“Death by Misadventure”: Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen’s “Passing”

“Death by Misadventure”: Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen’s “Passing”

College Literature
Volume 37, Number 4
, Fall 2010
pages 120-144
E-ISSN: 1542-4286 Print ISSN: 0093-3139
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2010.0013

Jessica Labbé, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum
Greensboro College, Greensboro, North Carolina

This article provides college literature teachers with a detailed historical, theoretical, and critical analysis of Larsen’s popular novel. Using bell hooks’ groundbreaking approach to “transgressive” education, as described in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, the article illustrates the means by which Passing can help teachers achieve hooks’ radical vision of learning. To this end, the author situates Larsen and her novel within an inclusive, kaleidoscopic vision of modernism and folds into this discussion Larsen’s modernist stylistic strategies. Related to these subversive strategies are the critical debates surrounding Larsen’s use/interrogation of “passing,” tragic mulatto, and (potentially) lesbian narratives. In addition to these “transgressive” interpretations of the text, the author reads Clare Kendry as a New Woman anthropologist figure and illustrates how our inability to decipher the cause of her demise is a testament to Larsen’s success as a “transgressive” modernist author.

Read or purchase the article here.

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