GENDERED EXPRESSIONS OF THE “PASSING” NARRATIVE: AN INTERSECTIONAL AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND POST-COLONIAL STUDY A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in English Literature Kayla Hardy-Butler May, 2017 i GENDERED EXPRESSIONS OF THE “PASSING” NARRATIVE: AN INTERSECTIONAL AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND POST-COLONIAL STUDY Kayla Hardy-Butler Thesis Approved: Accepted: ___________________________ ____________________________ Advisor Interim Department Chair Dr. Philathia Bolton Dr. Sheldon Wrice ___________________________ ___________________________ Faculty Reader Interim Dean of College Dr. Patrick Chura Dr. John Green ___________________________ ___________________________ Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Joseph Ceccio Dr. Chand Midha ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis director, Dr. Philathia Bolton. She agreed to help me on this long journey upon first meeting me and has stuck with me ever since on many, many drafts. I am forever grateful for her guidance, suggestions, and kind words. I would also like to thank my readers, Dr. Patrick Chura and Dr. Joseph Ceccio who both agreed to help me immediately. Thank you, Dr. Chura, for putting Larsen’s Passing back on your syllabus in your American Modernism course. Your guidance and reading of the text helped me form such a strong essay for that course that a much more narrowed incarnation of that very same essay has become the first chapter of this thesis. I must also thank everyone for reading this work in such a short amount of time as well. Finally, I would like to thank the department of English as a whole, with special consideration to the Administrative Assistant Bonnie Bromley for allowing me to use so many resources and to the department’s Interim Chair, Dr. Sheldon Wrice, for being such a great mentor since my time in high school all those years ago. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. INTRODUCTION: ……………………………………………….…….…….….….1 The Colonized-Colonizer Relationship………………………………………2-3 Theoretical Overview and Outline of Chapters…………………………….… 8 II. CHAPTER ONE: FEMALE PASSING NARRATIVES AS EXAMINED WITHIN NELLA LARSEN’S PASSING………………………………………………………..16 Intersecting Identities: The Unfixed Identity ………………………………….18 The Presence of Feminine “Anxieties”: The Stratification of Privilege………………………………………………………………………..23 III. CHAPTER TWO: MALE-CENTERED PASSING NARRATIVES AS EXAMINED WITHIN FAULKNER’S LIGHT IN AUGUST AND HUGHES’ “PASSING”…………………………………………………………………………..32 Hughes’ “Passing”: Crossing the Colorline…………………………………..33 Faulkner’s Light in August: Rewriting the Identity Politics of Passing………………………………………………………………………..39 IV. CHAPTER THREE CHOPIN’S “DÉSIRÉE’S BABY” AND THE INTERSECTIONAL NARRATIVE: WHEN FEMALE-CENTERED AND MALE- CENTERED PASSING NARRATIVES MEET……………………………………..48 Désirée: The Unfixed Feminine Identity……………………………………...50 Armand: Masculinity and the Assumption of Whiteness……………………..54 V. CONCLUSION A PARADIGM OF POWER MADE VISIBLE…………………59 iv Introduction I. Entering the Passing Narrative through Intersectionality and Post-Colonial Theory At their core, passing narratives manipulate racial constraints and boundaries.1 In fact, the very definition of race as part of the passing phenomenon is troubled; it is largely imposed by dominant systems of power, as is seen most prevalently in the “one drop rule” imposed during the U.S. slavery and upheld during the Jim Crow era.2 Passing narratives investigate the complexities and paradoxes of colorism or hierarchies of color reified within the United States due to this rule.3 Written predominantly within the Harlem Renaissance, these narratives most often relay the experiences of black or “Negro” characters who would, in certain contexts, pass themselves off as white if their skin or other phenotypic features were white enough. Central within these narratives is often the tragic mulatto character. 1 Passing can be described as “ [the] phenomenon of African Americans, who approach the ‘white’ racial type in physical appearance, choosing to live and identify themselves, whether temporarily or permanently, as white” (Passing). See: "Passing in the United States." Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition. Ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford African American Studies Center. 2 The “one drop” rule determined an individual was black based on any possible amount of black ancestry (Rodabaugh). See: Rodabaugh, Karl. "Passing." Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Paul Finkelman New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Oxford African American Studies Center. 3 Colorism is defined as “hierarchies within African American communities based on skin color” (Dale Edwyna Smith). Alice Walker is attributed with first using the term in print in her essay, “If the Present looks like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?” from her book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). 1 Angela M. Nelson provides a description of the tragic mulatto. Although this description is associated with women, the tragic mulatto is not gender-specific. Nelson states: “The female Tragic Mulatto was usually a beautiful young woman who had been raised and educated as ‘white.’ She lost her privileged position when spiteful enemies discovered that she was marked with “black blood” (1). As her definition suggests, the “tragedy” of the tragic mulatto stems from the idea that the mulatto cannot fully or comfortably integrate into the white world (or the black world, for that matter), as opposed to tragedy being about genetic insecurities. Given the presence of the tragic mulatto within passing narratives, it has become commonplace to see such representation of characters as negative reinforcements of racialized archetypes. For example, in his essay “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” critic Sterling Brown describes that while the tragic mulatto reveals “just how flimsy the whole structure is” (196) it is ultimately a trope rooted in “nonsense” (196). I would like to add, however, that the tragic mulatto paradigm can also be representative of the rigid nature of racially charged environments that manifest along the black-white binary. If we are to view these environments through colonized and colonizer relations, then it becomes apparent that those who “pass”—the colonized—are simply attempting to adopt ideology enforced by that of whites—the colonizer. What I mean by this is that by applying a colonial framework to the U.S black experience, we can begin to see the seemingly invisible ties that exist between the dominant and oppressed cultures. By understanding this, we can see the desire to pass as not merely being a desire for whiteness, but as an attempt to gain access to the privileged afforded to whites. Moreso, I am aware that many African Americans are descendants of slaves and, as such, defy the 2 postcolonial model that is generally reserved for those who were native to a country that was colonized. Despite this variance, I appropriate the colonized-colonizer relationship to demonstrate the socio-political dynamic that informs the impulse to pass. In sum, my thesis seeks to use Kimberle Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality to illuminate the ways in which gender and race informs the racial passing experience. To best understand this argument, a consideration of race as a social construction, and certain dynamics associated with racial boundary crossing, proves necessary. If race is to be considered a social construction and fixed in nature, then racial ambiguity becomes the root of much racial anxiety within passing narratives. And if passing is to be examined more thoroughly, the literature in which it is depicted would most certainly argue race as a state of being that is permeable and that can be “passed” into and out of. Much of the scholarship on passing narratives has focused on the subversive nature of passing narratives and the class benefits that can be attained from passing. Critics such as Gayle Wald suggest that passing is inherently subversive while others, like Judith Butler, recognize notions of class and seduction as part of the racial passing phenomenon. Butler states that it is “the changeability itself, the dream of metamorphosis, where the changeableness signifies a certain freedom, a class mobility afforded by whiteness that constitutes the power of that seduction” (170).4 For Butler, the “seduction” of passing narratives, or where Nella Larsen’s Passing is concerned at least, is derived from the crossing of the color line, the wonder of fully entrenching oneself in something that is new and foreign. 4 It should be noted that Butler applied this observation to Larsen’s Passing and that because of this, the notion of seduction can also be read in a sexual context, as Butler argues that there is a specific homosexual overtone within the text as seen in Irene and Clare’s relationship. 3 II. Literature Review While relevant scholarship has certainly interrogated the various complexities of the way racial boundaries are treated within passing narratives, the scholarship focuses primarily on passing narratives’ ability to show the tenuous racial definitions commonly held to be fixed, which differs from an examination of how boundaries are crossed. In her book Crossing the Line (2000) Gayle Wald defines passing as a conscious