Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case |
Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Volume 5, Number 2, 2005
pages 1-29
E-ISSN: 1547-8424
Print ISSN: 1536-6936
DOI: 10.1353/mer.2005.0013
Miriam Thaggert, Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies
University of Iowa
In Passing Nella Larsen seems to suggest that identity is a hazy fiction one tells that outward appearances and surface events only partly confirm. Rather than directly stating their thoughts, characters communicate through an exchange of looks—particularly her two light-skinned female characters, Irene and Clare. These subtle forms of expression heighten the sense of uncertainty throughout the novel. The reader never learns explicitly the reason for Clare’s fall out of a window, the reality of a homosexual longing between Clare and Irene, or the true nature of the relationship between Clare and Irene’s husband. This indeterminacy extends to the racial identity of Larsen’s characters, an identity not always easily discernible because of the characters’ mixed racial background and their inclination to “pass.” Without adequate markings or clues, any reading, whether of identities or situations, is flawed or incorrect.
A brief, almost offhand, remark Irene makes refers to a legal trial in which these issues of knowledge, passing, and the gaze combined in a process to interrogate the race and veracity of a woman. The Rhinelander case was an annulment proceeding in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for fraud. Leonard claimed he did not know that his light-skinned wife was “colored,” the daughter of a white woman and a dark-skinned cab driver. Larsen’s reference to the Rhinelanders occurs only once, near the end of the novel, after Irene suspects that her husband, Brian, is having an affair with Clare…
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Tags: Meridians, Miriam Thaggert, Nella Larsen, Rhinelander v. Rhinelander