Passing as Heterosexual

Although not made explicitly clear in Nella Larsen’s Passing, I believe it is not illogical to assume that the two characters around which the novel revolves, Irene and Clare, have an air of bisexuality to them. The story is told from a third person omniscient point of view; however, we still are in tune with Irene’s thoughts, pauses, problems, hesitations, feelings, and so on. Early on, in part one of the novel, when Irene sees again but does not recognize Clare, she is fully fixated on her loveliness; later on, after Irene realizes that Clare was her childhood friend, Irene is still extremely concerned with Clare’s appearance. Initially, I was not sure whether to read Irene’s infatuation as jealousy towards Clare for her passing or as physical attraction, but now, I posit that it can be read as the latter. In part two, Irene describes her husband, Brian, as “extremely good-looking” but “not, of course, pretty or effeminate,” which seems to me as a sort of mechanism through which Irene attempts to reinforce and convince herself of her compulsory heterosexuality (Larsen 60). Merely stating that Brian is attractive proved insufficient; Irene clearly felt compelled to contrast his “manliness” with femininity, which speaks to Irene’s character. In a similar vein, Passing briefly details Irene and Brian’s “marriage [which had] threatened to fail;” Brian even goes so far as to state that if his son “learns that [sex is] a grand joke . . . it’ll keep him from lots of disappointments later on (Larsen 65-68). Both of these instances further reinforce the notion of compulsory heterosexuality and the idea that Irene felt as if she had to ascribe to it.

On the other hand, however, Irene “had a sudden inexplicable onrush of affectionate feeling” towards Clare upon Clare visiting Irene’s home, crying out to her “Dear God! But aren’t you lovely, Clare?” (Larsen 73). This, along with Irene’s fixation with Clare’s beauty and a handful of other scenarios including a brief touch shared between the two serve to bolster again my claim that their relationship runs deeper than just platonic. In H. Jordan Landry’s article “Seeing Black Women Anew through Lesbian Desire in Nella Larsen's Passing,” Landry states that “Larsen creates women-dominated triangles within which women's desires and bodies rise to the fore separate from male prerogatives” which, in turn, “shows that . . . loving blackness becomes inextricable from loving femaleness” for Irene and Clare (Landry 26-27). This, then, conflates my two ideas previously mentioned: Irene’s jealousy about Clare’s passing and Irene’s attraction towards Clare. I believed that the scenario had to have been either one or the other, not both at the same time, but Landry’s article revealed to me that these two things are not mutually exclusive, but rather can co-exist and serve to support one another. With this in mind, it is not far off to assert “that whiteness is the initiator of lesbian desire between the two women,” as Landry explains in her essay (Landry 27).