Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by College of William & Mary: W&M Publish W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Book Chapters Arts and Sciences 2016 Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text Suzanne Raitt College of William and Mary, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Raitt, S. (2016). Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text. Jacquelyn McLendon (Ed.), Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen (pp. 114-122). New York, NY: Modern Language Association. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/10 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Book Chapters by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Nella Larsen Edited by Jacquelyn Y. McLendon The Modem Language Association of America NewYork 2016 © 2016 by The Modem Language Association of America All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America ML.A and the MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION are trademarks owned hy the Modem Language Association of America. For information about obtaining penn1ssion to reprint material from MLA book publications, wnd your request by mail (see address below) or e-mail ([email protected]). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Puhlication Data Names: Md,endon,JJcquclyn Y. editor. TIiie: Approaches to teaching the novels of Nella Larsen/ edited by J.icquelyn Y. Mcl,en<lun. Description: J\:ew York: TI1e Modern Langmige Association of America, 2016. I Series: Approat·hes to teaching world literature ; 1381 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 201600-2446 l ISBN 9i8l00329219l (cloth: alk. paper) I ISBN 9i81603292207 (pbk. : alk. paper) I JSB:>J 971!1603292214 (EPUB) I ISBN 9781603292221 (Kinclle) Subjects: LCSII: ~ en, Nl'lla-Study and teaching. Cl.i.ssification: LCC PSJ.523.A7225 Z75 20161 DOC 813/.52--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002446 Approaches to Teaching World Literature 138 ISSN 1059-1133 Cover illustration of the paperback and electronic echti?ns: Cocktails. by Archibald Motley. 1926. Courtesy of the Chicago I listory Museum. 0 Valerie Ge rranl Brown and Mara Motley, MD. Published by The Modern Language Association of Amelica 85 Broad Street, suite 500, New York, New York l 0004-2434 www.mla.org Teaching Passing as a Lesbian Text Suzanne Raitt At the end of a semester teaching an upper-level course called Lesbian Literatures, I always ask students to talk about which texts they recommend keeping the next time I teach the C.'Ourse. They mostly love Virginia Woolrs Orlando; they usually distke RadclyfTe Hall"s The Well of Loneliness, but they see why it should be in the rourse; and, almost to a person, they te ll me I shoul<l drop Passing. It's not about lesbians, they complain; the lesbian interpretations we developed were far-fetched; the novel deals with racial passing, and not with passing as a heterosexual. In this essay, I explore several ways of teaching Passing in a course on lesbian literature and suggest some reasons for student dissatisfaction with it in such a context. Much of their resistance, I believe, grows out of their inexperience with and potential reluctance to accept the socially and culturally constructed nature of racial and sexual identities, or the ways in which such identities are mutually constitutive-what Kimberle Crenshaw has called "intersectionality: In my Lesbian Literatures classroom, I encourage students to reflect on the historical and cultural contingency of identity categories and on the multivalence of literary writing. The ambiguous nature of much of the language of Passing encourages students to think about how their assumptions about the social and cultural configuration of race, sexuality, and gender shape ~wri and their experience of the world around them. Perhaps it should go without saying that their resistance to reading Passing as a lesbian text has not deterred me from including it in the course. Rather, knowing how intensely students deny the novel's engagement with lesbian erotic experience has allowed me to experiment with different ways of using the book to help them question their habits of reading and of analysis. Context in Lesbian LiteranJ HistonJ I teach Lesbian Llteratures at a small research university with a liberal arts focus. Lesbian Literatures is an upper-level course in English, cross-listed with women's studies and often with literary and cultural studies, with a maximum of thirty students, most of whom are white, and several of whom usually openly identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer. The course is organized chronologically, so that students develop a sense of the historical evolution of contexts and languages for lesbian identities and experiences in Britain and the United States. Students usually encounter Passing about halfway through the semester, after they have read selections from the work of the seventeenth-century paet Katherine Phillips, the eighteenth-century novelist Saral1 Scott, the Victorian writers Christina Rossetti and Sheridan Lefanu, and the critics Martha Vicious, Suzanne Raitt 115 Judith Butler, and Sue O'Sullivan. Immediately before reading Passing, students study Hall's classic lesbian tnigedy The Well of Loneliness and Woolfs fantasy biography of her lesbian lover Vita Sackville-West, Orlando. Students are prepared to read Passing in the sessions that precede our study of the novel by discussion of how literary texts sometimes anchor their representations of leshian experience in an essentialist, usually masculinized, version of what a "lesbian" is, and how they sometimes use imaginative language to release lesbianism from the constraints of definition altogether. The Well of Loneliness is an example of the first strategy. Students learn about the "congenitaJ inve rt" by reading and discussing excerpts from Carl von Westphal, a Gem1an doctor, who \\Tote a case study in 1869 about Fraulein N., a woman who dressed as a man and felt attracted to women (qtd. in Zimmerman 102--03); Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German lawyer, who wrote of gay men being "women trapped in men's bodies" and who worked to liberalize the German antisodomy laws in the 1860s (Zimmerman 688); Richard \'On Krafft-Ebing's Psycl1opathia Serualis, which describes homosexuality as an "inherited diseased condition of the central ne rvous system" (Zimmerman 3.'.H); and Havelock Eilis's magisterial Sextlal Ini:erslon, which notes that "[t]he commonest characteristic of the sexually inve rted woman is a certain degree of masculinity or boyishness" (Ellis and Symonds 94). Havelock Ellis wrote a brief foreword to the first edition of The \Vell of Loneliness, and its central character, Stephe n Gordon, fits Eilis's description of the inverted woman almost exactly. The Well of Loneliness is thus rooted in the new science of sexology, dramatizing its theories of lesbian sexuality as a function of gender identity. However, there is one character in the novel whose desire confounds such an easy correlation between masculinity and attraction to women, and students are always attracted to the ways in which she slips beneath the radar in most readings of the book. Mary, Stephen's devoted wife, is ultrafeminine, but nonetheless she has overwhelming and passionate sexual feelings for Stephen. The book resolves with ht>r seeking solace in the arms of a man after Stephen pretends to betray her in order to save h er from her tragic life as the wife of an invert. Mary's d esire is apparently aroused by masculinity whethe r it inheres in the body of a woman or of a man, but the novel is uninterested in the complexities of this anomalous, more fluid configuration of erotic fee ling. However, Mary is a useful context for discussion of Passing, since she is an e xa mple of someone who could and sometimes does "pass" in the sexual se nse. Her confusing presence in a novel that is apparently so confident about its own explanatory paradigms inadvertently reveals some of the shortcomings of identity politics, shortcomings that are at the center of Passing's interrogation of radal and sexual identities. Ide ntity politics are also challenged in the next book the students read, Orlando. Its central character, based on Woolfs lesbian lover Sackville-West, lives for over three hundred ye ars and changes sex from male to female at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Students learn about the biographical 116 PASSI.VG AS A LESBIAN TEXT context of the novel in the relationship between the two women and about the place of the novel in the uterary history of biography. They \.iew slides of some of the more resonant passages in Virginia Woolfs diaries and letters while she is working on Orlarulo, obselVing that Woolf never identified herself as lesbian. She was wary even of attaching the label to Sackville-West, who was a wellknown lesbian. Woolf, however, preferred to revel in the linguistic possibilities opened up by her lover's erotic splendor: "l like her & being with her, & the splendour-she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks v.ith a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung." \Voolf saw no contradiction between Sad.-ville-\\'esfs womanliness and he r attraction to other women: she described her in her cliary as "what I have never been, a real woman" (Dian152) while still recognizing h er as a "Sapphist" (51). After her sex change, Orlando, though biologically female, is an androgynous figure, frequently cross-dressing and retaining the attraction to women she felt as a man: "She was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each" (Woolf, Orlando 117); "as all Orlando's loves had been women, now; through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, it was still a woman she loved" (119). Thus Orlando, even while it recalls sexological theories of sexual inversion in locating the origins of lesbian eroticism in a heterosexual encounter, also unde rmines their assumptions, re flecting on the tenuous relation between gender and sexuality and on the fluidity of identity. The question of the legibility of ide ntity is at the center of both Orlando and Passing. Editions and Critical Contexts Since 2007, when it w.is published, I have used the Norton Critic-al Edition of Passing edited by Carla Kaplan in my course. I do not require students to read the supporting materials in the volume, but I do on occasion cite them to support a particular interpretation, and I encourage students to browse through any critical articles or other texts that interest them in the second half of the volume. ~nterracial and Same-Sex Afarriage Because Passing is a relatively short novel, I usually spend only one week (two class sessions) on it. During the first session, I present a brief lecture-style set of remarks, based on a series of PowerPoint slides, to frame our study of the text. In my lecture, I focus on the broader context of the issues raised in the novel and allow students to develop their own specific literary-critical readings of the text itself in the discussions that follow my remarks. I have found it most useful in the contemporary context to start by outlining the history of the miscegenation laws in the United States and encouraging Suzanne Raitt 117 students to compare the legal and social histories of interracial and same-sex marriage in the United States today. I focus on marriage for two reasons: first, because in PaYsing, interracial ~arriage is key to Clare Ken<lry's vulnerability as a passing black woman married to a racist white man and, second, because discussion of marriage in Passing can frame a discussion of how lesbian or bisexual women can pass for heterosexual in the context of marriage to a man. Comparing the histories of interracial and same-sex marriage in this country pushes students to think about the specific terms in which discrimination is debated in American culture, allowing them to reflect on the similarities and also the differences between the civil rights and the LCBTQ rights movements. For example, I ask them why interracial marriage has been legal in all fifty states since 1967, whereas same-sex marriage was not federally recognized until 2015. I open with a slide documenting the gradual passage of miscegenation laws in the majority of American states, giving specific information about Virginia, the state in which I currently teach. 1 Students learn that the first American miscegenation law was passed in Virginia in 1661, that in 1924 the Racial Integrity Law in Virginia made it illegal for a white person to many anyone with "a single drop of Negro blood," that by the 1920s marriage between whites and blacks was illegal in thirty-eight states, and that by the 1950s many miscegenation laws had been extended to include marriage between whites and a range of ethnic groups, including Mongolians, Malayans, and Native Americans. I then discuss the specific states relevant to Passing: Illinois, where Clare and Irene grew up, and New York, where they are living at the time of the action of the novel. Students learn that New York never enacted a miscege nation law and that Illinois enacted laws in 1829 banning whites ancl blacks from marl)ring and repealed them in 1874. At the time of writing, then, Larsen and her characters are living in states in which whites and blacks are free to marry. Clare's peril comes not from her legal situation but from ingrained attitudes and feelings; the novel is about prejudice, not about civil rights. Partly because, as I have noted, I teach in Virginia, I then spend some time on Loving v. Virginia (1967) ancl the subsequent nullification of the miscegenation laws that were still on the books in sixteen American states (most states repealed their laws during the 1950s and early 1960s). I show slides of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who married in Washington, DC, and were arrested at their home in Virginia in 1967. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Court's decision: "Under our Constitution, the freedom to many or not many a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed upan · by the State" (Lot;ing v. Virginia). Discussion of this opinion usually leads to a discussion of the terms of the same-sex marriage debate and of why race has been treated differently from sexual orientation in the marriage laws of so many American states. 118 PASSfl,.'C AS A LESBIAN TEXT Contemporary Cases of Racial Passing My remarks on interracial and same-sex marriage are usually followed by a series of slides and comments on two famous contemporary cases of racial passing, at least one of which was certainly on Nella Larsen's mind while she was writing Passing. My aim in introducing students to some of the specifics of the history of racial passing in the United States is both to encourage them to understand tl1e severity of the consequences of being exposed as a passer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States and to invite them to reflect on the historical and c.-ontemporary instability of markers of racial identity in our culture. An understanding of this instability allows students to make a connection between women's sexual passing (where a woman adopts a heterosexual identity despite her sexual attraction to women) an<l their racial passing (where a woman of color adopts an identity as white). Questions of intent and consciousness inevitably come up during this discussion. If a white woman does not know she is black (for example, if she has black ancestry of which she is unaware), can she still be said to be "passing" as white? If a woman who thinks of herself as heterosexual finds herself attracted to another woman, is she now "passing" as straight? If she never consciously acknowledges her lesbian feelings, how might we describe her sexual ide ntity? Students talk about the peculiar qualities of literary writing, which allows an author to manipulate narrative voice to intimate that a character has feelings hut lacks language to describe them. The two case histories I use to frame this discussion are the story of Anita Hemmings, who was revealed to be black a few weeks before she was due to graduate from all-white Vassar C ollege in 1897 (Mancini; Perkins; Sim), and the Rhinelander case, an unsuccessful but heavily publicize d lawsuit filed by Leonard Kip Rhinelander in 1924 in which he accused his wife of deceiving him about her African American identity (Madigan; Thaggert). Students view slides of Anita Hemmings and associated images and learn that she was admitted to Vassar College in 1893, that in 1897 her roommate's grandfather hired a private invesUgator to look into her family background and discovered that her parents were interracial, and tl1at Anita Hemmings appealed he r dismissal from Vassar and was allowed to keep her diploma but not to participate in graduation ceremonies. (n 1903 Hemmings married Andrew Love, an African American physician, and moved to Manhattan, where the couple successfully passed as white. Their daughter, Ellen Love, <lid not learn about her ancestry until she met her grandmother for the first time in 1923. She never told anyone, including her own daughter, Jillian Sim, about the meeting, and Sim did not discover that her grandparents were African American until 1994. The Rhinelander case is specifically referred to briefly in Passing (228) wheo Ire ne, fearful that her husband and Clare are having an affair, starts to worry that if Bellew finds out that Clare is only passing as white, he will divorce her. Leonard Kip Rhinelander, who had married his African American Suzanne Raitt 119 maid, Alice Jones, in Octobe r 1924, filed a suit for annulment a month later, claiming that he had married h e r thin king she was white and that she had lied to him about her racial identity (he alleged that she told him her father was Cuban). The case dragged on for a year and involved Alice Jones in numerous humiliations, including be ing forced to remove some of her clothes in the jury room so that members of the jury could decide for themselves whether Rhine la nder's claim that he thought she was white was credible. In 1925 the New Yo rk State Supreme Co urt finally ruled that Alice had never deceived he r husband as to her race. Alice filed for separation in 1927 on grounds of desertion a nd cruelty. I follow these painful accounts of the clangers of passing with some slides and discussion of contemrorary environments in whkh interracial social relationships were viewed more p0sitively, telling students a little about Larsen's involvement with the Harlem Renaissance and about the interracial gatherings hosted by Carl Van Vechten and his wife, Fania Marinoff, which Larse n attended. In-Depth Discussion of Specific Passages and Themes Passing is full of highly suggestive language describing Irene's obsession with Clare's beauty and her longing for her: Mthe woman . .. had for her a fascination, strange and compelling" (161); ''l,\,'hat was it about Clare's voice that was so appealing, so very seductive ?" (165); and so on. Toward the end, the novel opens up the possibility that Ire ne displaces her erotic feelings onto a fantasy that Clare is sexually involved with Irene's husband, Brian. I open our discussion of three key passages in the te xt (the first chapte r, the e ncounter between Clare and Ire ne in the Drayton H ote l, and the tea party at Clare's house with Gertrude ) by drawing students' attention to the erotic an d obsessive nature of Irene's feelings about Clare. In discussing the opening chapte r, students re5p0nd to the intensity of Irene's reaction to the "mysterious," "furtive" letter Clare sends he r (143) and to the passionate language of the letter itself. What expectations does the opening set up in the reader? Close reading of the vignette of Clare as a girl sewing her frock on the sofa (143--44) reveals the ambivalent nature o f the narrator's perspective on Clare, who is treated with tenderness and compassion as well as with exasperation. This oscillation in the narrator's feelings echoes Irene"s confusion about how to feel about Clare. Discussion of the Drayton Hotel episode in chapter 2 explores Irene's narcissistic identification with and repudiation of Clare's actions. Students analyze the complex erotic dynamics of passages such as this one: Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate. A tempting mouth. The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre. And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always 120 PASS1.VG AS A LESBIAN TEXT luminous, and set in long, black lashes. Arresting eyes, slow and me smeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them. Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes! Mysterious and concealing. And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic. (161 )2 The free indirect style here suggests that these are Irene's thougl1ts as her gaze moves slowly over Clare's face. Clare's blackness is revealed bit by bit, and as it is revealed the atmosphere of exoticism and mystery associated with her intensifies: first the "ivoryn skin, then the ••absolutely black'' eyes, an<l finally the discovery: "they were Negro eyes!" Students talk about whether Irene is attracted to or discomfited by Clare's feminine beauty or her blackness or both, explore the distancing effect of words such as "exotic" and "mysterious" to describe Clare's blackness, and reflect on the interpellated reader in the passage and think about whether the reader is asked to identify with Irene as a passing woman: is the reader experiencing herself or himself as white or black? heterosexual or lesbian/gay? Does it matter? Conversation about the tea party episode ( 165-76) centers on Irene's disgust at Gertrude's appearance and explores whether Irene's repudiation of Ge rtrude is linked to her knowledge that Gertrude-described as "white" (167)identifies as African American and to her jealousy at Clare's friendship with Gertrude. The complex social and erotic dynamics b e hveen the three women are intensified by the arrival of Clare's husband and Irene's rage and mortification at his racist remarks. Forced to pass as white. Irene notices a "look for which she could fin<l no name" on Clare's face as she says good-bye and feels a "recrudescence of . .. fear" ( 176), perhaps at the idea of what she herself is capable of. Indeed, one of the ironies of the novel, as Jennifer DeVere Brody points out, is that on occasion-for example, in the taxi on the way to the Drayton-Irene herself passes easily and without a second thought (Brody). Irene's sense of transgression ar_1d danger in visiting Clare can be linked to "iolation of both racial and erotic norms. so that the "passing" of the title takes on an ambiguity that is never fully resolved in the novel. Unknowingly echoing the conclusions of Deborah E. McDowell, one of my students once remarked that Passing itself passes as a novel about race, when in fact it is about the hidden lives of lesbians. Afte r the close reading exercise is over, students fonn small groups to identify key moments in the book that relate to Irene's marriage. They then return to the full group to share and reflect on what they have found. During this exercise. students always comment on the distance between Irene and Brian and his contempt for her, as well as on his desire to escape his marriage and what the novel calls his "queer, unhappy, restlessnessn (178). Irene's craving for security-"to her, security was the most important and desired thing in life" (235)-is an implicit acknowledgment that identity can never be se cure, that people are Suzanne Raitt 121 frequently not what they seem. an<l that the price of taking advantage of the ambiguous status of one's own identity is a sense of "impermanence" (229) that lrene finds both alluring and unbearable. The Ending The e nding of Passing is notoriously ambiguous. Readers who believe that Clare committe d suicide or was pushed by Bellew probably see he r story as continuing the tradition of the ~tragic mulatto.ft Readers who think that Irene pushed her are likely to view Irene's sexual turmoil-whether over he r attraction to Clare, her sexual jealousy of Clare, or both-as ct'ntral to the dynamics of the text. Or they may see Irene herself as the utragic mulatto,~ increasingly uncomfortable with the ways in which she has chosen to live out her racial identity, and perhaps revealing of Larsen's own ambivalence (Washington). Readers who see Clare's death as an accident may feel that the novel delibe rately holds open a range of possible interpretations of its central themes, as may readers who feel that the cause of Clare's death is delibe rately left unresolved. To encourage students to explore all these dilTerent ways of reading the final pages of the novel, I a~k them to stage either a debate over the ending or a mock trial of Irene. In tJ1e debate, diffe rent teams represent different readings of the ending (Clare killed hersc-lf. Bellew killed her, Irene 1-.ille<l her on purpose or by accident, etc.) and quote passages from the novel as evide nce for their interpretations. In the mock trial, I play Irene, on trial for the murder of Clare, and the students divide themselves into a prosecution group an<l a defense group. They take it in turns to present their evidence (in the fonn of quotations from the texts) and to question me. I respcnd in character, using quotations to support my answers. Eventually, the class forms a jury, delibe rates, and votes on my guilt. \\Te then discuss the implications of our decision as a class for our reading of the text, along the lines I have suggested above. The final exercise (debate or trial) forces us to address the possibility that the text is delibemtely ambiguous about the nature of Irene's attraction to Clare. fn the course as a whole, we talk at length about available languages for lesbian desire in different historical and cultural contexts, and we allow for the possibility of coded or ct"nsored languages of love. During our discussions, I often emphasize the relatively open nature of Harlem Renaissance society and the number of lesbian or biserual women associated with it (McDowell). This helps students understand that Nella Larsen moved in a world in which lesbianism was visible and somewhat accepted. But students are still often very resistant to the idea that Larsen is encouraging her readers to imagine an attraction between Irene and Clare based not just on their race but also on their shared femaleness. I believe this resistance is in part a resistance to the qualities of literary language itself: its capacity to hold open a number of difTerent readings simultaneously, to allow Passing to be more than one text at once. Students' 122 PASSV.'G AS A LESBIAN TEXT discomfort at this lack of fixity is related to the broader questions engaged in the nove l and in our course about the fluidity of racial and sexual itlentities, which can also be unresolved for a lifetime and even beyond. I often point toward Claudia Tate's defense of her refusal to adopt any single reading of the ending as a way to help students accept their own uncertainties. If I can encourage them to see the connections between their anxieties and the anxieties so painfully explored in the novel, I feel I have <lone my <luty as a teacher. A text that invites readers into the longings of one woman for another is inevitably unsettling for a number of students, even those enrolled in a Lesbian Literatures course; one that engages their <liscomfort about race at the same time is even more troubling-and this goes for students who are lesbian or heterosexual, white or people of color. My role in the classroom is to provide a safe space in which they can learn to articulate both their pleasures and their anxieties as readers and to understand that those pleasures and anxieties have a long and painful history in American culture and society. NOTES 1 Information in the lecture comes from Pascoe. Cheryl A. Wall, in Women of the Harlem Renaissance, has written most persuasively about this passage (361). 2