GENDER, RACE AND SPACE IN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING (1929)

At the very moment when Virginia Woolf was reflecting on the tripartite relationship between gender, space and the situation of the woman writer in her cornerstone feminist treatise A Room of One 's Own, across the Atlantic, another woman modernist was swiftly becoming one of the century's first women writers to push the limits of the societal glass ceiling or "double jeopardy"1 blocking black female professional advancement. In 1928, just a few months before Woolfs seminal essay was published, the half-Danish, half West-Indian Nella Larsen (1891-1964) would gain the Harmon Foundation Bronze medal2 - a prestigious award attributed for "distinguished achievement among Negroes" - for her debut novel Quicksand. In 1930 she went on to become the first black female creative writer to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship on the strength of that novel and her Passing (1929), upon which this article focuses.Unlike Woolf, yet in common with many other auspicious women artists of the early twentieth century, Larsen's slim literary production would soon be relegated to the outermost fringes of literary history in the half century that followed, the author herself disappearing from the high-profile, mixedrace literary milieu her social ascent had given her access to,3 vanishing into oblivion following accusations of plagiarism,4 and returning to the archetypically feminine profession of nursing she had once been so happy to leave behind. Reclaimed from the margins by second-wave feminist scholars of the seventies and eighties in a move that sought to counter white-male-biased critical hegemony and bring women's writing back into the canon, Larsen is now rightfully recognized as a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance, her work both lauded for its subject matter which critically engages with the place of the mixed-race or "mulatto" woman in interwar America, and for the sophistication of her narrative strategies which are "hailed for helping create modernist psychological interiority."5Written at a time when the boundaries of racial and gender identity were being drawn more sharply than at any other period in America's history, in what spaces and places, Larsen's subtly subversive prose asks, may such women evolve? And what is their narrative position? As the doubly marginalized "exotic other" Clare Kendry, are they to be located as forever elsewhere "utterly strange and apart,"6 disrupting narrative closure, refusing to be mastered by plot? Or, duty-bound and genteel, are they, like Irene Redfield, contained by the "security of place"7 buttressing middle-class sexual-textual propriety and its concomitantly predictable dictates and plot lines? What is the relationship between racial passing and other gendered forms of transgression hinted at in the text? These are just some of the questions posed by Larsen's novel Passing, which the following article will attempt to address.The social practice of passing - assuming the identity of another gender, race or class of person - captured the American public imagination in the 1920s as never before. The anxiety generated by such a blatant flouting of the perceived fixed social, sexual and ethnic identity positions may be witnessed in the renewed, often violent, vigor with which the regulation of sexual, social and racial types was being enforced. As historian George Chauncey has noted of male homosexuality:A battery of laws criminalized not only gay men's narrowly 'sexual' behavior but also their association with one another, their cultural styles, and their efforts to organize and speak on their own behalf. The social marginalization gave police and popular vigilantes even broader informal authority to harass them; anyone discovered to be homosexual was threatened with loss of livelihood and loss of social respect.8Racial lines too were fixed more sharply than ever, and with the removal of the ethnic category of "mulatto" from census declarations altogether, mixed-race America was quite simply declared a fiction. …