Parts 2 & 3 of Passing
"Then everything was dark." A reading guide to parts 2 & 3 of the novel, including a deep dive into analyzing the shape of the story
Welcome to our second, and final, reading guide for Nella Larsen’s remarkable 1929 novel, Passing.
If you have not finished the novel and want to avoid spoilers, please read the book in its entirety before scrolling any further!
In today’s guide, I’m including a more narrative-driven account of the plot summary, as well as some key thematic notes and an analysis of the story arc. I’ve also collected a few thoughts from your fellow close readers about their reading experience of the novel and have sprinkled them throughout today’s post!
(Shoutout of major thanks to Juliana, Martha, Petya, and Shruti for their thoughts!)
In a few days, I’ll be dropping an even deeper dive into the novel for paid subscribers. I’ll be showing you all my notes on the novel and revealing my process for how I put together a close reading essay after closely reading a novel like Passing. I’m so excited to share with you!
Origins and removals
Today, as we discuss the second-half of the novel, I think it’s worth reminding ourselves where we started — beginning with the novel’s epigraph, a quote from a poem by Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance colleague, Countée Cullen:
One three centuries removed
From the scenes his fathers loved,
Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,
What is Africa to me?
As I re-read the novel with you all this week, I was struck by the layers of Larsen’s decision to include this quote at the opening of a novel about women who are, in many ways and across many dynamics (time, geographical space, psychological space) distant from Africa—and from the Black identities they carry as American women in a modernist era. It was a time of freedom and activism for so many; it was also an era of expanding Jim Crow laws and violently enforced segregation.
The first time I read Passing, I was caught by the dizzying pace of the plot and of Irene's feelings that I *consumed* rather than *savored* it. Going back to it now, knowing that we would be discussing the novel, I took the time to sit with it and appreciate the little bites I took—even if I'm not a habitual fiction-annotator!
The exercise really made me appreciate Larsen's prose even more than the first time (again, the plot is so compelling that it is very easy to just go with it!) and to think more carefully about the nuances in character building. I'm definitely coming out of this re-reading liking and appreciating the novel a whole lot more!
—Juliana of Juliana, cronista
In an essay about the novel, Larsen biographer Thadious M. Davis wonders about the “elbow room” Black women attempt to create for themselves in the changing political, cultural, and racial dynamics of the early twentieth century. Far from a “room of one’s own,” a fantasy for white women, Black women wrote under “acute consciousness of their raced and gendered location in a social ground constituted out of spatial and relational structures.”1
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Irene feels increasingly threatened by Clare in terms of space and relationships: a passing Black woman, with all the class and economic stability of an upper class white woman, who is looking for a seat at the table she left behind twelve years ago. Clare comes into Irene’s home, confronts her in public spaces (like the tea-room, where they first meet), and even starts encroaching on Irene’s marriage. Clare threatens, in other words, the “spatial and relational structures” of Irene’s life, and even tells Irene that she’ll do anything—and hurt anyone—to get what she wants.
As Irene considers her husband’s longing to become expatriates in South America to escape America’s racist politics and culture, she contemplates her own identity and makes a clear assertion of her identity politics for perhaps the first time: “For she would not go to Brazil. She belonged in this land of rising towers. She was an American. She grew from this soil, and she would not be uprooted. Not even because of Clare Kendry, or a hundred Clare Kendrys.”
This is a “spatial and relational” set of structures upon which Irene Redfield has built her life. She “would not go” to another country; she “belongs” to America, a “land of rising towers,” a phrase which echoes the language of racial uplift—that welfare-driven goal to “lift” the Black masses into higher class consciousness and social capital, spearheaded by W.E.B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century. Even in the final sentences of the novel, Irene feels the crowd around her “lifting her up,” near Clare’s dead body as she sinks in the darkness of her unconscious.
In all these ways, the novel provokes questions of belonging and identity, prompting us to wonder:
What is a “Clare Kendry” in Irene’s mind? What does she represent?
Is Clare right to make a return to Black culture and to embed herself within Irene’s Harlem society?
What do we make of Irene’s work in the N.W.L. (the Negro Welfare League)?
Can we understand Irene’s feelings of being threatened by Clare?
What does passing cost these women? What do they gain by passing? (Is there a cost-benefit analysis to be done here? Is there an economy of passing?)
Becoming convinced of her husband’s affair with Clare, Irene increasingly feels edged out of her own life. Irene watches from the sidelines as Clare grows close to Brian and her sons—her rage boiling just beneath the surface. As the women’s tense friendship evolves, so too does the tension roiling between them as Irene increasingly feels that Clare’s very presence is “uprooting” her from the life she has worked so hard to build.
What a delight, to reread Passing, one of my favorite novels ever. I knew I would still love the book on this reread, but what I didn’t know was that my interpretation of it would change almost completely, compared to just two years ago.
When I started last week, I chose some themes to follow based on my memory of the last time I read the book, of which a few unlocked a completely new reading for me. For a book that is so focused on memory and what Irene remembers of certain events, I think it is fascinating that my own memory of reading the book is what led to new discoveries from the text.
—Shruti of Brief Op Notes and The Novel Tea
The finale
The finale of the novel finds the women at a party in Harlem, where Clare’s white husband finally confronts her—having pieced together (we don’t know exactly how, but we have some ideas) that she is not a white woman, but a passing Black woman.
In a flurry of energy and unexpected movement, Clare falls out of a six-story window and dies in the falling snow.
And yet the details are uneasy—blurred and confused by the resonant fact of Irene’s own unraveling. The people outside speculate: Did she slip? Did she jump? Or was Clare pushed? By John? By…Irene?
As the party gathers around Clare’s body, I couldn’t help but turn back to Part 3, chapter 1, in which Irene seethes with rage and drops an heirloom teacup. The whole scene feels foreboding as her rage finally reaches a quite literal breaking point.
“Rage boiled up in her.
There was a slight crash. On the floor at her feet lay the shattered cup. Dark stains dotted the bright rug. Spread. The chatter stopped. Went on. Before her, Zulena gathered up the white fragments.”
Her friend Hugh apologizes:
“Sorry,” he says, “Must have pushed you. Clumsy of me. Don’t tell me it’s priceless and irreplaceable.”
Irene retreats mentally, into the emotional pain of her frantic thoughts about Clare and Brian’s presumed love affair.
“It hurt. Dear God! How the thing hurt!”
But she shoves her thoughts aside and composes herself for the crowd:
“Oh, no,” she tells Hugh, “you didn’t push me. Cross your heart, hope to die, and I’ll tell you how it happened.”
Irene then weaves a deeply detailed and resentful account of the “ugliest thing that your ancestors, the charming Confederates ever owned,” seeming to be speaking more widely than of a simple teacup.
“I’ve never figured out a way of getting rid of it until about five minutes ago. I had an inspiration. I had only to break it, and I was rid of it for ever. So simple! And I’d never thought of it before.”
As Hugh watches her, Irene wonders: “Had she convinced him?”
She’s weaving a fantastic tale of justification and gratitude, masking over a deep resentment and humiliation. “Still,” she tells him,
“I’m perfectly willing for you to take the blame and admit that you pushed me at the wrong moment. What are friends for, if not to help bear our sins? Brian will certainly be told that it was your fault. More tea, Clare?”
I flip back to the final chapter. A tense breakfast where the boys ask about a recent lynching; Irene insists on keeping her sons ignorant of “the race problem.” She ponders security and safety; she wonders what her insistence on both has cost her: “She wanted only to be tranquil,” and later, “she still intended to hold fast to the outer shell of her marriage, to keep her life fixed, certain.”
And yet, faced with the uncertainties of a rapidly evolving world far beyond her control—of a husband who wants to leave America, of a dark-skinned son who lives in a country of profound racial-based violence, of a best friend who told her she will stop at nothing to get what she wants—does Irene crack?
Did Irene decide to “break” Clare to be “rid of [her] forever”? Is she “perfectly willing” to let John Bellew take the blame? Brian will certainly be told she didn’t do it…
And yet, there is also the moment, as Bellew bellows across the apartment, that Clare Kendry stands near the tall, open window:
“Clare stood at the window, as composed as if everyone were not staring at her in curiosity and wonder, as if the whole structure of her life were not lying in fragments before her. She seemed unaware of any danger or uncaring. There was even a faint smile on her full, red lips, and in her shining eyes.
It was that smile that maddened Irene….She couldn’t have her free.”
“What happened next, Irene Redfield never afterwards allowed herself to remember. Never clearly.”
In the immediate aftermath of Clare’s fall, the text tells us plainly: “Irene wasn’t sorry.”
In a novel about encounters and re-counters, I speculate with the crowd around Clare’s body—the “white fragments” of her body in the snow, the “dark stains” that are surely spreading around her shattered frame. Did she leap? Was she pushed? What does Irene know, and why won’t she let herself remember it?
I was so excited to read this book because a few years ago I’d read Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half and knew it was inspired by it. I came in, very earnestly expecting super nuanced discussion on Racial Passing — which I got. What I didn’t expect is to get such completely devastating reflections on relationships, marriage and infidelity. Participating in this reading group and going through my annotation process, I ended up focusing my close reading on the three types of passing I identified:
Racial passing: the effort to appear white but also the torment that causes both internally and within your community; Emotional passing: pretending to be different from how you really feel on the inside, Larsen calls it “the outward sinking of self” p.65; and Marital passing: the concealed resentments, the seething rage under the surface of otherwise “tranquil” relationships, the gut-wrenching work of processing a partner’s infidelity and pretending you are unaware of it for the good of your family.
It was just such a shockingly good reading experience.
— Petya, of a reading life
Encounters & re-encounters
Last week, we considered the ways Irene’s memory of meeting with Clare in the Drayton Hotel tea-room was an encounter of gazes, recognition, and memory.
And yet there were so many other encounters in Part 1:
Irene encountering the crowd gathered around the fallen man on the hot street
Irene encountering Clare’s first letter
Irene encountering the second letter from Clare (the first paragraph of the novel)
Irene encountering John Bellew as she passes for white
In Parts 2 and 3 of the novel, we get more “encounters,” that seem to parallel these key moments from Part 1:
Irene encounters Clare, when Clare shows up uninvited to her home
Irene encounters John Bellew on the street when she is not passing
Irene encounters Brian, as he questions her motives for not inviting Clare to her upcoming event
Irene and Clare (and the rest of the party) encounter John Bellew as he interrupts the party in Harlem
What other “encounters” would you add to this list?
I started to think about what constitutes an “encounter,” versus a “meeting” or “confrontation” or other types of engagement.
“Encounter” is a gerund—meaning that it is a word that can be used as both a noun and as a verb. (You can have an encounter with someone. Or you can encounter someone.)
It means, as a noun:
an unexpected or casual meeting with someone or something.
a confrontation or unpleasant struggle.
It means, as a verb:
unexpectedly experience or be faced with (something difficult or hostile).
meet (someone) unexpectedly.
The term’s origins reveal even more violent undertones that are worth contemplating: “against,” and “adversary,” couple with the words above: “unexpected,” “unpleasant,” and “faced with.”
“Encounter” is no accident in the text, even as it signals the unexpected. That the novel is a series of “encounters” and “re-encounters” seems to be the spinal cord, or framing logic, of the plot and of our characters, who are defined as much by how they respond in moments of calm as they are in moments of tense or titillating “encounters” with others.
In Passing, Larsen amplifies the tension of these encounters by leveraging the power of doubles: Black and white, legible and illegible, twin sons (a common trope in passing literature, just ask Mark Twain), and a novel structured around “encounters” and “re-encounters.”
Because of this emphasis on doubling in the novel, Larsen’s use of a tripartite structure feels especially curious: she writes two “halves” of a novel — but she also writes an outlying, third “finale” that does less to resolve the novel than to multiply its questions and confusion.
So let’s talk about the structure of the novel.
My experience of reading “Passing” was intriguing. I loved the tone Larsen created in Part One, using the relationship between Irene and Clare to challenge the racial foundations that American society are built upon. I was engrossed by the current of unease and danger while we wait to learn what the future of Irene and Clare's relationship might look like. I thought Part One set up limitless possibilities for how race and power were going to be scrutinised and addressed in the novel. I was eager to keep reading, ready to revel in the downfall of Clare and the undoing of her prejudice and life choices. I really enjoyed how Clare was set up as a 'villain' in Part One.
I was then surprised by the turn the novel took in Part Two and Three; I expected an immediate climax. I was intrigued at the story Larsen chose to tell with Clare; exploring the role of shame in a more nuanced way. I was shocked by Clare's suicide, but equally fascinated at how she acted so instinctively at the danger of being exposed. Initially, I didn't like the ending — it felt too abrupt. But the more I reflected, the more powerful I thought it was. To Clare, who represents American society in 1920s, nothing is worse than being Black. She would rather die than ever have to deal with the racism and prejudice she already intimately understands as a woman of colour. I don't think I would have thought so deeply about the messaging of this novel, or got as much out of it, if it were not for Haley and her exceptional close reading skills. I really enjoyed Haley's encouragement to think deeper, and look more closely, at what “Passing” explores.
—Martha of Martha’s Monthly
The shape of the story
All this exploration of the “encounters” and “re-encounters” within the novel invite us to examine the framework, or shape, of the story.
Consider the following traditional story arc, which you’ve likely seen in your high school days or creative writing courses. This is the shape of a traditional, hero-driven story with an expository opening section that sets the scene, the rising action that shows us a key conflict or problem and leads to the climax—a turning point for the protagonist and from which they cannot return—and then arcs downward into what is called “falling action,” where the pieces typically fall into place. Everything ends in the denouement, or the final resolution where the details and questions are all answered and made clear.
Compare that traditional story arc to the more modernist shape of Passing: a novel that pushes everyone off of a cliff at the end, and lacks any familiar or comforting resolution.
When we zoom out to trace the general shape of the novel, it seems to be a steep climb to a shocking climax, with a dramatic fall in action — echoing Clare’s dramatic “fall” to the ground.
In the chart above, I’ve mapped what I read as the key points in the narrative arc. Based on your close reading, your arc or shape may look very different—I’m not suggesting that any single reading of the novel is “correct,” but rather that our different mental models for mapping the novel can unlock new insights about how and where we see key actions developing in the story.
I invite you to map the novel based on your understanding of the novel and note where it diverges from the “traditional” narrative arc above.
More Passing is on the way
This weekend, I’ll be sharing a more polished “essay” of my close reading of the novel for paid subscribers. I’ve been reading an incredible book about the cultural power of staring, and threading the theories from that book into my reading of Passing, along with my own exploration of how the novel engages with Freudian concepts like repression and the unconscious. I’ll also be revealing some insights into my process, to show you how I take notes and draft writing based on my closely reading notes.
This deep dive will also include a comprehensive reading list of both academic essays and publicly available, open-access literature on the novel, and some recommendations from me, if you want to read similar stories in the future.
If you’re interested in reading my deeper analysis of the novel, be sure to upgrade to a paid subscription, which costs about the price of a small coffee each month.
Finally, here are few related readings, if you’re ready for more about and by Nella Larsen. These links take you to my Bookshop.org page, where a portion of your purchases goes to me and the rest goes to an online, indie bookseller!
The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen, the Everyman’s Library edition
Let’s chat in the comments
I cannot wait to read all your thoughts and ideas and reactions in the comments today. This is the best part of our read-a-longs together!!!
Was Clare pushed? Did she jump?
What do you make of Clare and Irene’s friendship? Is it a friendship?
What were your favorite parts of the novel?
What unexpected themes did you come across as you read the second half of the novel?
Or anything else you’d like to share…!
Davis’s essay, “Black women’s modernist literature,” comes from The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers.
I did not see that coming. In retrospect I should have noted that Irene’s increasing suspicions, rage, and unravelling, culminating in her crashing the teacup at the earlier party all pointed to a dramatic finale. Those last few pages of the novel were so very cinematic, everything happens so fast, and the mood is so palpable. I got to the end and needed to start over from the beginning. We’ve seen everything from Irene’s perspective. She starts out uncomfortable, aloof, and irritated by little things. Meeting Clare just brings that all into fuller focus, and then escalates. What is Clare’s side of things? What is Brian’s? Was all that menace, malice, and scheming that Irene attributes to Clare real? Was there ever really anything happening between Clare and Brian? Is this whole telling of events by Irene just the version she has created to keep herself from facing what she “never afterwards allowed herself to remember”? I'm still not sure and wonder where do these characters go from here. I expected the propulsion of the plot to be the racial implication of passing. It is there, but overshadowed I think by the taut psychological study of Irene. We learn more of Irene’s “passing” than of Clare’s. Irene is passing as settled, safe, secure, even happy when she has built an illusion of all that by repressing anything she truly feels. Lots more ideas are percolating in my thoughts, and I’m looking forward to other’s comments to help me find structure for them.
Brilliant guide, Haley! In particular, I love what you’ve brought up about: physical spaces, the ‘economy of passing,’ and the etymology and meanings behind the word ‘encounter’
For those who are going to read my entire comment, I apologize, it’s very long but I have so many thoughts —
Because I knew how the book ended going into this reading, for a lot of the time while I was reading, I was looking for clues to the ending. I found so many; but I still don’t know if I have an answer as to what happens at the end.
In last week’s comments, I mentioned that I was paying attention to emotions, and in particular, Irene’s emotions — this, along with paying attention to the theme of power, unlocked a whole new reading for me.
Irene thinks herself the orchestra director. She wants to control everything around her, whether that is convincing her husband to stay in New York, sheltering her children from the world, or even coordinating a simple afternoon tea. But she can’t manage to control the most important thing: herself. She quickly loses control of her emotions and unravels at the slightest trigger throughout the book.
Though she tries to coordinate everything around her, oddly (and probably because of the strange hold that Clare has over her), whenever she plans to do something, she seems to back out at the last minute. She is either unable to do it, or she ends up doing the exact opposite (eg, trying to resist Clare’s invitations; or when she convinces herself to let slip Clare’s identity to Bellew but then doesn’t do it when she has the perfect opportunity to).
But on the other hand, she has no control over her emotions, and is quick to fly into a rage (picking a fight with Brian, ripping up Clare’s letters, breaking the teacup at that party towards the end). There seems to be a disconnect between the ‘logical’ and ‘emotional’ parts of her mind when it comes to her actions, and the emotional side usually wins.
So for most of the book, knowing the ending, I grew convinced that Irene pushed Clare out the window. She was so angry, so wont to act on irrational, sudden impulses, that she MUST have done it in a fit of anger.
But… as we get closer to the end, Irene starts to meditate on the idea of getting rid of Clare; first vaguely, then explicitly imagining her dead. And so seeds of doubt sprung up in my mind. If Irene were to stay true to character, then she would, at the last minute, do the exact OPPOSITE of what she had been planning - which, in this case, would mean that she didn’t push Clare out the window. So which is it?
When Irene plans a thing, at the last minute she often does the opposite. And when she is inspired by a sudden surge of emotion, she acts without thinking. So whether you think Irene killed Clare depends on whether you think she planned it, or acted in the spur of the moment - which is it?
There are so many instances of foreshadowing of the final scene — for example, part one begins with the arrival of a letter, and ends with Irene destroying it (the letter represents Clare’s arrival in Irene’s life, and so if you sub ‘Clare’ for ‘letter’ then this represents the beginning and end of the book: the arrival of Clare and her ultimate destruction). There is also a line in the last part about Irene watching a spark fly out the window from her cigarette and get snuffed out — this is most definitely referencing the end. And, that line about Irene not knowing how to get rid of the teacup until five minutes ago — either she is already subconsciously thinking of Clare, or this incident is what puts the idea into her head.
In this reading I also found myself paying more attention to Brian and Irene’s marriage, and as I did so, I started to notice, with more clarity, the cracks in their relationship. The last time I read the book, I thought the imagined relationship between Brian and Clare was all in Irene’s head, a result of her paranoia. But on this reading, I was convinced that they were actually having an affair.
A lot of the symbols I was using to annotate started to dwindle as the book went on - there simply weren’t as many discussions of society, desire, or appearances anymore, and so towards the end of the book I think the central conflict of the novel comes into sharper focus, as if zooming in to the two women.
I also found myself thinking of the idea of doubles, and Irene and Clare as versions of each other. This called me back to Rebecca - when I have more time, I want to think more on this idea, and the connections between different books that use doubles.
I also have SO many thoughts on the last line of the book, but I have already rambled on for long enough, so for those interested I’ll share two podcast episodes on The Novel Tea from last year about Passing, in which we talk about the last line, among other things (in one episode we compared Passing with The Vanishing Half, and in the other we talked more about Passing and the Netflix adaptation): https://thenovelteapod.substack.com/p/podcast
Alright, I might have more to say as I read everyone else’s comments but I’ll end here for now!!
Can’t wait for the deep dive!