"It's funny about 'passing.' We disapprove of it and at the same time condone it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it."
— Irene Redfield
Passing is Nella Larsen's second novel, written in 1929.
The main character of the story is Irene Redfield, a lady prominently ensconced in Harlem's vibrant society of the 1920s. Her charmed existence, however, is shaken up by a chance encounter with Clare Kendry, a childhood friend that has been "passing for white" and hiding her true Negro identity from everyone, including her racist husband. Clare's actions provoke both ladies to confront the hazards of public and private deception.
It was made into a film in 2020, premiering at Sundance 2021, where it was the directorial debut of Rebecca Hall and starred Ruth Negga as Clare, Tessa Thompson as Irene, Andre Holland as Irene's husband Brian, Alexander Skarsgård as Clare's husband John, and Bill Camp as Hugh.
This work features the following tropes:
- Affably Evil: Clare's husband John is genuinely charming and friendly. He's also an open bigot.
- Ambiguous Situation:
- Did Brian and Clare really have an affair, or was it all in Irene's head? It's never confirmed.
- It's not clear if Clare falling to her death was her own doing or if it was Irene or John pushing her. This is averted in the film, where she explicitly pushes her and grapples with the aftermath.
- Attention Whore: Brian posits that Hugh doesn't like Clare because she takes attention away from himself.
- Betty and Veronica: In their youth, Irene was the bookish and dependable one, while Clare was spirited and ambitious. In the present day, this comes to a head when Irene worries that her husband is drawn to Clare's vivacious nature and is pulling away from her.
- Deliberately Monochrome: Both appropriate for the time period and a play at the "black and white" themes of the material.
- Downer Ending: Irene pushes Clare to her death (ambiguous in the book, explicitly in the film) and has an emotional breakdown. The End.
- Foreshadowing: The very first actions taken by Irene in the novel is to examine an envelope that's seemingly out of place and alien when compared to the rest of the mail, and was sent by a woman that (in her opinion) is always stepping on the edge of danger.
- Gilded Cage: Clare is married to a wealthy man, stays at fancy hotels, and can send her daughter to a European boarding school, but secretly hates her life and loathes having to repress her identity.
- Innocent Bigot: Hugh has a tendency to view race relations like he's in a newspaper article, as Irene points out.
- It's All About Me: Clare openly states that she's willing to hurt other people to get what she wants.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Irene when she encounters John in public while not "passing," knowing that he'll realize that there must be something Clare isn't telling him.
- When Clare breezily tells Irene that she would just return to Harlem permanently if John divorced her, Irene realizes that she'll never get rid of her.
- Pass Fail: The novel is entirely about examining this phenomenon - it contains three "black" women, one who has basically switched to a white identity by continuously passing (Claire), one that can pass, but doesn't (Irene),and one who passes occasionally out of convenience (Gertrude). It does not work out well for the first two in the end.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: John openly despises black people and isn't afraid to rail against them in front of his wife and her friend — both of whom are passing during the encounter. As if that's not enough, his nickname for Clare is a racial epithet and he outright admits that despite many years of marriage, he wouldn't accept if Clare had any black heritage at all.
- Sanity Slippage: Irene begins to lose it as she becomes more and more paranoid that Brian and Clare are having an affair.
