even as she sits with an air of calm and the appearance of a casual white woman visiting her white friends, Irene simmers with the anxiety of being found out and the danger of being in a racist’s home as a Black person—and her gaze meets Clare’s, a Black woman, passing for white and keeping her identity a secret, who has married a racist white man fixated on race and obsessed with her skin color.
Irene’s observatory nature gifts us, as readers, a nuanced reading of Clare that is equal parts alluring and off-putting. And also reminds us, with Irene’s frequent turns into her own voice and anxieties, that we are seeing this story through Irene’s perspective. Is anyone else noticing how “utterly strange and apart” Clare seems? Do others find Clare dangerous the way Irene does? What is the danger she represents?
Nella Larsen is such a fantastic conjurer of these intangible things: feelings, sensations, fears, anxieties. She puts them on the page through the evocative language of modernity that never rests too hard on certainty or absolutes (indeed, John Bellew doesn’t know how foolish he looks, asserting Clare’s whiteness to a room of Black women).
If you’re interested in the interplay of visibility and race, here are some questions to explore as we read Parts 2 and 3 in the next week:
Who is passing in this novel? Are there different modes or types of passing?
What kinds of secrets are being hidden behind appearances?
Is Irene’s Black identity visible? When does it become so?
Is Clare’s Black identity visible? To whom?
What does being seen represent for these characters?
What are some of the most powerful scenes where you notice the interplay of visibility and race on the page?
Learning to annotate
Earlier this week in the comments of our first post, Deborah asked about how to know what to annotate and highlight in a book that has so much going on:
“I read all of Part One yesterday and was completely flummoxed by what to annotate/flag. Obviously, I know that the novel is about black women passing as white and that the two main characters, Irene and Clare, approach when and why to do so differently, but as we go through the book, I would appreciate any guidance you can give as to (literally) how and what to track in my annotations.”
I am so happy to help with this!
Here is some literal advice:
Choose your annotation tools. The easiest way to start is with a single pen or pencil — no need to color code or overthink it, as you get started.
Choose some key themes, now that you’ve read Part 1.
Go back through the chapters and think about the parts you noticed the most. What did you notice about them?
Language choice?
Tone?
Character behavior?
A single word or idea? (Think: “dark” or “pale” or “faint” or “tea”)
Whatever you noticed is a worthy place to start. Then, you’re ready for the next step:
Make a list!
Track that list, or additional items as they appear, in the text by underlining or highlighting or circling. Whatever you want to try.
This time around, I put my list of themes on one of the blank pages at the start of the novel and then I am just listing the page numbers on which I see that theme unfolding most prominently.
How I picked my themes:
Modernism/modernist: This is a personal theme for me and something I love to look for in novels from the early 20th century. I like to look for whatever makes a story feel “modernist,” as defined by literary criticism. So far, I’m seeing it at the very end of Part 1 with the open-ended cliffhanger into Part 2. I’m also noticing it a bit with the stream-of-consciousness we sometimes get from Irene, but it’s quite limited. Larsen seems to have a very cool and unique use of that literary technique and I’m excited to examine it more as we keep reading!
Secrecy: I noticed this in the first paragraph, with the “furtive but flaunting” letter on Irene’s desk. It seemed to really be emphasized, so I want to see where else this idea of “secrecy” or “furtiveness” occurs in the story.
Decorum: Irene seems pretty “orderly” in her daily activities, as well as her thoughts on proper behavior in the first chapter. So I wanted to see if this is a theme. It is coming up a lot more than I thought it would!
Strangeness: Let’s face it, Clare Kendry is weird! She is bold and flirtatious and very mysterious. I wanted to trace how often she is characterized as strange by Irene—because that seems to be something that bothers and also seduces Irene from the very first paragraph—and the word “strange” comes up a lot. I need to go back and make sure I’ve caught all the instances of it!
Race and visibility: this is the big one! We know this is central to the storytelling, so I’m zeroing in on this idea of “visibility” to help me unpack the complex ideas here.
You’ll also noticed I’ve assigned some colors, but I don’t know how I’ll use those quite yet. So far, I’m just using a simple ballpoint pen to underline things and then adding the page numbers to the front page, as I read. I also, as I said above, grabbed my highlighter when I noticed the “visibility” language in chapter 2.
How your fellow readers are annotating
We have a few readers who are thinking about this same problem of how to annotate a book in a way that feels helpful and manageable.
Shruti Koti, MD sent me photos of her chapter one annotations to share with everyone:
She is using simple underlining, notes on the pages, and some small symbols (which she’s evolving as she reads) to get into a closer reading with the text.
This is what she says about her experience of reading and annotating Passing so far:
“Here is a method that I’m trying out: I’ve created symbols for the different themes & motifs that I wanted to track on this read. I have the advantage of having read the book before, so I know beforehand some themes I want to follow — but I also got some ideas after reading the introduction.
Seeing certain symbols together also sparks new questions in my mind — like on the last page of the first chapter, I see that physical description (a new symbol I created after I started reading, which is why it isn’t in the index yet) and time are next to each other. So now I’m thinking about how our impressions of people change over time, and how memory creates and rewrites what we know about others.”
Thank you so much for sharing your close reading practice with us, Shruti!
Want to share photos of your annotations or ask questions to the group? DM me here on Substack and I’ll get you included into next week’s guide!
For next week, finish Passing
I will put out a final reading guide next week (with some goodies for paid subscribers to follow) and I’m so excited to see what you think of the second half of this phenomenal story.
But, in the meantime, let’s get the conversation going in the comments!
Tell us your favorite scenes, your burning questions, or tell us about how you’ve decided to annotate your reading experience.
This is always my favorite part. Let’s get to it!
See you in the comments and ‘til next time, happy reading…
I read Passing for the first time earlier this summer, and it’s so fresh in my mind that I’m loving the reread knowing the ending. I appreciate all the tips for annotating as well - it’s a good way to force myself to slow down and pay attention to what Larsen is doing.
Thanks for sharing my notes Haley! I’m excited to see how others have been annotating.
I love your comments about staring and being seen; there is truly so much mention of “eyes” in this first part!
Some thoughts:
As I was reading part 1, I started to notice how much emotion we get, and how rapidly it changes. I started circling each emotion as they came up, and I noticed that Irene gets thrown into such a mix of emotions whenever she is around Clare - by contrast, there are very few instances where we get Clare’s emotions.
I’ve also been tracking power, and I realized that though Clare is in some ways exerting her power (through her camouflage and her secret), it is actually Irene who exerts power more visibly throughout her interactions - like when the topic of children’s skin color comes up, or when she is trying to escape Gertrude.
I’m paying so much attention to Irene on this reading and I can’t wait to see what emerges in Parts 2&3.