Degree Project Level: Bachelor’S Navigating the Colour Line

Degree Project Level: Bachelor’s Navigating the Colour Line A Critical Mixed Race Study of Biracial Identity and the Tragic Mulatto Trope in Nella Larsen’s Passing Author: Sofia von Arnold-Grön Supervisor: Dr. Carmen Zamorano Llena Examiner: Billy Gray, PhD Subject/main field of study: English (Literature) Course code: EN2028 Credits: 15 ECTS Date of examination: 7 January 2021 At Dalarna University it is possible to publish the student thesis in full text in DiVA. The publishing is open access, which means the work will be freely accessible to read and download on the internet. This will significantly increase the dissemination and visibility of the student thesis. Open access is becoming the standard route for spreading scientific and academic information on the internet. Dalarna University recommends that both researchers as well as students publish their work open access. I give my/we give our consent for full text publishing (freely accessible on the internet, open access): Yes ☒ No ☐ Dalarna University – SE-791 88 Falun – Phone +4623-77 80 00 Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................... 1 Sociocultural Views on Biracialism and Critical Mixed-Race Theory 7 Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield as Duplicate Selves ........................ 10 “Racial Fraud” and The Rhinelander Case......................................... 17 The Tragic Mulatto Trope ................................................................. 21 Conclusion ........................................................................................ 23 Works Cited ...................................................................................... 26 1 Introduction It’s funny about ‘passing’. We disapprove of it and at the same time we condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. (Larsen 86). When Nella Larsen first published her novel Passing in 1925, amid a time of considerable tumult and discussion over the crossing of racial boundaries in America, it challenged the pre-conceived notions of biracialism and the stereotype of the “tragic mulatto”, an inherently doomed light-skinned mulatto who passes into white society. Set in the Harlem of 1920s New York City, Passing tells the story of two biracial women, childhood friends Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, whose subsequent reunion leads to bitter consequences culminating in Clare’s tragic death. In the novel, the characters of Clare and Irene represent inverse explorations of their own racial identities as women of mixed race. While fair- skinned Clare has precariously transcended her race by “pretending” to be white and marrying a racist white man, Irene has dutifully remained in Harlem and chosen to stay on her “side” of the racial spectrum, reconciled to a life dictated by the injustices of being a black woman. The novel, which centers around the theme of “racial passing” and examines the complexities of navigating the so-called “colour line” between blacks and whites, has been both hailed for its depiction of mixed race identity struggles and loss, and criticized for its sometimes ambiguous treatment of the complex hybrid nature of biracial identity. 2 It should be noted that the important cultural context of the Harlem Renaissance1 and the painful historical legacy of slavery both play a significant role in informing the theme of racial identity in Passing. The 1920s in the United States was a period of great racial tension stemming from the century-old practice of slavery and segregation of African Americans, and exacerbated by the Great Migration whereby hundreds of thousands of black people from the rural south migrated to northern and midwestern cities. Many African Americans had fair skin due to European ancestry to varying degrees and this led to the practice of “passing” or “crossing the colour line” from black to white society. The crossing of racial boundaries later led to the so called “tragic mulatto trope” used in a number of films and works of literature. The phrase was originally coined by poet and scholar Sterling Brown in 1933 “to connote the character who represents the problem of race mixing, and who is inevitably ruined because she or he is a person ‘without a race’” (Joseph 2). At the same time, the Harlem Renaissance marked a cultural and artistic blooming of African Americans, bringing to the forefront new ideas and perspectives on race. Alongside the context of the divisive racial tensions which were at play at the time, Nella Larsen’s own life experience as a woman of mixed race must also have played a part in informing the narrative of Passing. Larsen, born Nellie Walker in 1891, was the daughter of what was believed to be a mulatto West Indian father and a Danish mother. Larsen’s mother Marie later remarried a fellow Danish immigrant and came to have another (white) daughter. Thus, Larsen had the painful experience of feeling that she did not truly fit in within her own white 1 The Harlem Renaissance was also known as the “New Negro Movement” and was a significant cultural revival of African American literature and art centered in Harlem, New York City during the 1920s. (Smethurst) 3 family due to the darker colour of her skin. As author and critic Darryl Pinckney wrote of her upbringing as a person of mixed race: “If she could never be white like her mother and sister, neither could she ever be black in quite the same way that Langston Hughes and his characters were black. Hers was a netherworld, unrecognizable historically and too painful to dredge up” (2). Although Larsen ultimately came to be considered a significant and acclaimed novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, she felt self-conscious among her black peers, more comfortable in the company of writers such as Carl Van Vechten,2 who although white, wrote about Harlem in his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, conveying an “interracial bohemia” more appealing to biracial Larsen (Pinckney 7). Pinckney suggests that it was Larsen’s childhood trauma as the “darker-skinned daughter” which came to inform her fiction which was centered around “women too dark to be white and too light to be black…culturally not entirely at home anywhere” (2). It is the complex and ambiguous nature of biracial identity, as portrayed in Larsen’s Passing, which has in more recent years awakened an interest by social scientists and activists to “bring to light the uniquely racialised experiences of mixed-race people” (Sims and Njaka 15). In their book Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present and Future, Jennifer Patrice Sims and Chinelo L. Njaka outline the evolution of “Critical Mixed Race Studies”, an area of research which makes use of racial formation theory, placing the notion of race into a socio-historical context, which in turn allows for a deeper understanding of both the structural and cultural elements in society which inform racial identity (Sims and Njaka 18). In her book Transcending Blackness: From the New 2 Carl Van Vechten was a white American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance. He helped many black writers, including Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes, to publish their literary works. His controversial 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, which depicted Harlem life, has been both criticized for being offensive to African Americans and hailed for its nuanced portrayal of Harlem culture. (Bernard) 4 Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial, Ralina L. Joseph examines representations of mixed race and blackness in popular culture (mainly film and television) and literature, including the tragic mulatto stereotype, asserting that these tend to portray successful multiracial individuals as those who have been able to “rise above” or transcend their blackness, thus reinforcing the racist notion of blackness as inferior. An examination of Larsen’s Passing through the lens of Critical Mixed Race Theory can accommodate a more nuanced understanding of the novel’s treatment of biracial identity in terms of its placement on the sociocultural racial spectrum and the implications thereof, which this thesis will elaborate on. While many critics, including those who are mentioned below and whose research is referenced in this thesis, do place a degree of focus on the issue of race and even on the issue of mixed race, they do not analyze the novel through the lens of the more recent Critical Mixed Race Theory. Rather there is often a tendency to analyse the novel and the theme of biracialism through the lens of African American Literary Theory, which inevitably highlights the issue of race in terms of blackness but lacks a more nuanced theoretical approach to the hybrid notion of mixed race. While some would argue that being biracial and having fair skin meant you were privileged in early 20th-century America, especially if you were sufficiently light-skinned to pass since darker African Americans were facing deep-rooted racism and prejudice at the time based on the colour of their skin, the practice of a biracial person pretending to be white nonetheless held the potential for dangerous ramifications. This is evident in the “one-drop rule”, a legal principle of racial classification which asserted a person’s “blackness” if they had even just one ancestor of sub-Saharan African ancestry. Larsen makes further reference to the 5 potential legal ramifications of passing with the novel’s brief but significant mention of the infamous 1925 Rhinelander case, wherein a wealthy white man, Leonard Kip Rhinelander, attempted

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